Cowboys & Aliens Howdy. Welcome to Silver City, Arizona--the time is a few minutes to alien invasion, 1873. That's right...alien invasion. And the cavalry won't be coming; the garrison at Fort Larrabie has already been obliterated by a small army of huge, armored, scaly, horned marauding extraterrestrials packin' heat like the Old West has never seen. Commander Dar of the House of Dar has crash-landed on Earth, and never one to let an opportunity slip by, he's decided to turn the crash-landing into a first-strike on a planet ripe for the picking.
What these aliens don't count on is an ad-hoc cavalry of sorts forming to stop them from signaling an entire armada of House Of Dar warships to come sunder and plunder (=Bad. Humans not slaughtered would obviously become slaves to the invaders since they already have slaves of conquered races helping them). The story is all action as a group of cowboys, led by partners in adventure Zeke and Miss Verity, make an uncomfortable alliance with some Apaches, most notably War Hawk and plucky young No-Name. Well, not all action. There's romance too, as Zeke starts to fall for an emerald-skinned viper-eyed female alien named Kai, former slave of mighty Dar who decides to defect to Earth and aid Zeke and co.s hopeless-seeming resistance. And War Hawk soon has a bit of a thing for Verity, verily, and I plum reckon she's of a mind to reciprocate.
The humans pull some really cool tricks to throw off Dar's plans to summon immanent subjugation of all things Terrestrial, including using some of the aliens' advanced technology against them--although that's not a weapon Zeke keeps trying to use, it's actually a repair tool. But hey, whatever works in a clinch. And can you think of a better action scene than angry Apaches attacking over-confident aliens?
But Zeke's clever plan to claim Silver City back from the otherworldly marauders begins to fall apart when a weaselly little scoundrel of a human decides to switch sides to save his own skin, and tip Commander Dar off.
I enjoyed this SF/Western mishmash, though the art veers from eye-catching to flat throughout. The denouement involving cowboys and Apaches talking about future cooperation doesn't exactly remind me of the real world, but other than that this was a bit of a hoot--believable dialogue, likeable heroes, villains you just want to kick off the planet, and some lively action scenes that got me cheering for the guys in the white hats and the feathers.
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