Welcome back blacklegs,
It feels like we just launched All-True Outlaw, and yet somehow, we’re already at Comic Four in the catalogue. I’m smacked with anticipation and dread and joy and regret and pride and nervousness every month, on rotation. Regardless of the wax and wane of various human emotions, I am entirely grateful to anyone reading these words right now. Thank you for your patronage, the best is yet to come.
This month’s comic is titled “The Good of Bad” and concerns itself with a pair of brothers who enter a California railroad town after a big score. The plot of this story is loosely inspired by the 1870s Oregon land scandal, which involved the state’s congressional politicians using drunken saloon-goers to buy cheap railway-adjacent land parcels to then transfer to lumber companies for big profit. Good thing the age of the robber baron is over, yeah?
Every story has an antagonist, but what I think is interesting about the Western genre is the celebration of bad guys. The rise of revisionist/Spaghetti Western in the 1970s flipped conventions and subverted expectations, often the villains in these works are more engaging than the heroes. Molded by the harshness of frontier justice and the inherent violence of a landscape light on enforceable law, the guy who shot first and asked questions later became something of a paragon for behavior in the badlands.
Some of these ideas were at the forefront of my mind when scripting “The Good of Bad”. How undesirable attributes in a civilized society might be welcomed in a place beset with cumbersome dispositions. The way uneasy alliances are made under duress. The struggle between the people looking to work and nurture the fecund land and those looking to exploit it. These are weighty ideas, so our four-page comic doesn’t delve deeply into them, but instead skitters across the surface like a flat rock over pond water.
For this comic, I had the pleasure to work with Marcelino Rodriguez again. Mark is the first artist I ever conversated with online. Nearly fifteen years ago (holy shit), shortly after graduating from Pitt, I realized that there was nothing really stopping me from diving straight into my lifelong ambition of creating comics. Back then, there weren’t a lot of great forums for meeting other creators, so posting on DigitalWebbing or Zwol (a long defunct webcomic’s message board) was truly the only way to solicit or collaborate.
Mark and I have danced around a few projects over the years, and in 2020 collaborated on a contest entry for Platform Comics’ 10k Challenge, which presented creators with a random-ish prompt and gave them about a week to plot and draw a short comic. We were granted the prompt “AI love story” and made it into a cute little sinister rom-com titled “Servercrossed” (which you can read and/or download here!). When I started revving the idea engine for All-True, I knew I had to finally fulfill the prophecies and work with Mark on a full script project. I’ve always admired Mark’s eye for page design and sturdy figure drawing. He nails every page and panel of the script.
Jahch provided us letters on this new story as well as “Servercrossed”. He completes the circle on transforming this collection of art and words into a story. The font styles are straightforward while being fun – I truly enjoy the choices he made in both comics.
All in all, these comics represents what the medium is all about: experimentation in genre, working with talented people and putting it in front of an eager audience.
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Westward!
~Jamil
