Gunplay Pre-review!

Gunplay
Jorge Vega, story
Dominic Vivona, art
Nei Ruffino, colors
Shawn DePasquale, letters
Christopher Priest, prose
Platinum Studios has a new book coming out that you might have heard of. Gunplay is a chilling Western written by Jorge Vega and Dominic Vivona. Legendary comics writer Christopher Priest is providing prose pieces which flesh out, and sometimes poke fun at, the story itself. Platinum Studios was kind of enough to shoot over a preview, so I sent it to a couple of our reviewers (Gavin Jasper of 4thletter! and David Uzumeri of Funnybook Babylon) for a little pre-judgment action. Here’s what they sent back.

David U.: Jorge Vega and Dominic Vivona’s Gunplay is a very impressive debut - at least from the preview. It’s the story of Abner Meeks, a black Union soldier who’s been zombified (to a degree) and now has to kill a person a day to survive. Considering this constraint, Abner does his best to make sure each person he ices is a complete douchebag who had it coming. The problem is, I didn’t figure this out until I reread the first-page concept synopsis after reading the issue. Gunplay #0, despite being well-written (especially for a debut writer) and drawn, largely works as the first quarter of a graphic novel but unfortunately fails as an advertisement, since nowhere in its 22 story pages does it state this premise, nor even name the main character. Truth be told, I was unaware of any supernatural elements in the book until the last page. This first chapter of Gunplay is also told in nonlinear time, skipping back and forth between the past and the present, with no indicator of this other than a caption with the date. Rather than providing context clues - such as “Earlier, on…” or “Later, on…” - it’s left to the reader to check the last timestamp and figure out whether or not the current scene takes before or after the previous one. As a matter of fact, this jumping around in time reminded me a lot of Priest’s inaugural issue of Black Panther - although, again, without the context his framing scene provided to make the nonlinear time flow easily for the reader. On the mention of Priest, it’d be a huge mistake not to talk about this preview and not mention Priest’s prose section at the end - illuminating the seemingly immortal life of Abner in “penny dreadfuls” that serve the narrative purpose, at least from their use in the preview, of the Shade’s journals in Starman. His prose is quick, visceral and effective - well-suited to the subject matter and tone. Overall, I really enjoyed Gunplay, and although I don’t think the preview worked well as a pure teaser in combination with foreknowledge about the book I’m looking forward to reading the full product and hope Vega’s career continues.

Gavin: This is the 32-page preview of the upcoming graphic novel about a buffalo soldier named Abner cursed to roam the Wild West with a curse on his head. If he doesn’t kill a person each day, he experiences soul-shredding torture at night. He ends up finding a companion in a preacher’s son, whose arm he is forced to amputate. The first page intro tells us as much, with the following pages showcasing the lead-up of how Abner and the kid meet up. It’s a really original concept for sure, but damned if the whole thing doesn’t overdo it with crotch-related humor. No, really. Dick jokes, somebody pissing himself, somebody pissing on somebody else, the preacher telling his son to shut up by grabbing him by the crotch, all a few pages apart. I get it. It’s a mature comic. Please, move on and get to the interesting parts where Abner shoots someone. Two-to-one odds he shoots someone in the nuts. I’m not going to go out of my way to pick up the full version, but if I ever come across it, I’ll at least flip through it and figure it out from there.