"Reckon our romance is over." A few thoughts about Red Range: A Wild Western Adventure

I was a supporter for publisher Drew Ford's Kickstarter project Red Range: A Wild Western Adventure, a hardcover collection of a western comic book story from 1999 by writer Joe R. Lansdale and artist Sam Glanzman. Ford wanted to get the book back into print and it sounded interesting enough. Unfortunately, due to some postal mishaps, I didn't receive my copy of the book until a year after I should have.

During the time from when I backed the Kickstarter to the present, Ford took his label 'It's Alive' to IDW, but continued launching Kickstarters to republish various comics, many of them by Glanzman, who passed away during one of the Kickstarter campaigns. I didn't feel right supporting Ford's efforts until I knew what he was capable of... and frankly, I was also ambivalent about supporting someone whose work was being printed by IDW. I mean, it's just reprints - and you've got a major publisher. I don't feel right putting money in the hat at that point, especially when most of what he's reprinting can still be obtained in its original format for much, much less than one of his Kickstarter copies. All the same, I was very tempted by his hardcover reprint of Dope by Trina Robbins, but I have all the originals.

Red Range, then. It's the story of a black man who is a masked outlaw and rescues a black boy from being killed by Klansmen; the Klansmen give chase. Eventually the pursuit leads into a weird time-lost land made up of various time displaced things like conquistadors and dinosaurs.

In the afterword, Stephen Bissette compares Red Range to Quentin Tarantino's film Django Unchained. I mean, I guess so? Both of them are well-crafted pieces of exploitative trash where white creators get to depict lynchings and use the n-word a lot, but it's okay because the protagonist is a black guy who is rather good at using guns and the villains are comical scumbags. Hooray? (I am not a fan of Django Unchained, suffice to say) It's an unpleasant read, with a black man being castrated on the first page and a few beastiality jokes in the middle. And then, somehow, the setting changes to a lost valley with conquistadors and dinosaurs. It's an abrupt change to the story and has no payoff - Red Range simply runs out of pages.

At least the pages are lovely; I have never seen Sam Glanzman's art looking so spectacular, being used to seeing his work printed on cheap Charlton paper with their lousy colours and dull lettering. This book pops, it looks absolutely terrific. But if I'd taken just 5 minutes to learn what Red Range was before supporting the Kickstarter, I really wouldn't have bothered.