By Zack Quaintance — One of the great things about our new regular Small Press Previews feature is that it pushes me to check out a wide range of comics. Earlier this week, for example, I featured Two Swords Til Mercy, the first issue of a five-part series that combines spaghetti westerns with medieval times. Today meanwhile, I’m not sure our new preview could possibly be any more different.

Today we’re featuring Palomino by Stephen Franck, and it’s a story that combines the largely-forgotten California country rock scene of the early 1980s with a classic Los Angeles neo noir crime story. That’s one hell of an interesting pedigree of themes, history, and ideas. And that high level of interesting is certainly bore out in the preview artwork that’s been revealed on the project’s Kickstarter (live now), which you can also just go ahead and check out below.

Enjoy!

>>CLICK HERE to checkout the Kickstarter page for Stephen Franck’s Palomino<<

The year is 1981. The American Century is running on fumes, but the end isn't anywhere in sight. The cowboy is still America's most central symbol—and from movies, to music, to the President himself, it all hails from Southern California. The age of urban cowboys is in full swing. Cowboy hats and rhinestone suits are all the rage. Kenny Rogers “Lady” is Billboard’s number three song of the year. Dolly Parton is a national icon. And across LA, six nights a week, working musicians, TV actors, stuntmen, cops, hustlers, and broken souls all play their part in the cultural myth making. Most of them are just trying to survive—on the B-side of the City of Angels.

You can also go ahead and checkout some preview artwork from the Kickstarter page below, before heading over to check it out yourself, of course.

Palomino
Writer/Artist: Stephen Franck
Publisher: Dark Planet Comics
Kickstarter Ends: May 13

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Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.