Stern v3: “The Real West”

If the first book was a bit of an historical crime drama and the second book was a western farce, then this third book is the serious western with real consequences and high drama.

There’s also a lot of gun play and a town at war.

It’s “The Real West,” indeed.

Book-Length Credits

That is the longest list of colorists I’ve ever seen in a Franco-Belgian album. To be fair, the book is 72 pages…

Prelude to a Short Review

This book made my Top Ten BD Albums of 2019 list, but I didn’t publish a review of it at the time because I didn’t feel like I had enough to say to warrant a full review. Fear of spoilers, in part, and the lack of a unique and constructive angle on the book, prevented me from publishing anything.

But you know what? I still liked the book. I wanted to talk about it. And I discovered that the more I thought about the book and started taking notes on it, the more I had to say.

Here we are now!

What’s Going On?

A gunslinger comes to town, but he’s not trying to start a duel at noon or collect a bounty of some sort. No, he’s a new author who wrote a book about his adventures. He’s on a book tour, passing through town to give his presentation and sell a few more copies.

That obviously piques bookworm Stern’s interest. He may not be the kind of guy Stern would normally associate with, but as a published author, he’ll certainly attract Stern’s attention, if not a bit of admiration.

Unfortunately, the author has left behind some enemies that have tracked him down to Stern’s town. That’s when, as I’m wont to say, all hell breaks loose.

Also, the town faces a budget crunch and it’s Christmas! In a way, “Stern” v3 is the “Die Hard” of Western Christmas movies. It’s tense, dramatic, frantic, action-packed, and a real page-turner.

Why It’s Cool

This is a book that feels like a classic western movie. It’s a massive scale event by “Stern” standards. It’s the whole town versus a group of invading gunmen looking to apprehend the author at any cost. There is also a personal element to it that helps explain the single minded victory-at-any-costs mindset of the invaders.

The Maffre brothers make sure to keep the causes-and-effects clear in this book. Ultimately, it’s a pretty simple story. There are no game-changing plot twists. There are merely explanations. This is a pretty linear story, told from start to finish in a straight line.

It could be an episode of a 1960s western television show. It’s the bottle episode, where they only had enough budget to use the pre-existing sets, but then blow it on the special effects and long shooting days anyway.

You can almost picture the main cast at the end laughing together as the screen freezes and the credits roll.

That’s not what happens here, though.

What’s so impressive about the book to me is two-fold. First, there’s a very real sense of danger in the book. The town is truly at risk from “invaders” that had no business there just a day or two again. Something has sprung up out of thin air and created this awful situation.

The Maffres pull you through this book, one agonizing step at a time. It’s a great example of how to pace a book properly, between “slow” moments whose tenseness carries you through and the faster moments when the action kicks in and the traditional guns go a’blazin’.

Second, it’s all about the orchestration. This is a town-wide shootout with lots of running around, gunfighting, and desperate people making desperate moves.

That’s where the orchestration comes in. Everything in the storytelling is crystal clear. I was never lost in the book. I may have stopped once or two to look closer at a panel to be sure I saw what I thought I saw, but that’s more in service to my own concerns for how this character or that character are faring. It’s visual storytelling that commands your attention.

The Look and Feel

The other thing that stands out is just how cinematic it is. It’s like there’s a wide angle lens being used for most of the book. Plus, it’s mostly told in wider panels, so it has that cinemascope look naturally.

There’s a huge difference in tone between this book and the last, where many very similar tools were used for such wildly different results. The second volume used it to very comedic effect, almost like a Looney Tunes short. You weren’t too worried about anyone’s well-being, because most of it was played for laughs, as serious as it might have looked. The bar brawls, dynamite sticks, and dirty city streets all worked together to make something more frantic than this book, which features the dusty town streets, the pleasant school house interiors, Stern’s isolated home, and the saloon to a more dramatic effect.

It’s not just the wide-angle panels stacked up. No, Maffre knows when to break up the visual rhythms and patterns. There are well defined tiers of panels in the storytelling, but they’re broken up nicely into multiple panels per tier most of the time. And every one looks deliberate and precise.

There’s not a shortcut in the book. There are more panels with five or more people in them in this book than just about every X-Men comic. When there is a blank background, by the way, the coloring adds a textured pattern to keep things looking interesting.

Overall, it’s a very pretty book that’s drawn in a style that fits naturally with the times. People look real, and the colors make it feel real. I couldn’t ask for more.

Recommended?

Of course. No doubt. Mais oui.

“Stern” is a great book every time, and it often feels like a different book every time.

Yet, it’s unmistakably “Stern.” For as much as the tone varies, the lead character remains likable even if he’s a bit of a self-isolating loner.

This book brings the feel of a western shoot out to the table, and handles it with cinematic excellence, mixed with some good characterization work, to boot.

This book deserved to be on my Top Ten list of 2019, and I’d put it there again now.

And, good news: They’re working on a fourth volume. “Stern” isn’t done yet, even though the ending of this book might feel like it a bit…