There were two mini-series set in the years between Tim Truman's Scout, and his follow-up, Scout: War Shaman. We'll get to New America eventually, but for today, we've got Swords of Texas.
Swords of Texas was 4 issues, with a lead story and a back-up. The lead story, written by Chuck Dixon, with art by Ben Dunn, Mark McKenna and Sam Parsons, was about a gun runner named Banner and his crew agreeing to supply arms to a revolutionary seeking to overthrow the joint Soviet/Japanese Communist government that ran Mexico and locked peasants up in work camps under threat of not seeing their families again. That was not, in practice, an approach that did much for production or worker morale, but they figure there are always more workers, so who cares?
It's a real "politics make strange bedfellows" story. Banner would prefer to not get mixed in politics and stick to profit concerns, but finds that difficult. He's being bankrolled by both Israel and a Navajo politician working on making what had been the southwestern United States an independent nation. Having Baja splinter off from Mexico and feel indebted would be at least one less pressure for all that. The Japanese governor of Baja has a whole samurai mentality, albeit one where it's perfectly honorable to run a prison camp calling itself a factory. The guide arranged for Banner's group - because as a real American, Banner has learned no Spanish despite living in the Southwest - is a Jewish-Hispanic New York cab driver.
It's got a very '80s action movie feel to it, with a few smaller gun battles prior to the big fight at the prison, which includes some vaguely Robotech-looking mechs (although they don't shift into a jet or anything cool like that.) Lots of tough guy dialogue, with the occasional one-liner or banter scene to lighten things up in between the shooting.
It doesn't end neatly. The workers are freed, but there's no guarantee they'll be able to set up their own government and make it stick, even if they can hold off the army. Banner and his crew are not seized by revolutionary fervor to ditch life as gun dealers. They haven't even gotten paid yet by the end of the mini-series.
There wasn't really a great splash page from that, so I went with the back-up story, by Beau Smith and Flint Henry, revolving around what feels like a Beau Smith self-insert character named Beau LaDuke (who had, to be fair, been a regular supporting cast member in Scout.) Beau must hurry back to West Virginia, picking up the rest of his siblings and some other people along the way, to help his dad defend the family amusement park from some scumbags looking to pull a insurance scam/land grab with government help.
The help includes a preacher who machine-guns those unwilling to turn from their sinful paths, and a private security guy Beau's dad calls C.I.A. as short for "Chuckie-in-Action." Flint Henry's art is pretty much perfect for this, with the little background details, the way he can make everyone look rabid or deranged, and the cartoonish energy he brings to violence. There is a panel is this where the preacher shoots a bunch of guys while driving one of the bumper cars, and another where Beau, while attempting to bear hug a general he crossed paths with previously, gets big chunks of his chest hair ripped out.
It also ends with LaDuke encouraging people to write in and request a Beau LaDuke series while what I assume are the Eclipse editorial staff try frantically to white out that panel.
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