Review – Brimstone #1

Hello there boys and girls. After a bit of a hiatus – I wonder how many times I can write something similar to that before I just get lazy – I’m back to tell you about a little Zenescope title called Brimstone. Now I don’t know about you, but the only situation I can think of where you’d really hear the word brimstone is in the phrase “fire and brimstone”. That would seem to indicate to me that we are in for some creepy demonic stuff in this issue. After one look at the cover showing a rather dead but not – commonly referred to as undead – preacher and a ghostly looking woman I have a feeling that assumption is going to play out.

Written by Michael Lent and Brian McCarthy with artwork by Hyunsang Michael Cho, Brimstone #1 is set at the similarly named Brimstone Mining Outpost in Nevada in 1864. Obviously greater things are going on in the country during this period of time but this title doesn’t appear to be touching on any of that.

The story opens with a preacher who has discovered a gold mine, but an Indian in the area warns the priest not to dig due to unsettled spirits. Since when has something like that ever been paid attention to in comics or movies? The man instructs his crew to detonate the dynamite, killing the Indian shaman, but when he picks up the gold things get strange. From here the supernatural tale set in the old west picks up quickly. People die unpleasantly.

Mine owners aren’t known for just letting their property be overtaken without putting up a fight from what I gather, and so a crew of bounty hunters is gathered up. The group looks almost like a Dungeons & Dragons group in both its array of skills and unlikely mix of characters. There is the wiseass Irish thief, the giant yet intelligent African-American escaped slave, the disgraced Confederate deserter, the white Gunslinger with a past, the Chinese monk and bomb maker and the mastermind leading the whole process. They are all offered $500 a piece to clear on the town and recover the mine.

If only tasks like this were ever so easy.

The rest of the issue is primarily focused on giving us brief background into each of the characters and how they came to find out about this little gathering. As they travel to the mine subplots amongst the characters develop, but that all ends when they arrive in Brimstone. Bodies are strewn about carelessly, some fresh and some having lain in the sun for weeks. The stage is set for our band of bounty hunters to face off against whomever – or whatever in this case – has turned this little piece of Nevada into a ghost town.

I’m a sucker for the Wild West so I really enjoyed this issue. The artwork sets the mood really well and I enjoyed the varying setting and colors used to introduce the main characters. The style during the attacks in the town where we get a glimpse of the “unsettled spirits” gives them a smoky eerie feel that I really enjoyed. Nothing irks me more than monsters that aren’t creepy and that is NOT the case here.

Interested? Great, you should be. Check out Brimstone #1 in stores and I think you’ll be entertained as well. Happy reading.