Once upon a time, comic books used to follow the same genre trends as other popular media. Marvel Comics, these days a company synonymous with the superheroics of Spider-Man and the X-Men, had its share of WWII comics...and westerns, too. BLAZE OF GLORY is a collaboration between prolific writer John Ostrander and Argentinian artist Leonardo Manco, and collects a handful of Marvel's long-disused western heroes in a miniseries that promises much more than it actually delivers.
It's 1885 and the Old West has begun to pass, replaced by railroads, miners, ranchers and the trappings of civilization. Already the myth building of the frontier is underway in such places as Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. When a small town in Montana, it's population made up predominantly of ex-slaves and Indians, falls under siege by KKK-styled night raiders, it's up to one man with a violent past to find defenders willing to risk everything for a bunch of strangers.
The basic storyline of BLAZE OF GLORY is certainly clichéd. Anyone who's seen THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN or ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST knows exactly where this tale is going and how it got started. Of course the little town in question is of value to a crooked man with a lot of money in his pocket for hired guns. Of course the night raiders want to run off the inhabitants at the bad guy's behest. And, of course, things are going to end with a lot of gunfire and heroic deaths.
It doesn't help matters that there are six major characters and just 88 pages to introduce them all. Four of these six have the word "kid" in their names, too: Rawhide Kid, Two-Gun Kid, Outlaw Kid and Kid Colt. Ostrander clearly has a fondness for Rawhide Kid (he returns in a sequel, APACHE SKIES), and consequently we learn more about Johnny Bart than we do about any of the other gun fighters that form the ostensible core of the miniseries. The stories of these other heroes are conveyed almost by footnote, and with the requisite number of shootings and chases there's little time to do much with any of them before the big climax.
Where Ostrander's story fails on several levels, Manco's artwork succeeds admirably. Manco uses heavy inks and shadow to give his pages amazing texture. This is the best these characters have ever looked; Manco's vision has given even the corniest hero - these characters almost all come from the '50s, remember - a post-Leone appearance that makes them seem all the more plausible as authentic gunslingers.
Manco's art is so good, in fact, that one wishes there was more to Ostrander's overstuffed script. With so much going on, there's no time for Ostrander to do more than pay the briefest amount of attention to any given plot thread. The villain of the piece is uncovered in the space of two pages with no explanation of how it happened. Subplots appear, vanish and reappear without warning. A limited page count, just four-issues originally, generally focuses a story, but BLAZE OF GLORY is all over the map.
Regardless, there's a certain kind of atavistic response readers will have to the story. Decades of westerns where heroes make a desperate last stand have conditioned us to react in certain ways, and BLAZE OF GLORY is no different, thanks largely to Leonardo Manco's outstanding, and evocative, art.
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