This is a column that focuses on something or some things from the comic book sphere of influence that may not get the credit and recognition it deserves. Whether that’s a list of comic book movies, ongoing comics, or a set of stories featuring a certain character. The columns may take the form of a bullet pointed list, or a slightly longer thinkpiece – there’s really no formula for this other than whether the things being covered are Underrated in some way. This week: The Man With No Name: Sinners and Saints.
I’ve not read a lot of books published by Dynamite over the last few years, partly due to their flirtations with that group of specific comic fans, and partly because there was nothing that really grabbed my interest from the publisher. I’ve long been a fan of their take on the pulp heroes (the Black Bat, the Spider and the Phantom to name a few), and so when a used copy of The Man With No Name: Saints and Sinners came into my LCS I figured I’d give it a go.
Written by Christos Gage, with art by Wellington Dias and letters by Simon Bowland, the book was initially published in single issue format as issues 1-6 of The Man With No Name around 2009 or so (at least according to the copyright info in the front of the book and not a google search). The book serves as a sequel to The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, though you don’t necessarily need to have seen that film to enjoy this – albeit I say that as someone who might have watched the movie twenty years ago and doesn’t remember a lot of it (I never made it to the third of Sergio Leone’s trilogy during my Western kick two years ago after I finished playing Red Dead Redemption 2.
All you really need to know about that trilogy you can puzzle out during this story; whether The Man With No Name’s actions and reasons for said actions make sense is up to you to decide; having no seen the movies in a long time I don’t really have anything to say on that one way or another, is the truth; it feels a touch off, but that could very well be my memory confusing the Man With No Name with another Western antihero Clint Eastwood played at some point in the past. It ultimately isn’t a deal breaker for the comic itself.
The story in the book is fairly straight forward; the nameless outlaw finds himself defending the defenceless as a repayment of a debt, and the audience gets to see some pretty fantastic gunfights in the desert. By audience I mean readers. Explaining too much more of the plot would ultimately be me padding this column out for the sake of word count, which I won’t do. Suffice to say that this really feels like a snapshot in the eponymous antihero’s life and (probably) flows well as a sequel the the trilogy.
The book was a nice diversion on a rainy Saturday morning, and as far as my limited experience with Western comics goes, far from the worst one I’ve read (take that more as a statement on how few I’ve read that have made an impact either positively or negatively). Not a bad book at all, and definitely an underrated one when it comes to how often you see it talked about. Are there better comics out there? Absolutely; but I enjoyed my time with The Man With No Name: Saints and Sinner, and at the end of the day that’s what matters.
There we have it. Are there other comic book related stuff out there that is, for whatever reason, underrated and under-appreciated?
Absolutely.
Because of that, Underrated will return to highlight more comic book related stuff that either gets ignored despite it’s high quality, or maybe isn’t quite as bad as we tend to think it is. In the meantime, though, if you do get a chance check out the characters in thisUnderrated, then you may need to hunt through the back issue bins for some, but others do have some stories collected in trades.
Until next time!
Source: Graphic Policy
