WESTERN SUN RISING is the story of Kenzo Takeshi, a former samurai who travels through the American West of the late 1800s, pitting his sword against six-shooters and repeating rifles to exact vengeance from the men who murdered his brother. The saurai’s mission to resotre his family’s honor is derailed when he finds himself in the sights of a hired gunslinger who is both a formidable opponent, and a curiously sympathetic kindred spirit.
We mythologize these the samurai and the gunfighter as dangerous, but honorable men who brought order to lawless times. Although the samurai enjoyed his heyday decades before gunslingers roamed the West, these disparate historical figures are cut from the same archetypal cloth. Sergio Leone understood this when he adapted Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo into the “spaghetti Western,” A Fistful of Dollars. WESTERN SUN RISING continues in this tradition by weaving an iconic, enduring figure of Eastern culture into therich, mythic tapestry of Western folklore.
I hope you enjoy this interlude between adventures of WORLD OF HURT. I concocted WESTERN SUN RISING as a pitch for a comic book a couple years before I dreamed up Pastor. The style is cleaner and more open, as I was really into the work of Stuart Immonen at the time. Nonetheless, I think this introduction works as a nice short story with a sort of drive-in, grindhouse aesthetic which complements WORLD OF HURT pretty well. I see a lot of things I would have done differently, but I also see a lot that still works.
- JEP
