First things first, in 2017 Nobuhiro Watsuki was arrested for having child pornography in his office and home. Wikipedia says he was fined 200,000 yen, which is about $1,500. I don't know what the standard is for that charge in Japan, or here in the U.S., but that seems light. Either way, in case that's a deal-breaker for looking at his work, I wanted to lay it out there first.
I still have no good transition from that.
In 2001, Nobuhiro was coming off a solid success in Rurouni Kenshin, which ran for 28 volumes. For his next series, Nobuhiro stayed in the 19th Century, but switched continents, opting to focus on the American West. The series lead is Viu Bannes (Nobuhiro adopts the Western convention of individual name first, family name second for characters in this series), the dark-haired kid up there, who is determined to go West and find the legendary "Gun Blaze West", which exists "beyond the west". What that is, exactly, is vague, and what characters think it is probably says more about what they value. Wealth, power, adventure, a challenge.
Where Kenshin Himura was an atypical shonen protagonist - soft-spoken, peaceful, only concerned with strength to the extent necessary to protect - Viu is more in the standard mold of characters like Goku, Luffy, Naruto (or Myojin Yahiko in Rurouni Kenshin). He's loud, ready to challenge anyone at the drop of a hat, dreams of testing his limits, and eats like a horse. He makes two friends along the way, a scholarly teenage bouncer named Will who favors lassos, and Colice, a young knife-throwing Japanese girl who was part of a traveling circus.
There's a lot of different villains and other allies thrown in, with their own styles. Not just guys who use shotguns with 8 barrels, but also guys who skate around on their spurs and shoot bullets from the crowns of their sombreros. There's a big melee to see who even gets to start on the path to Gun Blaze West that features Viu challenging the "Armor Baron", but there's also a part-mechanical American "super-soldier" called Sarge Thunder-Arm and look I didn't name these guys.
The journey to Gun Blaze West was apparently going to be a whole series of challenges and no doubt Viu would have experienced setbacks, but the series was canceled after 28 chapters, or 3 volumes in the collected version. So it goes.
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