Dead Irons and the Zombie Cowboy Epic

I was walking through Newbury Comics the other day and it came to me: conceptually the idea of a zombie cowboy is awesome. I'm willing to bet the idea popped in my head because I glanced the trade paperback for Dead Irons (Dynamite Entertainment, written by James Kuhoric, art by Jason Shawn Alexander) as I was walking out. Being a responsible consumer of ideas and entertainment, I decided it was high time I read Dead Irons, since the gorgeous Jae Lee covers had been calling to me for some time.


So I read the book later in the day.

In hindsight, it's a good read with an interesting an engaging storyline. The characters could have used some fleshing out, but that wasn't entirely needed when one considers that Dead Irons is primarily a revenge/redemption story. However, my problem with Dead Irons, the problem I had while I was reading it anyway, was that it wasn't the kind of Zombie Cowboy story I wanted to read at the time. No, that's not fair to the book. I don't care about being fair in my judging of entertainment. The book was good enough that I was happy with it even though it didn't give me what I wanted, take that as pretty solid praise. (This paragraph is a mess, but I'm comfortable with that too, it sums up my thoughts on the matter pretty well, I think, being a mess.)

I wanted to find an Old West Clint Eastwood style protagonist who just happened to be a zombie. Think about it. The quick draw wouldn't be quick. He couldn't be quick, he's a zombie. He would lose the quick draw every time, but unless you shoot him in the head (and let's be fair, quick draws usually ended with a chest shot [bigger mass]) he's probably going to kill his opponent. There wouldn't be much in the way of sweaty men squinting in the sunlight, zombies don't like the sun. I think the lone supernatural element would work wonders. I guess you could think of it as a slower version of the backup story in American Vampire (Scott Snyder, Stephen King, Rafael Albuquerque), less attitude, since we're following a hero, and slower paced action, since we're following a corpsier corpse.

Dead Irons focused a bit too much on the supernatural for what I was looking for. Both the protagonist and the antagonists as well as the thrust of the plot were steeped in the paranormal. Nothing wrong with that, nothing at all, just not what I wanted at that time.

Speaking of all this, I really need to play Undead Redemption. But that's going to have to wait until I've played Red Dead Redemption. I think that would really add to my education on the concept. The perfect concept.