True, True Grit: Earp Saints For Sinners #1

[17 January 2011]

By shathley Q

PopMatters Comics Editor

The thing to understand about Earp: Saints For Sinners, right up front, is that it’s science fiction.

Sure it plays out just two years from today. And the tech unfolded in its pages is a pretty low-grade evolution from our current tech. Sure the lush interiors visualize a grand mythology of running gun battles down Main Street and bank robberies easily the equal of any storyboard for the sequel to Michael Mann’s Heat. But the book is one hundred percent pure science fiction.

Not in the sense that TV shows like Joss Whedon’s Firefly or looking farther back the ‘80s high-impact animated show Galaxy Rangers are simultaneously westerns and science fiction, updating old-timey Hayes code storytelling values by blending them with a space travel future. Rather in the sense that, to the ordinary people staking their hopes on the idea of boomtowns that once littered the Southwest and those hitching their wagon on the idea of the California Gold Rush, just the idea of the year 2013 pretty much scans as pure science fiction.


How would you read this book? If coming out of the 1860s, out of the Civil War, you discover the world of tomorrow once had magnificent things (a movie industry, satellite navigation, ICBMs) but now these social structures have collapsed under their own weight. And now, in the world after the world of tomorrow, the more familiar social dynamics that governed the 1870s have once again arisen. The thing about Earp is that its not a backsliding, lionizing of the halcyon of gunfighters on the streets. The book is more prospective than that. This book is about gaging how to deal with the future, but predicting how the past might have dealt with its future. It’s in this way, that Earp: Saints For Sinners enters into an elite cohort of science-fiction that includes such classics as Dune, Life During Wartime, Rendezvous With Rama or Stranger In A Strange Land. Or H. G. Wells all-time great, The Time Machine. This book is about tomorrow, our tomorrow, by way of our past’s tomorrow.

But of course, that’s not the real question. The real question is, how can you read a book, which throws out the line, “Gun sales went up, but violence went down”? How can you read that line, after Arizona?

The answer is how could you not.




So does art create reality, or imitate it?

If you’re asking the question, let it go. That either/or binary is entirely too simplistic. The situation is far more complex than a simple measure cause versus effect. And Earp: Saints For Sinners a moving and deliberate piece filled with brio and machismo and pure humanity will push you beyond your limits. Because Earp will push into understanding the singular role of the art-piece as predictive. And on this occasion, an art-piece that draws the tight line between financial crisis and gun violence.

Is Earp: Saints For Sinners socially relevant? After a quarter pound of pressure on the trigger of a Glock 19 in Arizona, Earp desperately is. But it will also be socially relevant tomorrow. And long after we’ve healed, and after we still remember these horrific events, because these events deserve to be remembered. But Earp, sadly is socially relevant. Not because the book comments so vividly on a tragedy (it doesn’t, Earp vividly predicts a tragedy), but because one to of the surest ways of understanding what may come, is beginning to understand what might have come from our past.

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