GYPSY VOLUME 1 & VOLUME 2

"THE GYPSY STAR" | "THE FIRES OF SIBERIA"
Art by: Enrico Marini | Written by: Thierry Smolderen

Okay, folks -- I'm just gonna cut straight to the chase: this story is absolutely insane in the best possible way. You want a protagonist who talks about himself in the third person and constantly spouts bizarre colloquial exclamations? You want a high-stakes long-haul gun-running mission across the world in the not-too-distant future? You want knife fights, gunplay, and sexual situations?? Then GYPSY is the comic you've been waiting for.

Set in an alternate version of the dawn of the twenty-first century, "The Gypsy Star" opens with a young girl getting rescued from a gang of toughs by her older brother. The siblings are gypsies, feared and hated by the other children in their orphanage. When the headmaster arrives to break up the scuffle, he is shot by the brother, Tsagoi. Tsagoi flees, promising to send enough money to his sister, Oblivia, that she can leave the orphanage and move into a boarding school.

We then jump twelve years into the future and learn that Tsagoi was successful in his mission. Thanks to the destruction of the ozone layer, airplanes have been outlawed on Earth. Everything is transported around the world via gigantic cargo trucks which travel a superhighway that links every continent. Tsagoi has become a trucker under the handle Gypsy, and has been sending cash to his sister on a regular basis. But now, Oblivia -- Bibi for short -- has sought out her brother to find out why the money has stopped rolling in.

The siblings are reunited at a snowy truck stop in Canada, where Tsagoi gets into a fight with another trucker and demonstrates his skill with a switchblade in the process. Bibi is none too happy to see her belligerent brother again, having only come to him out of necessity, but when he promises her a huge payoff for his next haul, she finds herself coming along for the ride. It seems Tsagoi has hijacked weapons being transported to Russia by the sinister Selmer company, and he intends to deliver them instead. The pair is soon joined by another trucker called the Sorceress, who helps them elude some Selmer truckers out to reclaim their cargo. By the book's end, the Sorceress's truck has been destroyed and she finds herself riding with Tsagoi and Bibi.

Along the way, we learn that Bibi is HIV positive (though her brother doesn't find out), and Tsagoi uncovers the Sorceress's identity of Burma Selmer, a long-missing heiress with a fifteen million dollar reward out for her safe return. Oh, and Tsagoi stabs guys, shoots guys, and bangs the Sorceress at her request because she claims to have "foreseen" that they will make love.

The second book picks up with our heroes approaching Russia -- but, following some on-the-road coitus with Tsagoi, the Sorceress kicks him and Bibi off the truck and hijacks it. At this point we learn that the Sorceress is not Burma Selmer after all, but an agent of the Selmer Company using the lost heiresses's identity. Now stranded in the Siberian wilderness, Tsagoi and Bibi are attacked and captured by Mongols, but escape with two fellow prisoners: a boy named Ivan and his elderly companion. Eventually, this group meets up with Ivan's people, revolutionaries intent on retaking Russia from its current corrupt regime.

In this second installment, we learn that the Selmer company backs the current regime, and that the company itself is run by Burma Selmer's cousin, Miss Matten -- a butch lesbian who likes to kickbox naked with her girlfriend, Sabrina. Matten sends Sabrina to Siberia via zeppelin with men and weapons, as the Sorceress continues on her path to deliver the original weapon shipment stolen by Tsagoi. And of course there's more sex, more violence, and our hero even gets a backstory as we learn that his tribe was massacred when he was a boy, with only Bibi and him surviving.

Like I said, it's nuts. I don't use the term "balls-out awesome" often -- in fact I don't think I've ever used it in my life -- but that's literally the only way to describe GYPSY thus far. I mentioned last Sunday that I was hoping for "Mad Max meets Bean Bandit", and that's nearly exactly what I got. Tsagoi looks a bit like Bean, of course, and he's a "transporter" of sorts too. Then there's the pseudo-post-apocalyptic sci-fi vibe, coupled with a dash of steampunk in the form of the zeppelins. Plus, the action is just as over-the-top as anything Kenichi Sonoda included in GUNSMITH CATS. The plot is maybe a little light so far, being mainly a background vehicle to allow for near-nonstop action scenes, but if the story is as fun as this one, that doesn't really matter.

All I can say is that I've read two volumes so far and I'm eager to read the third and fourth -- but at the same time a little bummed because I'm a third of the way through the entire story already!