REVIEW: Deadly Tales of the Gunslinger Spawn #16 Brings Bad Omens to the Old West

Deadly Tales of the Gunslinger Spawn #16 rolls onto the trail carrying the kind of grimy Western energy this series wears like an old leather holster. Jimmy Palmiotti doesn’t treat Gunslinger like Spawn wearing a cowboy hat and calling it a day. Javi belongs in this time period. The silence, suspicion, brutality, superstition, dirt, and ugly little power games of the frontier all feel built around him, and issue #16 keeps pushing the series deeper into that space while letting the supernatural stink creep in around the edges.

Palmiotti structures this chapter like a Western road movie heading somewhere increasingly wrong. The opening stretch carries unfinished business from the previous issue, putting Gunslinger around people already nursing wounds, grudges, and enough bad blood to turn the dirt red. Violence arrives quickly, but the comic does not become twenty pages of dudes blasting away because somebody found another box of ammunition. The gunplay matters. Choices have consequences. Gunslinger reads situations almost faster than everybody around him, and watching other people ignore his instincts gives the story a nasty little inevitability. You know somebody is about to learn the hard way. They do.

His personality remains the engine under the hood. Palmiotti gives Javi a great balance between ruthless confidence and dry, almost irritated humor. The dude can walk into a gunfight like he has somewhere more important to be afterward, yet he is not written as an invincible badass who magically knows everything. He gets tired. He gets surprised. He assesses danger. He protects people when he could easily keep riding. Those smaller decisions keep him human beneath the mask and necroplasm because without them, Gunslinger could easily become nothing but a killer silhouette posing against sunsets. Palmiotti knows better.

The middle portion shifts gears from open conflict toward pursuit, exhaustion, and mystery, and I dug the change in temperature. Daylight scenes feel hostile and exposed, while the nighttime material settles into something quieter and creepier. A rescued traveler provides Javi with information that starts connecting his current trail to something far stranger, and Palmiotti wisely lets the uneasiness build instead of dropping a supernatural encyclopedia on our heads. Old-West horror works best when people cannot immediately explain what they saw. A campfire, strange tracks, frightened witnesses, half-understood symbols, somebody swearing something impossible happened. Boom. Your imagination does half the work.

One gripe, though, because we review comics around here, we do not hand out participation trophies. The advertised dead-town concept is more of a destination and pivot than the entire meat of the issue. Readers walking in expecting Javi to spend most of #16 exploring some abandoned nightmare settlement may be surprised by how much page real estate goes toward resolving the chase and establishing the next stage of the story. I did not mind the structure because the material pays off ongoing threads, but the issue occasionally feels like two movements stitched together rather than one perfectly seamless ride. A couple of exposition-heavy exchanges also slow the horse down briefly when characters explain information the visuals had already begun communicating.

Visually, the finished digital issue supplied for review credits Jordi Armengol on interior art, and his work gives this chapter some serious grit. Faces look weathered. Clothing hangs with weight. Horses actually feel like animals occupying physical space instead of transportation props somebody remembered to draw. Gunslinger himself has presence without Armengol needing to turn every entrance into a pinup pose. His coat, hat, mask, ammunition, and body language form this instantly recognizable shape moving through the environment, and whenever the shooting begins, the layouts stay readable instead of dissolving into random muzzle flashes.

The sequencing deserves love too. One firefight uses narrow vertical panels to control the rhythm of individual shots, reactions, and movement while wider panels open the landscape back up around the characters. Another sequence slows the entire visual tempo as Gunslinger rides through the night, moving from action into fatigue almost without dialogue. Comics live or die between the panels, mi gente. Armengol understands when to tighten the camera and when to back the hell up and let the horizon breathe.

Luis NCT’s colors, with Juan Alvarez Fuente handling color flats, might be the sneaky MVP of the issue. The daytime palette burns in dusty oranges, tobacco browns, dried grass yellows, and sickly frontier greens. Once night drops, everything cools into bruised blues and heavy black shadows without losing clarity. Then fire enters the equation and BAM, orange heat tears straight through the darkness. The palette is not merely decorating the artwork. It is telling you how safe, exhausted, exposed, or completely screwed everybody is before dialogue catches up.

Tom Orzechowski continues doing veteran-level lettering work, keeping Palmiotti’s heavier conversations readable while letting the gunfire punch through the page. BLAM. PA-TOW. KRAKK. Those effects belong inside the artwork instead of floating over it like stickers, and the caption placement guides your eye through some fairly dense layouts without wrestling Armengol’s compositions for attention. Good lettering disappears when it needs to and kicks the saloon doors open when the moment demands noise. Orzechowski has been playing that game longer than some readers have been alive, and it shows.

Marco Failla’s cover finishes the package with one hell of an Old-West poster image. Gunslinger riding beside a locomotive immediately sells movement, loneliness, danger, and industrial America chewing its way through the frontier. The muted sky and almost ghostly atmosphere fit the story better than some giant explosion montage would have. Put this thing on a rack and you know exactly what neighborhood you just wandered into.

By the closing pages, Palmiotti has moved Javi beyond a simple revenge-driven shootout and into something uglier, stranger, and increasingly supernatural. The cliffhanger lands because the issue spends time changing the atmosphere before delivering the final visual punch. Could the chapter have reached its central mystery a little faster? Yep. Would I trade away the character moments, gunfight choreography, and slow creep of dread to get there ten pages sooner? Nah. Let the horse run.

Deadly Tales of the Gunslinger Spawn #16 delivers a mean, atmospheric Western chapter powered by strong character writing, muscular visual storytelling, excellent color work, and a steadily tightening supernatural noose. Palmiotti understands that Gunslinger is coolest when the book does not constantly scream about how cool he is. Armengol lets the violence speak. NCT sets the temperature. Orzechowski controls the rhythm. Then everybody rides straight toward something that looks like it crawled out of Hell carrying a grudge. Yeah, fam. I’m riding into #17. WEPA!

CRUSADERS SCORE:
4/5

Script/Plot: Jimmy Palmiotti
Art: Jordi Armengol
Colors: Luis NCT
Color Flats: Juan Alvarez Fuente
Lettering: Tom Orzechowski
Cover Artists: Marco Failla
Editor-in-Chief: Thomas Healy
Published by Image Comics / Todd McFarlane Productions