When I first saw the adverts for the movie Rango, it annoyed me. The fact that on the posters for this movie, the name Rango is the same size as Johnny Depp. The actor is actually the same size as the title. Star marketing is a simple, stupid ploy that sucks people in on the previous performances of stars.

Now I would like to consider myself a person of strong morals. I have princibles. I delete people on Facebook if I havent had contact in a certain amount of time (this does count as princibles in the modern day for those doubting.) and I would avoid seeing films just for the use of star marketing. Some people would say this is just cutting of my nose to spite my face, but in this situation, I really fucking hate my face. I wasn’t planning on seeing Rango, but laying on a beach in Wellington, New Zealand a young lady approached me and my girlfriend and offered us free tickets to a preview. Now I may consider myself to have princibles, but come on, its free! Before we saw the film, I had no idea what the plot was. My girlfriend had no idea what the plot was. I doubt anyone in the screen new what the plot was. I didn’t even know that it was a western, ish. Would I suggest to people to go and see this badly marketed movie that I knew nothing about apart from that fact that Johnny Depp played a weird little lizard? Oh yeah…

Rango is a friendless, clueless lizard trapped in a life that he can only dream of escaping. After an accident on the road he is freed from his captivity and unleashed upon the real world. After taking the advice of a American Dream seeking Armadillo, Rango comes across an old western town suffering from drought. After creating a persona fit for a spagetti western, Rango rises to the dizzy heights of town sherrif and is charged with the quest to find who has been pouring the towns water supplies into the desert, forcing the towns people to sell up and move out.

So, a little bit of back story, just to keep you in the know. I have been craving a western recently. I have never seen a really good one. I have seen and enjoyed The Quick and the Dead and Unforgiven but never really had a big thing for the genre. But..something caused a spark in me to ignite. Its a little old TV show called Firefly. I love the show, I have seen it countless times and the film is almost as good. There is also a game I used to play when younger with a very similar premise: Space Cowboys. I don’t know what it is about this that gets me so involved that the Western genre misses but I have been feeling the need alot more to get into it. The Space Cowboy lays dead in the deeps of Space with Firefly ten years gone and Serenity 2: The Rise of Zombie Wash and his Reaver Patrol not looking like its happening, the only thing left is a series of sporadically released comics. So all I’m left with is the western. True Grit made me salivate a little and were I not half way round the world and living off pasta, I may have seen it, but then I saw 3:10 to Yuma and it just wasn’t what I needed. In fact it was…boring. I know, I know, it was critically aclaimed, it had a stellar cast but just didn’t hit the spot.

So…Enter Rango. This film got me going. It had a few very funny self aware moments. Rango himself is a very good protagonist. He is weak and rather geeky. He suffers from outrageous lonliness and can’t help but jump at the chance to live out his fantasies. He is a likable, pittiable character. He is hubris personifed. Don’t forget, he is Johnny Depp. The character is brilliantly funny and the supporting cast is just as good. Bill Nighey plays the perfect villain (though some exchanges do sound a little like Davey Jones and Jack Sparrow having a chat, but with Gore at the helm, thats no great supprise). The rich turtle land owner is a character that you love to hate and the henchman (yes one of the is a cockney, because as we know, all cockneys are evil) are the usual bumbling side kicks to infuriate a bad guy perfectly.

So the graphics are outstanding and in some places it atcually looks like the actors performed the parts and then had the CG added onto afterward to capture the subtle nuancies of the facial expressions. Direction is good too, some classic hero shots and the mixture of humour really does make this one to watch more than once. I think its supposed to be a kids film, but this one seemed to miss the mark a little and land straight in the parents lap. I’m sure that the adults were laughing more than the kids. The storyline is predictable, the characters 2D and only really Rango has the fleshing out really needed to make the characters believable. But thats the greatest thing about kids films. You dont need to have full characters to make it great. The Goonies doesn’t have a single character that has more than one dimesion but it’s still amazing. This film has it all. It has the best, and only, bat-mounted mole dogfight (yes I said it), it has a station wagon robbery, a showdown at highnoon and the most badass looking rattlesnake minigun combo I have ever seen.

The film is about industrialisation. Its about the modern world killing off those small towns left in the desert where people still chew tabbacco and spit on the floor. But its more about the killing of the dream. Rango is dressed in an Acapulco shirt, just like another American Dream hunting hero of mine that makes a cameo roll in the first few minutes that I almost died when I saw it. The American Dream is no longer the picket fence with kids and a dog, but the killing of everything to mke the biggest buck. Industrialisation is not the American Dream, but the American Reality and that’s the crux of this movie. No one wants another golf course, but its gonna happen, but nowadays, that six shooting, hat toting gunslinger ain’t gonna come riding in from the range and save the day. He is lost in the shrinking desert as the cities get bigger and the dream gets smaller. He is still there in the imagination of some, but that seems to be his final resting place. Gone are the realites of the old west and the idealised dream remains; but thats all it will remain. A dream fading under the glow of the florescent jungle spreading across the plains.

But the film was quite good!

The comic is written by AJ Lieberman with art and tones by Riley Rossmo. Now I have read none of Lieberman’s previous work, though I know that he has done several Batman comics, namely Hush Returns as well as a couple of other DC favorites. He has also written other greats such as I Kill Giants and Chew that I know are greats, only from others.  This was my first outing in the ways of Lieberman, and I will say I liked the sights. He is a good writer, original and funny to boot. The artwork is no let down either. From the front cover which is little stark with the simple image of C.N.V in the foreground and large text in the background stating that this is Cowboy Ninja Viking. Rossmo does the art work for the Alex Grecian written Proof. The black and white with splashes of blue suits the tone of the comic, it’s stylized, detailed, and has a certain maturity about it that some comic artists lack, the ones where it’s all big breasted arse kicking women and men with muscles that ripple more than a swimming pool full of fat men. Rossmo does the art work for the Alex Grecian written Proof, another comic that I have not read, but have a desperate thirst to check out, if for the art work alone.  C.N.V is golden age format, something which adds a little extra something to the comic, as well as the lack of annoying adverts every three pages. This alone made it worth the little extra cash.

So the plot? Five years previous to C.N.V #1, a genius doctor decides it would be a great idea to train people suffering from multiple personality disorder to be assassins. The triplets. (Don’t worry; the comic is fully aware of how lame it sounds.) Things didn’t go great. High powered agents now track down Duncan, the only triplet that wasn’t a complete failure, to attain his help in finding another of the triplets, P.G.O. (If you guess what it stands for, you win the prize!). Simple as people who enjoy Americas Next Top Model.

Cowboy Ninja Viking is a re-reader. If you didn’t get it the first time, read it again and you will. If you don’t the second try and third, if you fail then go back to Witchblade. The art work was amazing, the plot, should it thicken, will be better than a MacDonald’s milkshake, and the characterization was excellent, to a point. This is only issue #1 after all. Cowboy Ninja Viking has something; from the brutal and brilliant dialogue between the Cowboy, Ninja and Viking down to the details of individually designed speech bubbles for each personality. I will admit ignorance and say I don’t know much about Image comics, but after reading C.N.V, I really want to. If you are a little tired of reading the same sort of thing with D.C. and Marvel, and still resentful about the fact Neil Gaiman isn’t chained in a room with a pencil producing work 24/7, give this title a go. It isn’t what the title prescribes, but very much an example of how titles can be misleading. On the other hand, if you were to judge a book by its cover, this would score highly.