Get Gun Crazy's VHS up and running

The Latino Dolly Sanchez & the black Lanoya O'Brien ride in the middle of the American desert without saying a word. These jaded girls swallow pills to forget the creepy of their daily lives. For a living, they do pole dance shows in seedy bars along highways. But it's not just a job because they like to shock rednecks by dressing up all in white to gradually reveal their origins. We discover over the pages the past of each of these two rebels. Lanoya was a good Christian in Alabama until she became a soldier in Afghanistan where she met Dolly while spying on her in the shower. The two women fell in love and wanted to get rich during this war. They then return to the country to seize everything that racist and patriarchal society denies them. They will appropriate the tools of domination of men in American society: weapons, their bodies and money. This story is feminist by showing the liberation of two women but the representation of lesbian bodies and sexual acts is problematic, as well as the postulate that to impose oneself, one must take back the methods of men: violence and the search for money.

Without transition, we then follow several men on a mission for different motivations. Superwhiteman, a disappointed neo-Nazi decides to travel across America to kill blacks, immigrants and natives by taking a costume inspired by the Klu Klux Klan. He, too, is indulging on chemical drugs to achieve his dream: to find a white America. Sergeant Nolti from a small town also takes drugs to forget that he is despised by all. We then meet John St-Pierre, a former abused child who wants to kill all the pedophiles in the country before committing suicide. As in Pulp Fiction, these different characters will all meet in the second part of the book in Cortez, Colorado. The first skirmishes break out but the tension that rises crescendo will end up in Las Vegas in the second volume.

If the above summary makes you think of Thelma & Louise it is absolutely not a coincidence. Indeed, even though the action takes place nowadays, Gun Crazy is explicitly a tribute to the action movies of the 80s and 90s and the New Hollywood. During a fight, we also think of Fight Club but remixed in the feminine. This goes through the very conception of the book. The back cover takes the shape and decoration of a VHS and the entire beginning of the book is organized as if the page were the television screen where the film will begin: the sight, the screen with Play, the production credits as taken from the early days of Tron's digital special effects and the first pages are designed as a credits. There is even a surprise in the middle of the book. Readers who loved Ramirez's Flinging should be delighted. There are even false advertisements. The authors even offer us a soundtrack with the English punk album Never Mind the Bollocks by the Sex Pistols and references to Betty Davis or Country Joe Mac Donald that are used to categorize characters.

This book should not be read as a realistic vision of society or women. Screenwriter Steve D offers a crazy parody of action movies by reversing the perspective. Gun Crazy reveals the current side of the United States and its dark past. These are two women who are the Rambos and their enemies are not minorities but white people all idiots and racists. One kills a guy tattooed with a swastika with an Indian tomahawk! The more we advance in the book, the more the story becomes delusional: a dog drawn like Snoopy smokes. Jef's drawing is also not aimed at realism but pays tribute to the cartoonists of the 70s and 80s. The shape of the faces, the inking and some landscapes can make you think of Moebius.