Daisy Kutter
Viper Comics.
Daisy
Kutter: The Last Train (4-issue mini; w & a Kazu Kibuishi).
[From Fantagraphics: “Daisy Kutter – The Last Train”
is a new western/sci-fi action adventure from Viper Comics and creator Kazu
Kibuishi. Set in the dusty town of Middleton, a young gunfighter must learn
to deal with the trials and tribulations of day-to-day life while fighting
hordes of robots and a rogues’ gallery of malicious criminals. It’s
simply all in a day’s work for Miss Daisy Kutter…] Book
of the Week 2/16/05: [This is an unadulterated delight.
I’m not quite sure when it takes place—it seems like the Old West
in modern times with robots, so I’m guessing it’s just an alternate
Earth. But this isn’t a book given to exposition; it’s a very
simple, straight-forward story told very simply. Daisy is a former outlaw
turned shopkeeper (and one of the many delights of the series is that nobody
finds it implausible or unusual that a slender young woman was once a legendary
gunslinger), who finds herself bored by her new life. A stranger comes to
town with a robot bodyguard (Daisy hates robots) and an unusual offer: His
employer wants to hire Daisy to try to rob his own train, in order to test
a new security system. She is reluctant to return to her own life, even
legitimately, but due to a series of events, she finds herself in a position
where the job becomes very attractive. Needless to say, things turn out
to be more complicated than she anticipated. The art is perfectly suited
for the story, cartoony but very expressive; Kibuishi’s faces in particular
convey a wide and subtle range of emotion. Black and white, the book features
beautiful use of grey wash that serves as a textbook example of how to do
black and white comics (as opposed to, e.g., the recent Misplaced
trade, which has grey tones so uniform and muddy as to render the book almost
unreadable). Daisy Kutter is a truly unique heroine in a truly unique world,
and as such deserves your attention.]