The Tease and the Promise of Cullen Bunn and Brian Hurtt's The Sixth Gun: Road to the Six #0

Sometimes a tease is all you need.  Cullen Bunn and Brian Hurtt’s The Sixth Gun wrapped up in 2016 with the end and the remaking of the world.  Bunn and Hurtt spent some time after in that world with the spinoff series Shadow Roads but just as that series was starting to gain some real steam, it just stopped and that’s been all there’s been of Sixth Gun stories until a Kickstarter a couple of years ago and 3 short comics that are now collected in The Sixth Gun: Road to the Six #0, a prologue to a new miniseries- The Sixth Gun: Battle for the Six.  And as just a taste of what was and what is to come, Road to the Six is the right amount of that old familiar spark of action/adventure and the promise that there are more stories to tell within this world and with these characters.  

This issue is getting the creative band back together.  As well as Bunn and Hurtt being back, colorist Bill Crabtree and letterer Crank! show back up to slip back into the old ways.  Bunn writes three short stories— one taking place 600 years ago featuring a medieval incarnation of Drake Sinclair, and two stories set shortly after the events of The Sixth Gun, catching us up with what’s been happening since the end but also laying some new ground.  Some characters from past series return, a new MacGuffin is introduced, and the world seems to be in danger once again.

Bunn has always been a natural storyteller; you could picture him sitting around a campfire spinning tales that you’re never quite too sure if they’re real or purely from his imagination.  And they get a bit more outrageous but possible as the night goes on.  These three stories are like that— bringing these characters to life for a few pages, balancing an ease and a danger all at the same time.  None of them are 100% satisfying and they aren’t meant to be.  These aren’t stories but taste samples— think about walking around a warehouse store like a Costco where you get to try a little of this and a little of that for free so that you end up actually buying it and taking it home.  This issue isn’t free but functions like those Costco samples.  

But Bunn feels like he’s at home here; like this is where he belongs.  The wild crossroads of reality and magic at the edge of the frontier create this environment where Bunn can show knights fighting snake-like witches or Marshalls can track warlocks.  Or maybe his blending of frontier adventures with supernatural powers plays to his natural strengths.  More likely, the comfort level here is due to sharing the page with Brian Hurtt again.  

Like Bunn, Hurtt brings together all of these different elements, the frontier to ground us and the macabre to shake us out of that comfort.   His characters are hard— they’ve seen some stuff— but they’re not impenetrable.  They carry their adventures and their battles on their faces and their posture bears that weight.  He’s not a heavy artist; he’s almost cartoony, but there’s just something sinister enough behind his characters to make you a bit wary of them. One of the great things about The Sixth Gun was that most of the characters had a depth to them that both Bunn and Hurtt were able to explore together.  No one was 100% who they appeared to be; that was the central premise behind Becky Montcrief, the central hero of the original series.  She was an innocent farm girl pulled into this grand and dark adventure.  Bunn and Hurtt showed her surprising strength when faced with the ultimate danger.  There are hints of that here as they set a mystery of how these three stories are related.

This isn’t a comic book where you should expect to know what’s going on.  It’s not a story but an invitation to a story. In The Sixth Gun: Road to the Six #0, Bunn and Hurtt are returning to a story that most of us thought had ended and they’re showing us that there is something more here, that there’s another story to tell or maybe that the first one didn’t end quite as tidily as it seemed.  And read that way, this is a promise from Bunn and Hurtt that you can trust them.  You can sit down at that bonfire and get ready for them to spin a tale of men and women, of love and danger.  And of six mystical weapons, thought long destroyed, that may still be a danger to all existence.