Cow Boy: A Boy and His Horse - Hardcover

Nate Cosby is a freelance writer/editor from Mississippi. He was an editor at Marvel Entertainment for six years, overseeing acclaimed series including the Harvey-Award winning Thor The Mighty Avenger, the Eisner-Award winning The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, as well as Spider-Man, X-Men First Class, Hulk, Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane and many others. Nate’s been a writer for PBS’ relaunched The Electric Company. He edited/co-wrote Archaia’s Jim Henson’s The Storyteller and Immortals: Gods & Heroes. He co-writes Pigs for Image Comics, and writes Buddy Cops for Dark Horse. Nate lives in Colorado and needs more coffee

Gr 3-6-Ten-year-old Boyd Linney is a bounty hunter, primarily focused on bringing righteous law and consequences to his various family members gone wrong. His hobbyhorse morphs into a double-barreled shotgun when needed, and Boyd demonstrates an unforgiving will that begins as satirical but changing into something grimmer and unresolved. Five short interstitial stories appear between chapters of Boyd's ongoing story, and these are truly comic, brief sketches with unambiguous punch lines. Eliopoulos's art is slightly less clean than his work in the "Franklin Richards: Son of a Genius" (Marvel) series, but it suits the excellent color and design work he's done to make the book feel scruffy, textured, and temporally appropriate. The spare, essentialist facial cartooning is still able to convey subtlety of emotion, but the linework and loose layouts fully support any sense of dramatic tension in the enjoyably ludicrous action sequences. The closing chapter in which Boyd is able to stop being so serious and relate to his grandfather like an ordinary kid is the most successful, but it also highlights the strange morality at the heart of the narrative.-Benjamin Russell, Belmont High School, NHα(c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.