The western is a genre that is a bit marginalized in every medium, and one of the ways in which it has survived in comics is by combination with other genres. In the past few years, the rare western comic has usually been western-horror or western-futuristic, and Moore and Opena have teamed up to give us another genre melding, western and post-apocalypse. Lone #1 features plenty of western archetypes, from the legendary retired stranger to a town in trouble, but it incorporates a weird element as well, with giant mutated boars, zombies and the aftermath of a nuclear/chemical war defining the setting.
The post-apocalypse is actually an ideal setting for the western, given the technological regression and the idea of a new frontier, and in fact it's something that has been done before, from Hex to the more recent Just A Pilgrim. However, it's anything but a tired genre, and Moore and Opena certainly have some fun ideas to use within this structure. I appreciate that they don't just ignore technology completely to give the book a western feel, giving the characters cars instead of horses and flamethrowers as well as revolvers.
In the world of Lone, the apocalypse came not just with chemical, biological and nuclear after-effects (though it's got that too) but with a touch of weirdness. Zombies, mutants and giant animals roam the plains, and this sense of weirdness is what gives the book a lot of its charm. Opena's artwork, a sort of cleaner and more European-influenced look than most of the Rocket Comics artists, is a big part of that feel, and I loved his depiction of the giant boar, his zombie action scenes and the western-meets-Mad Max vibe that he gives the book in general. There's a lot of detail, and plenty of character, in his work on the book, and it reminds me of artists like Travis Charest and Tan Eng Huat.
Moore introduces Lone late in the game, instead spending much of this issue on Luke and Mark, a brother and sister from the town of Desolation, which is being besieged by zombies. I like Luke quite a bit, as she shows intelligence, heroism and determination, and I especially enjoy that she subverts some of the cliches, being a young girl who is the tough protector of the town rather than a young boy. Her brother's "warning" from his mom was also not just a funny line, but a telling indicator of Luke's personality. Moore does a lot of that kind of characterization, where we learn about the character from how other people perceive them. Certainly Lone benefits from being introduced more by reputation than anything else, earning his mystery rather than having the writer tell us that he's mysterious and enigmatic.
Given the sort of out there nature of the concept, I had expected Lone to be played a little more tongue-in-cheek, but it's actually played fairly straight, which is where it falls a little short in comparisons to similar work like Just A Pilgrim or Lansdale and Truman's Jonah Hex tales. However, given the mystery of who Lone is, which is heightened by the way the zombies talk to him or where he lives, there's enough serious material to keep me reading, and certainly Moore and Opena craft an interesting setting and set of characters in Lone.
