Lost Vegas TP
Roland, a professional gambler and incidental knight errant, comes up short in the wrong game and is hauled away to Lost Vegas, a debtor’s prison that doubles as a stately pleasure dome of gambling, beautiful dancers, and brutal no-holds-barred combat. Like his fellow inmates, Roland must serve out his sentence as an attendant to the visiting pleasure seekers. Unlike his fellow inmates, Roland has hatched a plan not only to get himself out of there but to exact some well-deserved revenge, and he has accumulated a ragtag team of helpers to do it, including a queen-to-be and a lady with ties to his own past. Not quite as distinct a work of art as McCann and Lee’s Eisner-winning Return of the Dapper Men (2010), either in conception or execution, but the book remains an enjoyable romp. McCann writes a cross between space opera and intergalactic heist flick that hearkens back to the heyday of Heavy Metal magazine and is distinguished by the Basil Wolverton–like solidity and personality of Lee’s satisfyingly imagined visuals. --Jesse Karp