THE RAWHIDE KID

I’ve long been an admirer of Howard Chaykin’s work, but with the Rawhide Kid mini-series, “The Sensational Seven,” just concluded at No. 4, he has fallen far short of his usual mark. Rawhide ends rudely. It’s Ron Zimmerman’s story, in which the gay Rawhide Kid sets out to rescue the Earp brothers, Wyatt and Morgan, who have been imprisoned by the unrepentant and irredeemable Cristo Pike. To this purpose, ol’ Rawhide assembles six helpers, Old West legends Annie Oakely, Doc Holiday, Kid Colt, Two-gun Kid, Billy the Kid, and “the noble savage Red Wolf.” The story unfolds in two giant wrinkles as Zimmerman leaps back and forth between the cell holding the Earps and the recruiting efforts of ol’ Rawhide—the former full of sibling venom, the latter seasoned liberally with homosexual and heterosexual innuendo. Amid the flipflopping, Pike recruits seven of the old West’s most notorious bad guys to face Rawhide and his compadres. Not unexpectedly, this encounter consumes most of the final issue of the 4-issue series, and, also not unexpectedly, the Sensational Seven (that is, Rawhide’s gang) wins each individual match-up.

Zimmerman’s tale is a fairly routine, even predictable, yarn albeit with occasional flashes of sexual innuendo that he supposes passes for wit. Meanwhile, Chaykin, abetted by colorist Edgar Delgado, is busy undermining the story with the sloppiest artwork by a usually polished professional that I’ve seen this season. His stylistic adoption of boxy anatomy gives his characters an unyielding stiffness that prevents them from moving with any liveliness and often distorts proportions. He also achieves the impossible: many of his characters look so much alike that it’s impossible to tell one from the other yet when drawing a single character, the individual’s face is seldom the same from one panel to the next (in one ludicrous pair of adjoining panels, Pike’s nose is distinctly different from one to the other). Page layouts in which Chaykin alternates tight close-ups of faces with distant pictures of characters at full height are so routinely repeated that, instead of enlivening the proceedings, they become boring.

Flawed story; clumsy drawing. Too bad.