The Legend of Joe Moon #1
Story by Gonzalo Ventura
Art by Manuel Silva and Leonardo Silva
Letters by Martin Blanco
Pit Bros. Productions
Cover price: $2.00; Available now

Chapter 1: “Only the whisky takes away the taste of death”

Right off the bat, I’ve gotta say that any stories dealing with vampires, zombies, or werewolves are a tough sell. Anyone that’s a fan of stories with one (or all) of these creatures has their own preconceived notions about how they should go.

“Vampires should be sensual creatures full of gothic lust…”

“Zombies should never be able to run… “

“Werewolves only transform during a full moon …”

I could go on and on. And whenever a story strays from people’s preconceived notions, that story is quickly dismissed. So, as a storyteller, you’re always stacking the deck against youself whenever you decide to use creatures so near and dear to people’s hearts.

The Legend of Joe Moon is a werewolf yarn wrapped inside of a Western. The hero of the story is a man with living with a terrible beast inside of him, a beast he can’t control. And when the beast comes out, people die. He’s a drifter, wandering from town to town, collecting rewards on wanted men and moving on because, inevitably, the beast is going to come out, and he’s going to be hunted… Simple, straightforward storytelling, and it’s done extremely well.

Me, I love a good werewolf yarn, but I was never too keen on Westerns — other than Tombstone — until I saw the foul-mouthed, gritty realism of the HBO series Deadwood. Something about how dirty and foul everyone was just rang true to how such an untamed time had to be. And writer Gonzalo Ventura captures that same foul-mouthed, gritty realism here. The language, while certainly rough, always feels natural. I was never taken out of the story thinking the swearing was gratuitous, which, as a writer, is a difficult dance to master. And Manuel Sliva and Leonardo Silva’s art complements the time period and subject matter beautifully. The book keeps its indie aesthetic intact while reaching a professional level of production value. Again, a difficult dance to master, yet this team pulls it off with ease.

My one nit-pick, as far as the art goes, is that at times I found myself thinking, “Wait… which character is this?” The designs on the men look a little similar — long hair, hat, scraggly beard. Nothing to take me out of the story, or to ding the book for, but just something worth mentioning. I believe that once I spend more time with these characters, they’ll always be easy to distinguish. And I do plan to spend more time with these characters.

Several threads are introduced in this first issue — the main character’s past and how it haunts him; his current life of drifting from place to place; a good man trying to bury the beast within him, and a mysterious man who’s on the hunt for the main character. So this book has several places it can go, and I’m looking forward to being along for the ride!

The Legend of Joe Moon takes the werewolf genre and instills fresh life into it by moving it into the Wild West. An untamed beast in an untamed land full of scoundrels, bandits, six-shooters, rifles, and shotguns? What’s not to like?

Available at IndyPlanet.