Written by AJ Lieberman art by Riley Rossmo  

As comic titles go Cowboy Ninja Viking stands out as the funniest and most intriguing of the year.  Pre release it had grasped my attention but not enough to add it to my subscription, yet seeing the solitary issue left on the shelf at my local comic shop I grabbed a copy.  Here’s the spiel…   

COWBOY NINJA VIKING is the creation of Doctor Sebastian Ghislain, a psychotherapist who recruits Multiple Personality Disorder patients to produce a unit of counter-intelligence agents called Triplets. But what happens when those guys become out of control assassins? That’s when the deadliest Triplet of them all Duncan- COWBOY NINJA VIKING, is called in to take down his own brethren.

Something that stands out in the issue is the fun and original use of word balloons, which have a different weapon within them depending on which on which of Duncan’s personalities is talking…

You can probably guess by the scans who’s who, it’s nice touch and it gives the comic a sense of fun along with being a really cool way to show Duncan’s multiple personalities.  And the different personalities do creep through, the Cowboy is a sex crazed looney,  the Viking has thuggish tendencies and the Ninja is the calm calculated killer. 

Onto the art,  Rossmo’s draws such hectic lines, it’s rough, really messy and crazy, which adds to the bonkers personality disorder of Duncan.  There’s no colour however, it’s all done in grayscale with blue tones, which are used for shadowing purposes, it’s good to see an artist being brave and letting his lines do the work ahead of any digital coloring.

There is however one big problem I had with Cowboy Ninja Viking – I found the story really confusing, mostly down to the use of flashbacks.  Flashbacks can work in comics in this case though I found myself lost and I had to go back and re-read parts. It’s as if this comic is trying to be too clever, which is it’s downfall.  Too much of the comic is spent jumping around in time, leaving no room to flesh out the plot.  I would of liked to have seen why Dr Ghislain thought people with multiple personalities would make good assassins, is it just a fun idea or is there more to it?  The constant leaps forward and then back in time made it difficult to grasp the story, I wasn’t hooked in. 

In summary - Cowboy Ninja Viking is more confusing that it is fun. Maybe it was just me who struggled to follow what was going on, but the quirky/clever art and interesting concept\ isn’t enough for me to pick up issue #2.