A City of Whiskey and Fire is the first Noah van Sciver comic I didn’t like and that’s probably because he didn’t write it - someone called Daniel Landes did.
It’s about the birth of modern-day Denver when, one night in 1863, a couple of drunks trying to scalp one another (as you do when you’re plastered) managed to set fire to the wooden bar. The blaze spread across the fledgling wooden frontier town, burning the whole place down. From then on all structures had to be made out of non-flammable materials.
It’s a short comic but van Sciver can do more in the same amount of space than Landes can and has done when he’s writing as well as drawing. As it is, A City of Whiskey and Fire relates a dreary, uninteresting story that tries, and fails, to become meaningful in the last few pages.
It has some nice art from van Sciver but if you’re a fan of the artist, this is definitely one of his lesser efforts. If you haven’t read these comics, try 1999, More Mundane and The Lizard Laughed, or his books The Hypo and Fante Bukowski, instead of this.
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