The Sixth Gun #24

Written by Cullen Bunn
Art by Brian Hurtt

I think right off the bat it's important to confess that I have had a weakness for the mostly-white cover ever since I bought Alpha Flight #6 back in my pre-teen days.  I find they are even more effective, now that technology is such that the inside cover doesn't bleed through...

Anyway, this is a gorgeous cover by Brian Hurtt, which leads to yet another amazing issue of The Sixth Gun, one of my favourite creator-owned on-going series.  This issue marks the beginning of a new story arc, 'Winter Wolves', which opens by checking in with a number of characters we haven't seen for a little while.

The members of the Sword of Abraham are having a restless night, as General Hume, whose corpse they keep prisoner in their cellar, is stirring again, and when his body is confronted, he delivers a fair amount of foreshadowing, while also revealing that the Widow Hume has a different relationship to him than we expected.

Gord Cantrell shows up in these pages again, searching for his friends.  It looks like he's being followed though, so expect that when he finds them, bad things will happen.

From there, the story shifts back to the people that Gord is looking for - Drake Sinclair and Becky Montcrief.  Having escaped from the strange predicaments of the last few issues, they have decided that they should no longer hide from the Widow Hume, but should instead confront her.  Before doing that though, Drake wants to pick up some allies at a place called Fort Treadwell.  Journeying there though, they run into problems as they are suddenly swallowed up by deepest winter and surrounded by wolves.

This is a good issue in a very good series.  Cullen Bunn's name has been showing up all over the place at Marvel lately, and while some of his work there is very fine, he is similar to other recent up-and-comers at the company (Jason Aaron, Rick Remender, and Kieron Gillen all come to mind) in that his creator-owned work is much, much better.