Librarian Molly West's adventures continue. She gradually became accustomed to life in the Wild West to the point of mastering rifle shooting. We will also see that she does not hesitate to make the powder speak…
A foreigner in her country
The second volume of Molly West deepens the characters. Volume one had insisted on the arrival of a teacher from the northern states in the south of the country just after the civil war. Molly knows how to manage without a man even if she is assisted by the young Artie and the Mexican Diego. In the prologue, the mysterious Diego in Mexico is pursued by thieves and he is also a liar. This episode illustrates the very clumsy character of this man while Molly has managed to make a place for herself in the community by becoming an outlaw! She knows much more how to handle the rifle than the library repertoire, pistols than dialectics. She will do it mercilessly repeatedly. But, by attacking the corrupt powerful, she is closer to Robin Hood than to Mesrine.
The screenwriter Philippe Charlot takes up the codes of the western. The action takes place in a microcosm of the city of Lajitas and around. The outcome will be in a larger city more conducive to political rallies. After the treasure hunt of the first volume, we witness with joy a quest for revenge. Major Hood, the one who had deceived Molly, turns out to be a local leader of the nascent Klu Klux Klan and a politician in search of votes. He took advantage of the disappointed defeat to federate a group to become essential in the South. It uses hatred and racism for private gain.
A feminist western
This series puts at the center a woman who decides alone. Molly has not given up on her ideal because the profit from her flights is used to finance a mobile library. She wants to provide access to culture in the remote West. But Molly became tougher and ready to kill. To carry out this ideal, she hires Diego as an assistant and Artemus becomes her ward. Molly West makes a woman the main character but she was the only one in the first character. The series would not pass the Bechdel test. This changes in the second volume with the arrival in the very male West of three single women, Annie, who leads the stagecoach. Indeed, the books in the library will be transported exclusively by women. One of them is an African-American woman who was a nurse during the war. She becomes an important character in the series. Refusing to submit, she accompanies Molly on her adventures. Refusing intimidation, she heads to the town of Palmito Ranch but will she come with books or will she make the powder talk?
Xavier Fourquemin's classic Franco-Belgian style contradicts this modernity and offers a counterpoint to the violence around it. The colorist Chiara Zeppegno offers quite logical shades around brown.
Molly West, published by Vents d'Ouest at Glénat, offers an original library war. The reader certainly follows gunshots, rides and conflicts between very politically opposed characters, but the series is in fact a woman's war for culture against ignorance, for tolerance against racism.
