Review: Jack Irons The Steel Cowboy
Our universe is fractured into the Four Horsemen's sick whims, a cracked mirror of sentient life's deepest lusts and fears, made manifest in excess.
Earth is a reservation kept "safe" by a corrupt Alien Government, trying to maintain it's facist control over what "free" galaxy is left, by any means necessary.
Humanity lives, cowers, and makes do, alongside alien refugees and pilgrims, behind the impenetrable walls of New Deadwood.
When reality belongs to Evil,
Heroes are INEVITABLE.
2076 and it's Armageddon... and not one of your namby-pamby metaphorical armageddons; this here is the real deal with your actual Four Horsemen: War, Famine, Pestilence and Death.
According to the alien Anu Confederation, these embodiments of evil are an inevitable part of every sentient species' development: "Creatures born of blackened thought-form, made manifest from our own obsessions."
The purpose of these beings is to perpetuate a perverted version of humanity: sickened, starving, mutated... A hell on Earth.
Our narrator Jack is no ordinary cowboy. Nearly 250 years old, and with 2000 years worth of past-life memories, he appears to be the natural challenger to the terrible quartet. A mutant with some impressive fighting skills, he easily evades being arrested by a hulking robo-cop while drinking prota-beer in a saloon with mostly alien patrons.
Jack is in the bootlegging game, bringing food, security and justice to the huddled survivors of the twisted purgatory that the world has become. But what is he? And can even he defeat the Fearsome Foursome?
Jack Irons The Steel Cowboy by writer Cody Fernández and artist Maxi Dall'o is a genre-busting sci-fi Western with a big dose of mythological mysticism, so it should appeal to a broad market. Like a futuristic Clint Eastwood, our hero calmly wanders the wasteland, content to mosey from bar to bar, crossing deserted townships to rescue the hopeless, taking out the bad guys with a dry wisecrack.
The art is a loose, comedic/macabre style which expresses the elements of the story with great energy. Jack is a burly, cigar-toting cliché, the aliens are suitably weird and entertaining, the spectre of Pestilence (in a total-coverage containment suit, hissing through a respirator) appropriately creepy.
This is a fun and action-fuelled fantasy but with a strong moral/political message about corruption and responsibility. Tellingly, the Horseman representing Famine is a perfectly ordinary looking human being. We are, after all, the worst monsters...
Can one man save the world? Jack is no regular gunslinger and he let's nothing get in his way... but the forces arrayed against him are ancient and implacable, and their minions are legion.
"Death always comes. And always wears a different face."
JACK IRONS STEEL COWBOY on IronVerse Comics
Zak Webber
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