Long John

I took a very deliberate approach to guns in Long John; specifically, I tried to avoid two things about them: 1. using them in a celebratory, showy way. Things like spinning a gun around on a finger or behind-the-back trick shots or hyperactive fanning of the hammer to take down a row of nameless thugs. Such fetishistic bravado celebrates these weapons in a manner that I didn’t want to platform in my work. 2. I didn’t want them to be used as a plot crutch.

Guns are scary. This is especially true of the handguns featured in Long John because they were made as either weapons of war or domestic self-defense. They were made to point and shoot at people. With the level of gravity associated with them, I did not want to exploit it for the sake of having an action scene where I could do cool drawings (my general angst around drawing action scenes on their own are well-known), I wanted them to matter.

To that extent, I treat guns in Long John similar to the mythology around samurai and their swords. Building on the idea of iaido––where when a sword is drawn it must be used quickly and immediately in response to a danger––when a gun would be drawn in Long John, I wanted it to feel like a choice of consequence and impact. To manage that, I did my best to avoid points 1 and 2 above, but when they fired they roared like cannons, figuratively ripping into the white space of the page itself.

While works of art in their own way, the guns in Long John are like swords as they’re used in something like Kurosawa’s Yojimbo––not glamorized or precious, they’re just things that people had. Tools of the day. So, when Rich Jack gets his gun, obviously it must be everything I’ve worked so hard to avoid, because he is an outsider to the gunfighter/mercenary world. He’s a fan. And often people, when deep in their fandoms, tend to focus on the wrong things.

Thumbnail drawing for Page 9. Click for larger version.