Cowboys by Gary Phillips and Brian Hurtt

This is a review from Spinetingler of an excellent graphic novel.

Cowboys by Gary Phillips & Brian Hurtt – review
Posted on June 24, 2011 by Nerd of Noir

Cowboys, the latest graphic novel from Vertigo Crime, opens with two men in a Mexican standoff. There are blood and brains all around them as a shootout has just taken place. Before we learn who survives the showdown we cut back to five weeks previous, find out that the two men are Federal agent Tim Brady and cop Deke Kotto, both of whom are placed undercover at different ends of a massive criminal conspiracy with neither aware of the other’s existence. As their separate investigations heat up and they become recognize of one another merely as their false underworld identities, the reader’s need to know the result of their final confrontation becomes fucking unbearable.

As written by Gary Phillips (The Jook) and drawn by Brian Hurtt (The Sixth Gun), Cowboys is truly a no-bullshit western in the Budd Boetticher/Randolph Scott tradition only set in the modern day. (Oh and if you don’t know about the RANOWN westerns directed by Boetticher and starring Scott, fucking netflix that shit immediately.) Deke and Brady are men of no small flaws personally and professionally, but who will ultimately do the right thing in the end, no matter how violent it may be or costly it is on their lives or soul.

for the rest go here: http://www.spinetinglermag.com/2011/06/24/cowboys-by-gary-phillips-brian-hurtt-review/#more-11194