The Sixth Gun is a 50-issue Weird West Comic Book series created by Cullen Bunn & Brian Hurtt and published by Oni Press. It ended its run on June 2016.
During the darkest days of the Civil War, wicked cutthroats came into possession of six pistols of otherworldly power. In time the Sixth Gun, the most dangerous of the weapons, vanished. When the gun surfaces in the hands of an innocent girl, dark forces reawaken. Vile men thought long dead set their sights on retrieving the gun and killing the girl. Only Drake Sinclair, a gunfighter with a shadowy past, stands in their way.
This series provides examples of:
- Abnormal Ammo: All six guns are loaded with the wielder's negative feelings. To make things worse, they don't need reloading, ever. Invoked when Drake mentions he had gotten used to not reloading his guns when he was forced to use regular revolvers.
- Action Girl: Becky.
- Affably Evil: General Hume and Lady Hume, in the Spirit World alternate timeline.
- Alternate Self: Becky meets an Alternate!Becky that succeeded in obtaining all six guns, redid the world in her image, and now lives a happy married life with Kirby Hale.
- Ancient Conspiracy: Two of them. The Sword of Abraham, who seeks to stop The Six Guns from opening the seal that would undo the world, and The Knights of Solomon, who seek to do just that.
- Artifact of Doom: All six guns, but specially the sixth one.
- Astral Projection: One of the Sixth Gun's more advanced uses. Mysteriously, Becky can use it to attack people, which Missy regarded as impossible.
- The Atoner: Drake Sinclair.
- Badass Normal: Kirby Hale and Nahuel, the indian hunter.
- Badass Preacher: Pa Montcrief, and the members of The Sword of Abraham.
- Back from the Dead: General Hume.
- Big Bad: General Hume.
- Body Horror: The effects of the second gun.
- Chronic Back Stabbing Disorder: Drake, for the most part.
- Church Militant: The Sword of Abraham is a flawed but positive example.
- Clingy MacGuffin: All Six Guns.
- Crapsack World: Several of the previous worlds.
- Crisis of Faith: Father Roberto remains pious, but he seriously questions his devotion after being trapped in the Spirit World. He even wonders if the Six dethroned God in a previous apocalypse and shares these thoughts with Drake.
- Cult: The Knights of Solomon turn out to be one for the so-called "King of Secrets." Griselda also runs her own so that she'll have people for the Human Sacrifice she needs to open the Seal.
- Dark and Troubled Past: Just about everyone. Technically speaking the world as a whole as well.
- Dead Person Impersonation: Drake took the surname Sinclair after a dying Confederate soldier called him that.
- Dwindling Party: By the time the last arc starts, the party is down to Becky, Drake and Nidawi, oh, and the world just ended.
- Eldritch Abomination: Several, but the Great Wyrms are the most notable. Far older than man, they hunted humanity for food and sport in the earliest version(s) of the world, long before the Six allowed cavemen to replace it with something more anthropocentric. They managed to survive that apocalypse - and many others since - but were weakened, and most now dwell beneath the world, asleep. Fortunately, the repeated cycle has driven those above the surface, at least, to extinction.
- Eldritch Location: The Crossroads, and The Vault. Notable for being several of them around.
- Eternal Recurrence: The Six possess the power to destroy the world and replace it with a new one of the user's design, if used together with a liberal application of Human Sacrifice. Eventually, the Six appear in the new world in a new form. This has happened and untold number of times, usually at the hand of Drake. In the end, Becky is able to break the cycle by creating a new world - implied to be our world - without the Six or any knowledge of them, at the cost of herself and everyone else involved in the latest war over them not existing in it.
- Evil vs. Evil: The Knights of Solomon vs Griselda. Both want to enter the Devil's Workshop so they may shape the next world. Griselda wins.
- Evil Weapon: Evil is debatable, but at minimum the Six Guns are ruthless, manipulative and self-serving.
- Face–Heel Turn: Asher, after the Grey Witch nudges him using his Love Makes You Evil weakness.
- Famed In-Story: Colonel John S. Mosby, the Gray Ghost, Drake Sinclair's mentor.
- Fate Worse than Death: Kirby, becomes a lizard-man thanks to Griselda. During a moment of lucidity, he asks Becky to put him out of his misery, and she complies.
- Fiery Redhead: Becky Montcrief.
- Fingore: Drake loses two fingers on his left hand to frostbite.
- From a Single Cell: When Becky chops Mrs Hume's hand off (gripping the Fifth Gun), the hand regenerates into a new youthful Hume who promptly shoots the original.
- From Nobody to Nightmare: Griselda's backstory. Once she was just a simple village girl who was chosen to be the annual Human Sacrifice to the Great Wyrms. Instead of eating her, they took her under their wing and made her into a Humanoid Abomination and Evil Sorceress that has long since outlived them - and more than one version of the world.
- Greater-Scope Villain: The Sister Wyrms, who empowered Griselda the Grey Witch, and the older and stronger wyrms that sleep beneath the Earth.
- The Greatest Story Never Told: With Becky RetGonning everyone from the pages of history, no one knows that the world had ended or even saved/recreated by her and her allies, or even knew they existed at one point, 'cept for Gord.
- The Gunslinger: Just about everyone.
- Quick Draw: Kirby's specialty.
- Handsome Lech: Kirby Hale.
- Hero Antagonist: The Sword of Abraham briefly becomes this.
- Holy Ground: Serves as a Place of Protection where the dead cannot rise and only the greatest of foul powers operate. A pity that the Six fit quite firmly into that category.
- Humanoid Abomination: Griselda, eventually graduating into a giant wyrm.
- It Can Think: The Six Guns are not mere pistols, and possess wills and machinations of their own. What their precise goals are, however, is unclear.
- Love Makes You Evil: Asher Cobb. Technically a case of You Can't Fight Fate, since he became evil when he couldn't stop his loved one's death, in spite of being a seer. It is also the reason why eventually pulls a Face–Heel Turn on Sinclair's group.
- Made of Iron: All of the Six provide this to an degree, but none to the extent of the Fifth.
- Moral Event Horizon: In-Universe Drake regards calling forth and using the Six to be one, as he realize that for all the evil he done that something as evil as the guns shouldn't be messed with and that Hume must be stopped.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Drake, more than once. Jesof realizes that helping Griselda was a mistake when he sees her transform into a Great Wyrm.
- Our Zombies Are Different: The Fourth Gun raises spirits that then become mud golems, or snow golems, or stone golems, depending on what materials are around. Eli Barrow's magic lets him create more conventional examples.
- Asher Cobb, a 9ft tall mummy is a more sentinent and independent specimen.
- Rag Tag Bunch Of Misfits: A farmgirl, a former confederate soldier, a gambler and now a mud homunculus, a former slave who delved into black magic under the guidance of his former master, a thief, an ambiguously evil seer turned living mummy, two Native Americans and the dissecated head of a really powerful Indian shaman.
- The Paladin: Downplayed. The Sword of Abraham is noble but pragmatic and all-too human example of a Church Militant, and while they have a few legitimately holy tricks in their arsenal most of their supernatural power, while light-based, is reliant on what holy object they've managed to acquire over their existence, rather than any sort of divine empowerment.
- Pinkerton Detective: Several are featured, providing their services to lady Hume. They're actually Knights of Solomon.
- Really 700 Years Old: Drake. When the Six are called forth into this world to bring the apocalypse, so is he, and while he initially comes in with all the memories from the previous apocalypses, they eventually vanish. His earliest incarnation appears to be a caveman. Griselda the Grey Witch as well is also ancient, but comes from a later Norse era.
- Ret-Gone: Becky does this to the Guns and everyone involved with them, including herself, during the climax.
- Sealed Evil in a Can: General Hume's status at the beginning of the story, trapped on Holy Ground. It doesn't last.
- Seers: There are oracles aplenty, from the Gallows Tree to Cobb, but the most important are the wielders of the Sixth Gun.
- Swiss-Army Weapon: Not only for their powers, but also for their nature. It is revealed that the weapons have changed shaped through the ages, from primitive stone age weapons, to swords during the crusades, to guns in the wild west.
- The First Gun: a revolver whose bullets explode like cannon fire.
- The Second Gun: infects its victims with a rapid flesh-rotting disease.
- The Third Gun: ignites its targets.
- The Fourth Gun: able to summon the spirits of the men and women killed by it and use them to animate homunculus made from nearby material.
- The Fifth Gun: heals the wielder from the even the worst injuries. Killing others with this Gun also temporarily returns youth to the wielder.
- The Sixth Gun: The most powerful of all the Guns, capable of Astral Projection, Combat Clairvoyance, Dreaming of Times Gone By and Dreaming of Things to Come.
- Thanatos Gambit: Gord makes a deal to become a crossroad spirit after his death, this allows him to help Becky, Drake and Nidawi port into the new world that Griselda is creating with the Six Guns.
- The End of the World as We Know It: The true power of the guns, should they be used to unlock The Vault.
- Token Good Teammate: Drake was this for General Hume's old gang, also making him the Only Sane Man of such gang.
- Weird West: A good example of the genre, considering it deals with ghosts, zombies, homunculus, zombies and mystical weapons that can bring the destruction of the world.
- World of Badass: Just about everyone important in the story is a badass.
- You Can't Fight Fate: Cobb was quite unhappy to discover that he could not change the futures he had seen. Equally, though the Sixth Gun allows its user to Astral Project into the past, they can't change it. ''They'' can, however, change their visions of the future.
- You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Griselda the Grey Witch, kills her daughter in law, Lady Hume, when she stops being useful for her, and gain possession of The Fifth Gun.
- Your Magic's No Good Here: In the land of the dead, the Guns are just ordinary pistols.
