Oliver Davis reviews East of West #3…
“Death’s reign of terror over THOSE WHO RULE continues, as the forces of the END TIMES continue to work to bring about the Apocalypse. It’s the END OF THE WORLD: Someone dies, someone lives, and someone falls in love.”
WHO IS THIS WOMAN, THE ONE THAT CONQUERED DEATH? reads the opening page in faded grey letters. It’s above a Triforce looking thing, the central image of the book.
It’s all to do with an impending apocalypse, but one of the four horsemen has gone AWOL (avenging without leave). As was revealed at the end of issue two, Death is off looking for his wife. That’s the woman that ‘conquered death’. Get it?
East of West is a heady mix of such mythical conventions. Essentially a Western, Jonathan Hickman also mixes science-fiction, alternative history and spiritualism. The world building is epic, where the US never became United, instead comprising of seven states in an uneasy Union. China’s involved somehow. There seems to be place called New Shanghai in North America. It’s hard to follow everything that’s going on, in all honesty. But whenever someone does explain, it come across as forced exposition. A problem for which Hickman has yet to find an answer.
Everything sounds so ominous, too. The Black Towers. The White Tower. The Message. Death. War. Famine. Pestilence. Along with the scattered approach to genre, the story might be overly epic.
There are positives. The characters are well drawn (in both characterisation and Nick Dragotta’s art) and their dialogue is rich in dialect. Those scenes framed in the book’s main genre, the Western, are also very good. Some even recall the tense builds of Sergio Leone’s.
And the central premise, of Death falling in love with a woman, is actually rather poignant. As the slender, all-in-white horseman strikes down those who stole his wife, the question is asked: why would Death hunt and kill when all men come to him in the end anyway? For love, answers his witch compatriot.
Revenge, more like. Just like a good ol’ Western.
Oliver Davis (@olidavis)
Originally published June 5, 2013. Updated November 28, 2022.
