Of all the genres of historical and popular fiction, the one that probably has the most ingrained archetypes is the Western.
You’ve got the strong, good, white hatted (and usually white skinned) hero. The dastardly black hatted or mustachioed villain. The damsel in distress. The old coot/drunk. Settings of stagecoaches, trains, saloons. And towns that seemed to have only one street abounded.
And of course, the Native American who could be the workhorse partner (looking at you, Tonto), a savage attacker, or a dim-witted simpleton.
That last one is the most problematic and downright racist when viewed with today’s eyes, but it stood for a long time. And while there have been (and still are) Western-themed films and books, one medium that is usually overlooked is the comic book.
Scholar William Grady takes a closer and likely definitive look at that intersection in Redrawing the Western: A History of American Comics and the Mythic West (304 pp., $50, University of Texas Press). And not just the time period of the invented stories, but how they were both influenced by and later affected perception of what really went down in the “Wild West.”
Grady sets the story with detailed background in artistic depictions of the Old West from illustrated news periodicals to pulpy dime novels to editorial cartoons. And later, newspaper comic strips ranging from Bad Bill the Western Wildcat and Tenderfoot Tim to better-known strips like The Lone Ranger and Red Ryder.
But the book gets to the four colored-panel heart of the matter when he focuses on U.S. comic books from the 1940s-’70s. Today, it’s superheroes who are mostly associated with the format. But for decades, romance, jungle, funny animal, teen, and Western were just as much read as the adventures of the long underwear crowd.
Western-themed movies and TV shows were incredibly popular, and that spilled over into comics where you might find cowboy actors Roy Rogers and John Wayne making the dusty streets safe for the common folk along with Lash Larue, Hopalong Cassidy, and that Lone Ranger again. Later, TV shows like Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Davy Crockett and Maverick would have their own spinoff comic books helping with cross-promotion.
Interestingly, some of the stories became thinly veiled allegories for the Cold War, where the “red menace” threatening the safety and security of a townsfolk might refer to the “skin” of the Native American…or Uncle Joe Stalin.
And while more sympathetic and realistic characters of the race began to show up, there’s a reason the childhood game has always been called “Cowboys vs. Indians.” By comparison, Mexican and Black characters—often also cloaked in racist tropes—were around as well.
Especially interesting is Grady’s look at how the EC Comics company operated. Usually associated with their horror and sci-fi titles, EC’s peerless writers and artists often deconstructed (and in an unsettling way) the myths, lies, and half-truths of the Old West in many of the “message” stories they specialized in.
Not surprisingly, many of these stories featured Native Americans as the heroes and white settlers, lawmen, and military leaders are vainglorious, greedy and, yes, racist. One story tells the life story of Geronimo, one of the most feared and strong Indian leader and warriors.
The twist comes when a well-to-do white family attends the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. The young boy is amped up to see Geronimo after hearing all the stories. But he is ultimately disappointed to encounter a feeble old man selling picture postcards. “I…I guess,” the disappointed father notes, “he’s adopted the ways of the white man, son.”
As the culture changed in the ‘60s and ‘70s, so did the Western comics. DC’s Jonah Hex had more in common with anti-heroes like Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name than Marshall Matt Dillon.
Lobo was a Black cowboy fighting to clear his name after a false accusation, Reno Jones was another Black gunslinger. The Rawhide Kid was filled with social commentary. And Native American characters like Red Wolf and Scalphunter had their own books with stories from their perspectives. Thunderbird, was even a member of the “new” X-Men for a short while. Today, there are few comic books set in the Old West, and some that are take a decidedly grimmer view of the era (Preacher).
There are some minor issues with Redrawing the Western. Grady sometimes writes in an academic style that can be dry. Reproduction of panels and pages are sometimes small and harder to read. There’s no mention of William Messner-Loebs’ elegant and epic Journey independent comic book (though that is set in Michigan). And this is one title begging for a color insert.
Still, Redrawing the West is an important addition to the burgeoning field of comic book scholarship, and on a subject where fact and fiction sometimes smash together like warring armies of natives vs. settlers on the wide open plains.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2024.
