Shaolin Cowboy: Beginning of the End Results — 21 Years of Blood, Sweat, and Chainsaws

All too often, it’s easy to agree with the title of GWAR’s 1994 album This Toilet Earth. As the U.S. sinks a little further into fascism every day, and my own life holds steady at "nothing to brag about," it’s easy to lose hope.

But hope — and joy and chaos and beauty and ultraviolence — are to be found in abundance in the work of Geof Darrow, providing a reason to live, if you’re running out of those. Hard as it is to believe, Darrow has been gifting us with the adventures of the Shaolin Cowboy for 21 years, and his latest book is a celebration of that fact. Whether you’re new to his work or a completist, Darrow’s Shaolin Cowboy: Beginning of the End Results — 21 Years of Blood, Sweat, and Chainsaws is a worthy addition to your post-Christmas shopping list.

Though a Shaolin Cowboy book, this one starts out with a different character, sort of: Bourbon Thret, reprinting 70-something pages of material that had only been available in hard-to-find French editions. Thret, created in the magical comics year of 1986, is Darrow’s pre-Cowboy character who shares a paunch and a talent for kung fu with the Cowboy. These early adventures offer a look at a young Darrow, who, despite his youth, emerged almost fully formed as a significant and unique cartoonist.

I’ve seen the Thret comics before, but only in French, a language I’m as fluent in as a brick. So it’s quite fun to see what young Darrow was like as a writer. Spoiler: He was a hoot.

One adventure begins like so:

“A TEFLON POLYUNSATURATED NUCLEAR BOMB LEFT OVER FROM THE COLA WARS IS ACCIDENTALLY DETONATED BY ESTROGEN MINERS WORKING BENEATH BOURBON THRET’S APARTMENT BUILDING, DAMAGING THE REPRODUCER HEAD AND BROWN ARTIFICIAL-LEATHER COVERING OF HIS PORTABLE THREE-SPEED SILVERTONE PHONOGRAPH!!!”

Now that’s a sentence. Darrow is so known for his visual storytelling that he gets few props as a wordsmith, which is unfortunate. He is consistently witty, funny, and inventive. Look how many ideas are packed into that sentence, which tosses out references to nuclear Cola wars, estrogen miners, and vinyl love. How many of today’s “writerly” comics scribes could come up with a sentence so jam-packed with meaning? Darrow’s density of ideas is reminiscent of Jack Kirby, who Darrow worked with in 1980s animation.

Let’s see how the sentence is followed up:

“UNABLE TO PLAY HIS COMPLETE SET OF ROOSEVELT SYKES BLUES RECORDINGS, WHICH HE RECEIVED FOR RESCUING A FIRST EDITION OF HAROLD ROBBINS’S LONLEY LADY FROM THE BOOKNAPPERS OF THE DEWEY DECIMAL SYSTEM, HE IS FORCED TO TAKE TO THE ROADS IN SEARCH OF A BOUNTY TO PURCHASE REPLACEMENT PARTS FOR HIS PRIZE PHONOGRAPH.”

And off we go. In only one additional ultra-dense sentence, Darrow weaves a tale that would make Seinfeld’s library cop sputter, demonstrating in past and present the sort of whimsical adventures that Bourbon Thret gets up to. A sentence later, we learn that Thret has accepted a job to “TERMINATE A ROGUE NUN SPREADING FORBIDDEN RECIPES FROM AN OUTLAWED CHINESE COOKBOOK THROUGHOUT THE GALAXY.” As you do.

The early Darrow art is remarkably mature (and also immature, if you know what I mean, since Darrow delights in the silly and scatological). The joy in detail is there, though Darrow’s work would grow even more detailed. He was already reveling in ultra-dense crowd scenes featuring random animals and miscreants. Darrow has always had a talent for the absurd, as seen in panels of musical instrument-playing penguins jamming with Thret. The minuteness and mayhem are such that no one would confuse these pages with the output of any other artist. Darrow is monolithic, an utterly one of a kind sicko, thank the gods.

I would say the biggest difference between young and recent Darrow is in the propulsive motion of recent work, such as the epic Shaolin Cowboy: Cruel to be Kin. As the Cowboy innocently befriends an orphaned Komodo dragon, setting mayhem in motion, the pages freakin’ move. While those Darrow details keep your eye on the page at hand, Darrow’s figures, always moving, keep the pages turning. Whether they contain a mutated Nazi or a defeathered giant chicken, the motion is constant, and his early work is relatively static — relatively, I said. I’m really just picking nits here, folks. Darrow arrived on the scene as a big deal, and that deal just kept getting bigger.

All in all, the search for Sister Mary Home and Garden Implements (what a name) is a classic Darrow adventure, as are the other Thret stories, which show Darrow characteristically delighting in physical humor. As with the Cowboy, Thret is an elastic protagonist capable of being stretched in any direction that moves Darrow. As Mike Mignola wrote in Lead Poisoning, in words that apply to Thret as well:

“…the Shaolin Cowboy is pure Geof Darrow. He is Geof’s unknowable man — on the surface a patchwork of things that Geof just likes to draw, but inside … the inner workings are a mystery. We don’t know who he is, where he comes from, or where he is going, and I for one like it that way. For me he is just the perfect Geof Darrow toy (with no end of cool little accessories), and the world he stumbles, punches, kicks, and saws his way through is, really, just the inside of Geof’s head.”

After the Thret comics, this edition republishes Start Trek, the Shaolin Cowboy's initial arc. I don’t know how you first came to know Darrow — possibly his 1990 collaboration with Frank Miller, Hard Boiled — but this was my introduction. About 15 years ago, I liked to spend my spare time perusing the long boxes of my local comic shop’s 50-cent section, which occupied an entire basement. Alongside a lot of crap, I picked up several issues of something called The Shaolin Cowboy, and aside from the discovery of an issue of Jack Kirby’s Destroyer Duck, this blew away any and all other treasure from this basement of cheapo dreams.

One of my most memorable moments in reading comics, ever, is the first time I read issue #5, in which a giant Godzilla-like lizard is slowly revealed a little at a time, a little at a time, a lot at a time, and finally shown to be carrying an entire city on its back, in mind-boggling Darrow detail. I’ve seldom seen such a demonstration of the power of comic art to create scale, not to mention scales. I was a Darrow true believer instantly.

Start Trek provides many equivalent joys, remaining as fresh today as when I found it in a bin. Giant lizards, rapping monsters, vengeance-happy goons, ravenous zombies, a mysterious baby who only says “Mine,” and a talking horse flesh out these shaggy stories, which are brimming with visual and verbal invention. These comics live in a whimsical district of kung fu heaven, exquisitely designed by Darrow, who famously also lent his talents to the Matrix movies. There’s too much greatness in these pages to ignore if you’ve somehow missed out till now. Get thee to a comics store and fulfill the words which once graced a Kirby cover: “Don’t ask! Just buy it.”

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