When Six-Gun Gorilla #1 hit the shelves, it featured an ape with guns and I’d just become a fan of its writer, Simon Spurrier, thanks to his bombastic style on X-Club and Extermination. So I was expecting some wild and crazy madness and some wacky good times. I did not expect a powerful study of the importance of storytelling in a world fixated on real-life tragedy porn, nor did I expect an indictment of ongoing comic book series and the fans who can’t handle deviations from what they think they want from them.
This book has been an education. For one, thanks to 30 seconds of research I apparently couldn’t be bothered to do at the time, I now know that Six-Gun Gorilla isn’t just some wild new concept, but rather a long-standing character who was first published back in 1939, whose creator remains unknown, and who now exists in the public domain. Thus, the dedication in the first issue to “creators unknown whose works outlived their credit” is even more directly relevant than I’d initially thought. Secondly, I’ve begun to re-evaluate my relationship to the notion of adherence to continuity in mainstream superhero comics vs. the absolute necessity for different creators to be able to craft their own stories. It’s something we could all stand to be less uptight about, although there’s still definitely room for them to respect the creations of others when handling them. That’s what Spurrier has done strikingly with Six-Gun Gorilla #6.
The story followed Blue, a pseudo-soldier in a division made up of suicidal people who are wired with brain-cameras so that civilians can experience interdimensional warfare firsthand through their eyes as the ultimate in reality programming. When he accidentally survived his first deployment, a dying general gave him a special trinket that he was supposed to deliver to one of his loved ones, and Six-Gun Gorilla appeared from nowhere to protect him on his quest – and often times to dish out cryptic metafictional wisdom. Eventually, we realized that this is a universe which no longer understands the concept of fiction itself. When one incredulous character is introduced to the notion, it’s defined as “lies designed to do nothin’ but make you feel.” Without the concept of storytelling, people slavishly watch televised warfare just to get some sensation of narrative. Blue, however, is a fan of that long lost art, which is why he could be suckered into delaying his own suicide to deliver this bauble – it was just too good a tale to deny it a properly sentimental conclusion.
Slowly, Blue comes to realize that his own depression, born of having his heart broken, is not worth destroying his life over, thanks to issue #5’s celebration of forgotten characters and the emphasis on the stunningly simple revelation that just because something has ended doesn’t mean it never mattered. A cameo from Meg The Priestess (a Nelson S. Bond character) illustrates the point beautifully, when Blue angsts over not wanting to remember the relationship that crushed him. “Then all you’ll have is the fact it died. And not the fact it lived.” It’s a quietly profound moment that illustrates how wrong our tendency to dwell on negativity really is – focusing on reasons why not instead of reasons why.
For a less emotional but still equally valid version of that principle, there’s always that Mitch Hedberg joke. “I like to drink red wine. This girl says ‘doesn’t red wine give you a headache?’ ‘Yeah, eventually, but the first and the middle parts are amazing!’ I’m not going to stop doing something for what happens at the end. ‘Mitch, do you want an apple?’ ‘No, eventually it will be a core.'” It’s the same idea. The fact that you’ll eventually be done eating doesn’t mean you shouldn’t want to start – and stories are food for the mind.
However, as we see in issue #6,the warmongers and ratings-obsessed executives are tasked with making sure that he ongoing conflict is “the kinda story that never fucking evolves and never fucking ends.” This is according to General Vertid, who freely admits to conspiring with the enemy to prolong the war – which is what that trinket delivery turned out to be about. The only stories they want are “the kind folks keep tuinin’ in for, the kind they’ll subscribe ta, the kind where they’re so fuckin’ famished fer sensation that they’ll eat up the tiniest taste’a action ’cause they’ve forgot what it’s like for things ta change bit by bit.” That’s the kind of statement that makes you rethink what you should expect from serialized comics, and how you should react when they get rebooted, revamped, reimagined or refurbished. While mainstream superhero books with franchisable characters never really end, they certainly do evolve – in some respects, anyway. Superman today isn’t the Superman of 1939, and now, thanks to Spurrier and artist Jeff Stokely, neither is Six-Gun Gorilla today what he was in the hands of his unknown creator that same year.
Stokely’s artwork is cartoony, but once you settle into it, it serves the story very well, because it’s highly emotive and extremely detailed. Six-Gun Gorilla is the kind of book that will read best when collected, so don’t hesitate to pick up the trade when you can and follow Blue’s metafictional quest to accept his pain and save his universe from a life of desperately grasping for emotional engagement through rubbernecking at the suffering of others. It’s a book that has defied expectations, truly provoked thought, and maybe helped a person or two not be so frozen by potentially negative outcomes that they never actually attempt anything that would qualify as living a life.
Plus, it has an ape what shoots people with guns.
