{"id":245,"date":"2006-12-30T18:21:14","date_gmt":"2006-12-30T23:21:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.delirium.org\/?p=245"},"modified":"2010-10-04T08:09:21","modified_gmt":"2010-10-04T14:09:21","slug":"cowboys-aliens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/?p=245","title":{"rendered":"Cowboys &#038; Aliens"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I have a local comics-y friend who acquired a copy of <a title=\"Cowboys &amp; Aliens by Fred Van Lente, at Amazon\" href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Cowboys-Aliens-Fred-Van-Lente\/dp\/158240724X\/\" target=\"_blank\">Cowboys &amp; Aliens<\/a> and immediately thought of me. Of course, I had just started a reasonably large book, so there has been delay. But that&#8217;s alright, as I&#8217;m here now. Apparently, you can get this slim graphic novel at your local store just by buying something else, and they slip it into your bag as a promotional item, I guess? Or maybe vast quantities of overstock.<\/p>\n<p>That last one fits pretty well. The art is fine, but the plot is uninspired at best: when aliens crash-land in somewhere in the Old West, cowboys, Apaches, and settlers drop their petty feud over land theft and genocide in the face of a common foe who, sheerly by coincidence and I&#8217;m sure with no thought to parallelism, hopes to steal land and commit genocide. Then they have a fight, in which people die and things explode. My favorite part (and I refer here to my least favorite part) is the opening screencrawl segment in which all of the parallels that I earlier lied were coincidental are spelled out in excruciating detail before the book proceeds to unsubtly (but much more forgivably) present them via the plot. Explicitly, at one point.<\/p>\n<p>In case you&#8217;ve missed it, though, I&#8217;ll go ahead and mention it a fourth time, now. Whitey rampaged through North America during the 19th Century, not for the first time, but the most aggressively and rapidly of any post-Columbus period. It&#8217;s possible there was something morally questionable about that, as presented by the Golden Rule, aka alien invasion. There. Now you&#8217;re probably prepared to read this, in the manner the authors were hoping for you to be. To end on a positive note, though, the cowboy hero&#8217;s name is Zeke. Which you must admit is a pretty awesome name. (I mean that. Don&#8217;t make me get a court order.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have a local comics-y friend who acquired a copy of Cowboys &amp; Aliens and immediately thought of me. Of course, I had just started a reasonably large book, so there has been delay. But that&#8217;s alright, as I&#8217;m here now. Apparently, you can get this slim graphic novel at your local store just by [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[17,430,1240],"class_list":["post-245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words","tag-graphic-novel","tag-science-fiction","tag-western"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=245"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}