I was about to say I’d never seen any of Windsor-Smith’s work before Freebooters, but I guess I collected Weapon X back in the early 1990s, just like every other comic book reader....
Windsor-Smith did a magazine anthology in the mid-1990s, Storyteller, and The Freebooters was one of the stories. Apparently (while the collection has the story, I only glance over it), the publisher didn’t support Storyteller and Windsor-Smith ended up having to end Freebooters and the two other series. Thanks to Google, I now know this publisher was Dark Horse, but I suppose it isn’t particularly important--however, though I don’t care for Dark Horse and their lack of support for such a good book is a bit of a shock. I’ve been putting off Freebooters for months (I only bought it because it was from Fantagraphics and I had just discovered Fantagraphics when I ordered it) but I had time this morning and I read it and it’s absolutely fantastic.
A Windsor-Smith quote caught my eye (the Freebooters story is inserted between chapters) and I bookmarked it. He wanted to use social interplay to appeal to a mainstream audience, to convince them comics were no longer “vapid generic crap.” There’s also some mention, on the same page, of a reader complaining about Windsor-Smith’s decompressed storytelling, a few years before Kevin Smith and Brian Michael Bendis made it so famous. Freebooters’ chapters, however, tend to be about 6 pages, not 22, and there’s a lot going on in them. Windsor-Smith’s artwork is a lot better too....
I suppose Freebooters is a sitcom. While it’s set in a vaguely Middle Eastern desert city and its cast is comprised of formerly heroic brigands and scantily clad waitresses, it’s about a bunch of people with a bunch of history who sit around a bar together. It’s a very good sitcom, I probably laughed out loud once a chapter, sometimes twice, which is better than most sitcoms get. Windsor-Smith also creates these great characters and then spends time with them, spends the time letting the reader like them. In approximately 70 pages, I know the characters in Freebooters better than in any mainstream comic book--in those comic books, there’s a wink-wink about a character’s history (the reader is expected to know). Windsor-Smith just tells the reader. Guess which method is better....
Since the Storyteller incident ended almost ten years ago, even with the behind the scenes in the collection, The Freebooters can just be enjoyed as good storytelling. I think Windsor-Smith’s conclusion to Storyteller says the most about him as a... storyteller. All the characters, from all three of the series, get together and have a going away party for Storyteller. It’s beautiful.