Writer: Skottie Young
Artist: Jorge Corona
Colorist: Jean-Francois Beaulieu
Letterer: Nate Piekos
Editor: Marla Eizik
Cover Artist: Jorge Corona
Publisher: Image
Price: $16.99
Release Date: December 4, 2024
When Ryder coughs up blood, the Doctor hands her a death sentence. Still, it’s not all bad. Ryder can take his medicine and maybe extend her lease of life. But bartering for a few more months seems like another raw deal. So, how does Ryder face her cryin’ husband and daughter? She leaps on her horse and rides away. Ryder doesn’t care if she’s gotta beg, borrow, or steal to press her claim to a happy life. She wants the years she is owed with darling Darius and little Joey. Where will Ryder’s quest for life take her? What trials must she undergo to cheat death? Let’s saddle up our horses, ride into Aint No Grave TP, and find out!
Story
Ryder made her name by robbing banks, stagecoaches, and trains. Then, she found true love and left her career of crime to become a wife and a mother. Ryder embraced life on the farm, away from the centers of civilization she thumbed her nose at. She played housewife to Darius and raised their daughter. She and her husband might quarrel. Joey might get rambunctious and muddy her dress. Still, the family muddled through whatever problems came their way unless Ryder backslid into her old ways. Then came the Doctor’s declaration. Ryder knew a death sentence when she heard one. Heck! She’d sent more than a few people the Grim Reaper’s way!
In Aint No Grave TP, Ryder searches her liberated loot for two coins from Cypress. They are meant to pay her toll for the afterlife. She wants them for a ploy. Darius argues that dyin’ isn’t like the other problems Ryder has ignored or worked around. But for Ryder, it's all or nothing. She vows to cheat death. Darius forces her to tell Joey goodbye. Like the Terminator, Ryder insists she will return.
As Ryder travels through prairies and badlands, she navigates a trail of grief. Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance mark her journey. When she reaches Cypress, Ryder resumes her outlaw career. She tries to win a game everyone loses. Yet she can't escape the siren song of a man who guides souls toward eternity in Aint No Grave TP.
It's easy to admire how Ryder demolishes obstacles in her way. Like Judas Priest, society often hails those who ignore the rules while charting their paths to success. But there is always a price to be paid for one’s actions. And like the corporate executives who reap fortunes while their workers get by and their shareholders go bankrupt, Ryder must answer one final question. Why should an outlaw get a second crack at life?
Art
Jorge Corona shows Ryder riding past hoodoos and natural stone monuments while crosses and headstones mark untended cemeteries. She insulates herself in layers of clothing as she rides between narrow defiles and past animals on grazing lands. Ravens watch as Ryder nears an arch with sand streaming down like a waterfall. She compares two dead trees with the emblem on her coin. Then, a tear tumbling down her cheek, Ryder leaves her horse behind and trudges toward a gunslinging hay mound.
Jean-Francois Beaulieu lavishes a loaded palette on Aint No Grave TP. While Darius and his wife frolic beneath a cloudy blue sky, a black sun hangs in the scarlet sky over Cypress. Yellow windows glow in the beige, tan, and green buildings that climb the hills of this Pellucidar (sadly) without dinosaurs. Scraps of parchment flutter down, their edges eaten away by yellow and orange after blotches of scarlet form like mold near a gold star. A black goat with glowing red eyes clatters across rooftops of the wood frame buildings and leaps across a glowing cerulean river toward an obsidian steamboat. Beautiful colors adorn every panel of Ryder's journey, whether filtered memories or undeniable reality.
Music notes in beige rectangles accompany burlesque dancers and a tinkling piano in the scarlet and magenta gambling hall. Nate Piekos casts generously sized black and colored letters into polygonal balloons in Aint No Grave TP. Ryder's words flow like the river she avoided as she shrugs off bullet wounds. Sound effects enhance laughter, roundhouse punches, and gunfire, while a hissing engine foretells a seemingly inescapable destiny. Thanks to Image Comics for providing a copy for review.
Final Thoughts
When a former outlaw gets a death sentence, she rides to the gates of hell to bargain for her life in Aint No Grave TP. The spaghetti western speaks to how we relate to changes in our families, careers, and society and how we deal with grief and loss.
Rating 9.8/10
For cover art from individual issues see my review at Comic Book Dispatch.
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