The Undertaker Volume 1: The Gold Eater & Dance of the Vultures by Xavier Dorison and Ralph Meyer
Abrams ComicArts (March 31, 2026)
Reviewed by Joshua Gage
Xavier Dorison was born in 1972. He is a prolific author known for his immersive narratives across multiple genres. He started a comics festival while in college, and within a few years he had become a pillar of that very scene, thanks to series like Long John Silver. Dorison continues to shape modern comics with his high-energy storytelling
Ralph Meyer was born in Paris in 1971. He offers a bold and expressive style that has garnered him a loyal and enthusiastic following. A lifelong comics fan, he went from thrillers to sci-fi and classical mythology before finally turning his attention to the Wild West. He is considered to be one of the great visual storytellers of our time. Their newest graphic novel is The Undertaker Volume 1: The Gold Eater & Dance of the Vultures.
Jonas Crow is not your average mortician. Tall, lean, and accompanied by a carrion-eating vulture, he travels the Old West in a black hearse, providing final rites for those who can afford them. But Jonas is a man with a past as dark as the clothes he wears — and his newest client is about to make life very difficult for the living. When the wealthy and hated mining tycoon Joe Cusco summons Crow to the town of Anoki, it’s for a peculiar request: Cusco knows he’s dying, and he has very exact instructions for his burial. If Crow and Cusco’s assistant don’t follow them to the letter, a stranger’s life is at stake.
What follows is a dark tale of exploitation, revenge, and greed. The psychological horror that results from unrepentant gluttony and avarice drives the pulse of this narrative, which is then gorgeously augmented with hints and elements of Gothic Westerns. Not only does Crow wrestle with the realities of being a mortician in the Wild West, he’s also forced to deal with the responsibility of a corpse, especially when there are some elements in the world who don’t want the corpse to be buried. In a story that’s as much The Treasure of the Sierra Madre as it is Stagecoach, Dorison’s The Undertaker will not disappoint.
Having cut his teeth on the violent, urban tale Berceuse Assassine, Ralph Meyer is no stranger to illustrating violence and death. His skills with anatomy illustration are on full display here, adding a layer of visceral splatter gore to an already anxiety filled narrative. The deaths in this tale are not elegant, and the borders between justified violence, protective violence, and human depravity are thin in this Western tale. Meyer’s art only enhances this ambiguity, capturing the wild emotions of killers and victims alike. Beyond that, he captures the Old West deserts and canyons, flora and fauna, with a authenticity and reverence that only serves to ground the narrative in reality, making the horror within the narrative that much more realistic and worse.
Interweaving the narratives of a horror story and western story in one successful arc is difficult for most authors, and usually one genre or the other takes over. In The Undertaker, this is not the case. The Western setting and characters are enhanced by the psychological horror of the plot. Nothing is anathema, and the various heightened emotions and fears are based in rational responses to irrational and inhospitable circumstances, which makes the horror that much more palpable for readers. Any fans of psychological horror, survivor horror, and horror Westerns will absolutely want to read The Undertaker Volume 1: The Gold Eater & Dance of the Vultures.
