I’m happy to say this issue has convinced me to stick with this book for the time being. In the first couple issues Hickman threw a bit too much at me and failed to flesh anything out. This left me pretty lost in a way that was similar to Prophet’s early issues. For this book though I found that frustrating because of the cognitive dissonance created by the otherwise familiar Western trappings and the lack of proper context for most of the scenes. This issue gave the concepts some room to breath and provided us with some basic character information (Death’s companions in particular) that I think should have been there in the first issue.

The art has been great all around for me. The character designs have the right mix of realism and expressiveness to make a book about the apocalypse and cowboys work without looking too cartoony to take the violence seriously or so realistic to distance us because of the sheer strangeness of the settings and characters.