Gunning for Ramirez Act One is due out September 30, 2020. — **Gunning for Ramirez Act One** is due out September 30, 2020.

By T.W. WORN — With everything going on in the world recently, nothing has brought me as much badly-needed mirth as Nicolas Petrimaux’s Gunning For Ramirez. This comic was such a joy that I read it twice before I even considered what I would be writing in this review. I then read it a third time to get the following, but hopefully the idea of me reading it three times in a row is enough to convince you to purchase a copy outright.

I had no idea how I should start this review. I had a lot to say about the book, from it’s dangerously beautiful artwork, to it’s smooth, slow-burn whiskey of a storyline, and I worried that words wouldn’t be able to describe how fantastic this series is. But here I am all the same, doing my best to sum it all up. If the idea of Miami Vice distilled through an Anime lens, mixed with a dash of Wile E. Coyote antics and topped with jokes that echo the concept of Jungian synchronicity gets your engine revving, then it is time to swap in that jalopy of a comic you are probably reading for the slick leather interior of this book, crank the engine of entertainment, and race down Route Awesome.

The first thing I need to point out about this series is how amazing the art is. A hyper-stylized 1980s aesthetic packs every page of this comic in a true, neon glow. You can hear the colors hum every time you turn the page, and the best part of it is that at no point does this feel like a visual gimmick. While vaporwave and synthwave love to bring their interpretation of the 80s aesthetic, Gunning For Ramirez always feel genuine. The art is honest. Stylized, but honest. It’s bright and clean when it needs to be, but is never afraid to get dark and dingy when the time is right. The character’s and locations hit you with a powerful combination of dynamic and small scale, you easily forget that the stakes in this story start off surprisingly low. The structure of the panels is also fantastic. Every panel is given the exact amount of space it needs to get its point across. As a cinematographer frames their shot to get just what they need to tell you their story, Petrimaux allows his art to tell you what you need to know.

And like how a pizza boy needs a car to get his pizza to its location, this artwork needs a story to show us its art, and that story delivers. It’s piping hot, at your door in thirty minutes or less, and unlike with the pizza boy, you don’t have to awkwardly shout “story’s here” to an empty house because no one will judge you for consuming this story all by yourself. Like the aforementioned pizza, this story will burn the roof of your mouth, but it is too delicious to not stop shoving it in regardless of how much you want to savor it. It starts off as a slow burn tale about Jacques Ramirez, a mute Vacuum repairman ready to take his vacation, when all of a sudden he is noticed, or possibly mistaken, for a Cartel hitman that tried to leave the life behind. The characters are vibrant and full of life. Each player is memorable, and while there are a handful of stale secondary characters, the humor of the comic more than makes up for it. Throw in some love stories, a hilariously evil villain, car chases, corporate work satire, and guns, and you have got a gumbo thick enough to savor for days to come. I know what you’re thinking, I started with pizza and ended with gumbo which crosses metaphors. Gunning For Ramirez is so good it's allowed to be both. Hell, it can be any other food it wants, I won’t stop it, it’s that fantastic.

Overall: There is such an ethereal magnetism to this story that it’s hard to describe why you need to read this, but you just do. Gunning For Ramirez is action-packed exploitation cinema turned comic. The only thing it is missing is some killer tunes. 10/10

REVIEW: Gunning for Ramirez

Gunning For Ramirez
Writer/Artist: Nicolas Petrimaux
Letterers: Jeremy Melloul/Jolie Hale
Publisher: Image Comics
Price: $16.99
What if the deadliest assassin in all of Mexico, a man with dozens of kills to his name, was actually a vacuum repairman in Arizona?Falcon City, Arizona. Jacques Ramirez works at Robotop, the leading home appliance company in the Southwest United States. Jacques is efficient, thorough, and discreet. That last one is easy: he's also mute. But everything changes when two members of one of Paso del Rio's largest drug cartels stumble upon Jacques and believe him to be the deadly hitman who betrayed them in the past: the ruthless Ramirez.Could it be that the cartel's legendary clean-up man is really a legendary vacuum cleaner expert?NICOLAS PETRIMAUX presents the first in a trilogy—a tribute to the action thrillers of the 1980s and '90s, a brutal narrative with never a dull moment. GUNNING FOR RAMIREZ is as much a descendant of Friedkin's To Live and Die in L.A. as it is Tarantino's Pulp Fiction or Rodriguez's Mexico Trilogy.
Release Date: September 30, 2020
Buy It Digitally: Gunning for Ramirez

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I'm T.W. Worn and if you can read this message then reality has returned to its regularly scheduled programming.