Hex=awesome; El Diablo=meh
All Star Western continues to be fantastic. The second issue continues Professor Arkham and Jonah Hex's conflict with the shadowy Gotham underworld organization behind the spate of prostitute murders. Moritat's woodcut-like art is perfect for this book, and Gabriel Bautista's restrained colors give a great period feel to everything.
This issue opens with a great series of full page panels; Arkham's mansion high above Gotham at night; the house surrounded by hooded outlaws; Hex meeting the intruders at the porch, rifle in hand - and then as soon as the gunfight erupts, the comic switches to a flood of small panels showing closeups on various bits of the action. This opening scene alone makes the comic head-and-shoulders better than most out there.
To be sure, the art does fail a little toward the end when a thug appears inexplicably in between Hex and Arkham when he wasn't there the panel before, and when the same thug tosses Arkham, the Professor is poorly rendered as little more than a stick figure. But aside from those couple places the art is pretty great throughout.
It is a little disappointing that this secret Gotham cabal is not the same Gotham cabal from the current story arc in Batman (The Court of Owls), but I guess that was too much to hope for.
The backup story is less successful. While it's great that they're reviving El Diablo, his first adventure (as if you couldn't guess) is to take on a zombie infestation. Frankly, the zombie western thing is getting really tired at this point, and has been done much better elsewhere (Desperadoes comes to mind). Even were it not for the zombies, the episode is riddled with clichés, and at one point a stock character completely contradicts himself, first advocationg for Lane's (El Diablo's) plan and the next moment contradicting it.
To really hit the high water mark, this comic needs to either focus entirely on the Jonah Hex story for the whole issue, or give equal attention to El Diablo.
