The Shaolin Cowboy #6

Story, art and cover by Geof Darrow

 

When we last saw our taciturn, titular hero, he was navigating the rigid corpse of a cow through the garbage-strewn gastric juices of a behemoth dinosaur's stomach, using a long pole with chainsaws on each end as an oar.

 

His demonic foe, or at least the head of his demonic foe, Mr. Excellent, was sinking into the giant beast's belly fluids, toward the open mouth of a shark.

 

And that's right where we find Shaolin Cowboy and Mr. Excellent in this issue, which chronicles the greatest man vs. shark battle inside a monster's stomach in the history of the comics medium.

 

Remember when Wolverine fought that great white shark in Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.'s "Enemy of the State" story a while back? Remember how awesome/stupid that scene was? Well, it doesn't hold a candle to S.C.'s shark battle.

 

Mr. Excellent's head, still with a katana through its empty eye socket, is now clasped between the jaws of the shark, which he's apparently commandeered, and he coaches it on how to fight the Cowboy: "Feint…parry…thurst…lunge!"

 

No shark is a match for the Cowboy in a fair fight, however—"You might be nature's perfect eating machine, but you are sadly lacking in fencing skills," Mr. Excellent sighs once his shark has been gutted—so the demon's head rallies a whole school of them.

 

The Shaolin Cowboy proceeds to take the whole school of them to school.

 

The goings on of this issue don't constitute a story so much as an extended action scene, and the pacing (which makes both New Avengers and All-Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder seem fleet) is so leisurely that I've long since forgotten why that demon's head and its companions are after the Cowboy in the first place.

 

But why fault Darrow for the story-side of things being less than high literature (he does write some snappy, pun-filled fight chatter), when the art is this great?

 

The imaginative arena of the fight scene—the bowels of the giant beast which swallowed our hero last issue—is filled to over-flowing with human and animal corpses, komodo dragons, scavenger birds, sharks, bottles and sundry litter, and Darrow draws every single one of them with a maniac's attention to detail.

 

On the last four pages, when the Shaolin Cowboy is confronted with what must be Mrs. Excellent, Darrow draws human bones not merely by the millions, but (seemingly) by the billions. It's simply awe-inspiring how damn much this man draws, and in what detail.

 

And Darrow knows his way around the sequential part of sequential art, as he illustrates in several beautiful (if gory) fight sequences involving the jumping of sharks this issue. And yes, he is self aware to make his own jump the shark jokes while doing it.

 

Rating - 9