Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips have consistently turned out critically acclaimed, award-winning comics and graphic novels for what seems like decades now, from their work on Fatale and Criminal to this year’s big Eisner winner, My Heroes Have Always Been Junkies.
It looks like that trend could continue in 2020, as Image today announced Pulp, a new Western graphic novel by the duo.
“When Sean and I decided to do something completely new for our next original graphic novel, he planted the idea of a Western in my head… And I found myself drawn to the era where that genre first hit big—the pulp magazines and the Great Depression,” said Brubaker. “I thought about all these writers telling fictionalized versions of the vanishing days of the Wild West, as their own world was going through one of its darkest hours… And suddenly I realized I had the makings of a really great pulp story, but one set in the real world. A story that I really wanted to tell.”
The story centers on Max Winters, a pulp writer in 1930s New York who finds himself “drawn into a story not unlike the tales he churns out at five cents a word—tales of a Wild West outlaw dispensing justice with a six-gun.” That story involves bank robbers, Nazi spies and more.
“I asked Ed to write me a Western and this is as close as he could get. Hopefully I don’t have to draw too many horses. Or hats. Or six-shooters. What was I thinking?’’ Phillips said.
Look for it in May.
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