Ladies With Guns v1 cover detail by Anlor
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“Ladies With Guns” v1

If there’s one truism in comics in North America in 2022, it’s this: If you want a good western comic, you need to go to Europe.

“Ladies With Guns” is the latest example of this. Five women from different circumstances come together over the course of this book to fight for what’s right, what’s theirs, and what should be.

Yes, this is a “Getting the Gang Together” kind of book, but it’s filled with interesting characters and situations that feel true without being a thinly-veiled lecture on modern times.

Winchester Credits

Ladies With Guns v1 cover by Anlor
Original Title: “Ladies With Guns”
Writer: Olivier Bocquet
Artist: Anlor
Colorist: Elvire De Cock
Translator: Tom Imber
Letterers: Cromatik Ltd.
Published by: Dargaud/Europe Comics
Number of Pages: 65
Original Publication: 2022

What’s Going On?

The strength of this series is its characters. In one short book, we’re given enough individual history and current day interactions to make every character someone I want to learn more about. I know we’re just scratching the surface with all of them. No doubt, the narratives that got them to the place in this book where they are goes much deeper than you might expect. Watching them all deal with their traumas while fighting back in the current day promises more than a few ‘hell, yeah!’ moments.

There’s the recent immigrant from London who’s lost all of her comforts and much more, the slave girl still locked in a cage, the American Indian looking to avenge her brother’s death, the school teacher, and the, uhm, saloon dancer who does her best work upstairs, if you know what I mean.

Olivier Bocquet’s story does a very good job in giving each of these characters a memorable introduction and just enough of their backstory to make them interesting. He moves the main story along in a believableway, adding to it as he goes by incorporating new characters, pausing only for brief flashbacks to show part of how they got here.

Yes, this is the same Bocquet who writes the wonderful “FRNK” series.

He incorporates small bits of humor with punchy dialogue that includes smart jabs and references to situations without being overtly and tediously preachy or political. None of the women in this book are in a great situation to begin with. Bocquet’s first job is to create sympathetic and/or interesting characters that you want to learn more about.

He succeeds.

So far, it’s only the saloon woman, Cassie, that we haven’t had a complete introduction to. She comes in last in the book and appears relatively briefly. She’s the least sympathetic character so far, but that’s only because we don’t know anything about her. I suspect the second album will help there.

Cassandra's job is defined

But the rest of the characters are worth rooting for, and their points of view are well-reasoned and articulated, through actual events in the book and not flowery speeches. This is a book that could easily get lost in trying too hard to make parallels to the modern world and to incorporate all the political movements of recent years. There’s really only one example of that I saw in this book, and I didn’t even catch it on my first read-through. The point of view makes sense given the circumstances that it seemed like a natural fit for the character, not a thinly disguised platform for the writer.

It’s a book set firmly in its time with believable situations and dramatic events. The book starts with Abigail, a teenaged slave, locked in a cage and dragging it through the woods, avoiding the local wildlife that sees only a dinner in her. She comes across Kathleen, a woman with a British accent who is alone, haggard, armed, and not terribly good with a rifle. That’s when Chumani, the American Indian woman, shows up with her bow and arrow to avenge her brother’s death.

Daisy and Chumani try to get Abigail out of her cage

The misunderstandings are immediate. The points of view are logical. The situation is ludicrous and they know it. Bocquet has set up a situation with a number of factors running at the same time to increase both the drama and a dark vein of comedy, as well.

Kathleen and Chumani have to put aside their issues to get the girl out of the cage before the bad kind of company shows up. It won’t be as easy as it sounds. They’ll find more friends/associates along the way, as well as enemies that start piling up. The story builds nicely. There’s a nice third act in this book where the women have to fight for their lives against an overwhelming force that’s willing to blow them up to get what they want.

The book blends the action sequences with the comedy, all covered by multiple layers of drama that help propel everything forward.

I want to know more about everyone. I love a good team book, and this one has enough going for it that I can’t wait to see what else Bocquet and Anlor have up their sleeves in the next book. This is a new series in France, so we might have a while to wait for part two, though.

The Art of Anlor

One of the complaints I’ve read from North American readers about European comics is that they’re too dense. There are too many backgrounds. Every page is an explosion of details they can’t deal with.

Now, I don’t necessarily agree with that summary. There are only unnecessary backgrounds that annoy me, but very few artists — yes, including European artists — want to waste time on those, anyway. At the same rate, I’m a great admirer of Francois Schuiten, the architect-turned-cartoonist, whose major draw is to fill every page to within an inch of its life with busy and detailed drawings.

I’m a study in contrasts, what can I say?

One of the strengths of Anlor’s art in this book is that while it does maintain the high degree of storytelling and page structure that you’ve come to think of with Franco-Belgian comics, there’s also a very modern flair to it. She does that without taking tricks from manga and applying it here. (Again, see “FRNK” for how to successfully do that.)

Rather, she balances the details out well. There are very busy and detailed backgrounds when they count. In smaller panels, the fine details begin to break up. In between, where they aren’t completely necessary, you get talking heads panels backed by hints of the background or color gradients and textures that match the color of the overall scene.

Anlor draws backgrounds when they count in "Ladies with Guns," such as in this General Store.

For example, here is our introduction to Daisy, in the town’s general store. This glorious panel takes up about half of the page and is filled with all the detail of everything for sale in the story, including the shelves behind the store owner, the bins holding fresh fruits and vegetables, the wooden floorboards, the stacks of flour bags, and so much more.

Close up on Daisy and the General Store owner, now without backgrounds

The next tier of panels starts the conversation back and forth between Daisy and the store owner. It focuses on the two of them and the egg beater he’s talking about. Nothing more, nothing less.

The pages don’t feel “heavy” at all. Even with 9 or 10 panels per page, the movement of the reader’s eyes is obvious and easy to track, but the overall impression of the page is of a complete and detailed item that doesn’t rely on looking busy to feel real.

Anlor establishes scenes strongly and keeps plenty of backgrounds in to keep the action well situated. But in the in-between moments when the story might be more focused on dialogue or small actions, she isolates them well and brings the reader in closer to see what’s going on.

The Use of Panels for Storytelling

Anlor’s storytelling takes place inside of a grid system for most of the book. That is, each page has three or four tiers, and each tier reads straight across the page. There might be one panel that bleeds out under the others, but it’s a very easy story to read. There’s never a problem with where to look next. It’s as by-the-book as you can get.

When there’s a big action sequence, though, that pattern break. There are more diagonal lines. Tiers of panels run at an angle. Individual panels might not line up exactly. They overlap or spread out or bounce up and down across the page.

This more “chaotic” layout of the page — and it’s still far less complicated than some of the excesses of North American comics in the 90s, for example — mirrors the actions going on in the panels. It’s a nice storytelling decision.

I’d show you some examples, but those are all spoiler pages.

Characters as Individuals

Every character also has a unique look. It’s not the same person dressed in different clothes.

Anlor does the work to differentiate each character, deservedly so. The school teacher is older and rounder. The saloon girl is super skinny and very angular. The teenage slave is very scrawny and has the lankier proportions of a teenager still. The woman from London is dressed more properly, but she’s also been through a lot and has hair sticking out and clothes that are slowly falling apart. She’s increasingly exasperated by what’s happening around her, and her hair seems to get wilder as she goes.

Characters have unique silhouettes, which is one of those rules of animation that I’m sure I’ve mentioned here before. That helps you differentiate characters, particularly in a non-superhero world where you don’t have easy identifiers like bright colors and capes and floppy-topped boots. If their shapes are different, you’ll keep them separated in your mind and the story will read more easily.

Part of a full page training montage scene
Part of a training montage sequence!

Colors and Lettering

Elvire De Cock’s coloring work in this book is strong and convincing.

The book is, mostly, fairly literal in its colors. The woods in the opening scene are overwhelmingly green with brown spots. Scenes near the end inside a wooden house by candlelight maintain the browns/tans/oranges you’d expect in the scene.

There are some individual moments where panels are keyed on a specific color. One is used when there are two scenes happening at the same time and the panels alternate between the two. Having one set of panels be all yellow is a great visual tip to the reader that this is the other thread in the story at the moment.

There’s a nighttime scene early one in one of the flashbacks that use the darkest and most blue color for the sky that I’ve ever seen in comics. I really liked that one, though I’m sure any print edition would likely tone that done a bunch.

It’s an attractive and bold series of color decisions, especially in a book that’s set during a time when so many colorists default to dark, muddier, more depressing color schemes that often don’t hold up well on paper. Thank goodness for digital comics in those cases…

Lettering sample from Cromatik Ltd on "Ladies With Guns"

I also like the lettering in this book. The font is jagged and expressive. It feels hand-written. Letters occasionally lean in different directions. You don’t get consistent strokes between letters like the “E” and “A”. It’s very imperfect in the traditional font construction sense, which helps maintain the illusion of an imperfect hand-lettered job.

The crossbars on the “I” are small enough that they don’t bother me when used on the first letter of a sentence that isn’t the first person pronoun.

Loud lettering sample from Cromatik Ltd on "Ladies With Guns"

The secondary font that gets used when characters are yelling works along the same lines, but more pronounced. In it, letterforms have lines that overlap (see the “O” shape) and have different line widths in the same letter shape. Look how high the bottom of the “U” or the left side of the “M” is above the baseline. Gloriously imperfect and organic feeling. It’s the right font at the right time.

It goes well with the word balloon shapes, which are not perfectly curved. They feel more like rounded hexagons, and the balloons used when characters are yelling are even more extreme and jagged.

It’s a style that fits in well with the organic look of the art — neither are glossy and perfect, with well-manicured lines. Anlor’s art remind me at times of Keith Giffen’s. It can look deceptively simple, with short ink strokes around the face to maintain expressions. The solid black areas are well-chosen, and the storytelling is super crisp and clear.

The lettering matches it well.

I checked the French edition of this book, by the way. It looks like the dialogue font is the same, and the balloon shapes are definitely the same.

The more I look at it, the more I think that the balloons where dialogue is shouted are drawn by hand in French.

Here’s a good example, since it repeats a word twice:

French lettering for "We need a doctor" in  Ladies With Guns v1
English lettering for "We need a doctor" in  Ladies With Guns v1

Most comic book fonts have two sets of the same font. You SHIFT to get the alternate letter. But you can see here that not only is every letter in the two “DOCTEUR”s different, but those same letters elsewhere in the same balloon are different. Fonts don’t come with three-letter options. That’s why I think the French edition is hand-lettered.

(Also, why is the “F” lower case in “FAUT” there?)

The English language edition definitely uses a font. It has a similar style to it, but it’s much straighter across and the letters are the same shapes. Even the two “DOCTOR”s use the same exact letter shape. There might not even be an alternate letter set for them to use. Those repeating “E” shapes in the middle are particularly glaring. (Only to me. Nobody else cares, I know.)

Credit to Cromatik Ltd. for picking a similar font for those balloons and keeping as much of the original feeling for the book through that.

Recommended?

Ladies With Guns v1 cover by Anlor

Yes. It’s an entertaining and promising book that tells a nice big block of story. And, yet, you can tell it’s only the beginning of a much longer struggle. There’s a lot yet to be learned about these characters, and seeing how they all interact is going to be great fun. Sign me up!

Buy It Now

[As always, that Amazon link is an Amazon Associates link, and this website will earn a small commission if you click through and buy the book. It won’t cost you a penny more.]


"Ladies With Guns" v1 - PIPELINE COMICS

Five ladies with (and without) guns come together for mutual protection and maybe a bit of revenge.

URL: https://amzn.to/3cZJIq2

Author: Olivier Bocquet, Anlor

Editor's Rating:
4

What do YOU think? (First time commenters' posts may be held for moderation.)

4 Comments

  1. It would be nice when you review a book like this that you mention the original french title of the series or of the volume, or both, that would make it easier for me to check it out, save me a google search. This one actually looks interesting, I remember a few years back a canadian TV show called Strange Empire that looked a lot like this, mainly female characters in similar settings.
    Do american readers actually say that European books have too many backgrounds ? I really have a hard time believing this. Or do they mean that it’s sometimes hard in modern BD to distinguish the foreground from the background ? That would be more of a valid criticism, especially murky color schemes. Basic storytelling techniques are going the way of the dodo everywhere.
    As I’m catching up with recent Thor comics in preparation for Love and Thunder, I find it harder and harder to understand what is happening on the page during action scenes… And speaking of lettering, the Asgardian speak now has a funny ‘h’ that drives me crazy.
    The assembly line nature of american comics long encouraged panels with standing figures in front of vaguely colored empty space, so I understand that the contrast might be striking, but surely that is a thing of the past, as recent comics I can see have decent background scenery, sometimes photo-referenced but still, A for effort. I’m sure you could do a better analysis than I could on the modern tendency in comics and BD to have richer background at the detriment of dynamism on the page. You have 4 hours 😉

    1. I did recently add the original French title for the comics I review in the credits section at the top. Scroll back up and take a look. =) And it’s not a typo in this case — the French title is the English title.

      And, yes, I saw a conversation just a couple weeks ago between two people complaining that European albums looked too busy and they didn’t know where to look. I smacked my forehead and closed that browser before my blood boiled over. People just like plain things, I guess.

      But it was actually overwhelming to them to see things like background details. I guess they’re so used to watching movies with blurred out backgrounds and lens flares…

      And, of course, everyone seems to have moved into Manga, which is pages of close-ups on characters’ faces without anything more than some speedlines in the background while they yell in 64-point type to fill out every panel.

      See? Now, I get to be the grumpy old man who hates the comics the kids read these days!

      Digital lettering went through a phase in the late 90s where they tried a different font for each character. Thankfully, they realized pretty quickly that that was a dumb idea and pulled back. But some of those fonts hung on. For some reason, Norse speak has never let it go. I’m surprised they don’t put a line through or umlauts over every “O” just to make it look fancier.

      The art of action scenes is, sadly, becoming a lost one — though I would contend it’s even worse in movies where they just do a million cuts to cover the fact that nobody is actually fighting on the set. That being said, I haven’t read those Thor issues. Honestly, I was never a Thor reader. A lot of the individual panels I’ve seen look beautiful, but I don’t know how well they read in context.

      Now excuse me, as I only have 3 hours and 50 minutes to ponder this topic further… (The solution and the problem both will be, of course, the colorist!)

      1. The colorist is indeed the right answer. You get the prize. Pat yourself on the back.
        Anecdote time: I just recently reread the Walt Simonson era of Thor (told you I was in a Thor binge, it’s been one of my favorite series since Don Heck was drawing it) and by mistake instead of the ‘visionaries’ series of volumes I got the other series, the more recent one completely recolored by Steve Oliff. I was totally floored by how amazing they are, by how much difference it makes. A the time the original floppies were published, low quality printing had me force myself through those issues month after month, “C’mon, Simonson is a master, you should be enjoying this” ; it was a purge (and I also hate John Workman’s lettering). This time around, rereading those classics was nothing but a delight from beginning to end, right behind the Kirby/Buscema origins that I already had on my shelves in the glorious Black & White Essentials version. Then at the beginning of the Aughts, it all goes down, as we said, art becomes more illustrative, more elaborate, sure, but totally stiff, storytelling flow is completely absent, it feels you’re reading a movie storyboard. When each page could be a poster, that can’t be good. I blame the French, it’s all Olivier Coipel’s fault, he started it.
        Your comparison with the million-cut action scenes in recent movies is spot on. It’s the complete opposite conceptually, yet you also can’t tell what’s going on.
        You’re right that Manga changed the game somewhat, some can be very light on backgrounds, but close-ups convey emotions better and poses/composition are so dynamic that it makes up for it in my opinion (and I love reading B&W volumes).
        Of course, in my book, the master of impeccable backgrounds will always remain Dave Sim’s own Gerhardt. Haven’t seen better since.