2 Guns: Second Shot Deluxe Edition (1)

This is a great story, that I didn't know even existed until the film was made. I highly recomend the purchase.

Dare I say, I liked the movie better than the book. Or maybe its cause I saw the movie before I read the book and it ruined it for me.You be the judge.

Strong story from a writer who is always fun to read. If you can find it, check out Badlands, one of his earlier works. I love to see that one made into a movie.

2 stars? This book has a rating of 2 stars?! Surely not. It's been made into a major Hollywood movie. It's got a writer of some pedigree - Steven Grant - who's written for Marvel as well as some notable indies. It's a story that's been likened in genre to Ed Brubaker's acclaimed run on 'Criminal'!Well, all that may be true...but for me, this is a pretty shoddily made comic book when all's said and done.That's down to a mixture of things relating to both form and content. Both Grant and artist Mateus Santolouco are equally to blame, though it's hard to tell who's most at fault. The artwork in isolation isn't actually that bad - Santolouco's work is fairly dynamic, clean and accessible, and it's matched with a colour palette that often makes the work pop. But some of his page composition makes transgressions against the basics of sequential art - poorly depicted action where characters seem to operate within a hazily constructed notion of time and space. Sometimes characters and objects flit in and out of existence at whim...though to be fair, Grant's script probably pushed Santolouco into some of those situations.After all, this is a book where a lot of stuff just... happens. Convenience and coincidence (rather than logic) push the story forward, and if you're not willing to put your sense of disbelief completely on hold you'll catch yourself rolling your eyes more than once. Considering this is a book about undercover cops, double- and triple-crosses, organised crime and intelligence agencies...it plays pure softball. The action is forgettable and toothless, the dialogue unnatural and overwrought, the characters' motivations shallow and unrelatable...comparing this stuff to Brubaker's Criminal is like like comparing 'The Thin Blue Line' to 'The Wire'.Egads, it's bad. And what makes that such a shame is that this might - just might - be the first comic people read if they liked the film (I haven't seen it, so can't comment). Y'know those snooty movie reviews where the critic says "based on a comic" in such a way that it's almost as if they expect you to lower your expectations and intellect in order to enjoy it? Books like this prove them right. And I kind of hate it a little more for that.Oh, and as a physical product - despite a nice bit of embossing on outline of the cover graphic - this is poor. A page fell out on a new copy on my first read-through. That hasn't happened to me since the old days of Boxtree handling Marvel's trades...and at least those always felt worth holding on to. With a shoddy binding adding to all its other problems, I'm half-tempted to donate this one to the Recycle bin.