Publisher: :01 First Second
Item Code: MAY121156
SRP: $18.99
PREVIEWS Page #305
In Shops: 07/04/12

Bloody Chester rode the frontier, armed against trouble with his bad reputation and scary nickname.  Good thing, too, since Chester Kates is just a young teen without a family, and the Wild West pulls no punches, even for orphans.  Desperate for money, he takes a job with a railway man: burn down an abandoned settlement and clear the way for the railway line.  The town’s not empty though, and Chester ends up tangled in a fight between everyone who’s got a claim on the land.

Hilary Florido, twice honored as an America’s Best Comics inductee, makes an excellent graphic novel debut with Bloody Chester.  JT Petty, her cowriter, brings his experience with the western genre to bear on the work with great results.

The story itself reads simply and smoothly — a suspenseful and creepy young adult mystery set in and under the town of Whale.  However, both Petty and Florido set up plot-dominoes that loop the reader back to some earlier key occurrence time and time again, demonstrating just how few isolated incidents there are in land on the edge of civilization.

~ Sarah Martinez