I guess in 1997, the theme for DC's Annuals was "Pulp Heroes". Which I'm sure could be taken in a lot of different ways. For Tommy Monaghan and Natt the Hat, Garth Ennis went with a spaghetti Western motif. From the title page to the first three pages of the story, where Tommy and Natt sit in Noonan's Bar and discuss their favorite parts of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Ennis makes no bones about what you're getting here.
For me, this entire issue is like that gif of Captain America saying, 'I understood that reference.' Tommy's hired for a job in a Texas border town, dominated by an uneasy peace between a corrupt white sheriff and a Mexican drug lord. Both sides are prepared to break the truce over a coffin full of dollars somewhere in a cemetery that's being bulldozed up to build a mall, and the drug lord got himself a special hired gun (named Manko, who looks like the guy who played the hunchback in For a Few Dollars More.)
Tommy makes one friend in town, who gets in trouble later for being Tommy's friend. There's the obligatory Leone-style ass-kicking, the inevitable showdown, and the last-second save by a buddy. Of course, all of this is threaded through Hitman's typical style, so Tommy's chucking around grenades to get an edge, and he doesn't really play by the rules for Western showdowns.
Ezquerra, Pugh, and Fenny keep the visual feel of the issue similar to McCrea. There's less shadows and heavy blacks in this story, but they're also in a desert town, mostly during the the daytime, rather than a crappy slum in Gotham. The art doesn't do comedic exaggeration as well as McCrea's, but it's not a story with a lot of comedy in it, so that's fine.
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One of the things I've always liked about Garth Ennis is how he brought artists over that would otherwise be overlooked in US comics. Carlos Ezquerra was a legend in the UK but I don't think he ever made much of a splash in the US, aside from when Ennis gave him work.
I didn't realize that. Ezquerra sounded vaguely familiar to me, but I couldn't have pinpointed from where. In that case, I usually assume they were drawing a lot of creator-owned books for Image and I just wasn't paying attention.
I'm sure Ennis did it for other artists too, but I know he threw a lot of work Ezquerra's way. This, a Preacher special about the Saint of Killers, Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, and probably others I've forgotten.
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