5000 Hits

By the time this post is published I will have over 5000 hits to this blog in just under six months.  This feels like it should be something to be proud of, but I really do wonder if anyone actually reads what I write, or if all of my visitors simply stop by for the images that I use to frame my posts.  For example, over 600 hits to the blog have been my Frank Frazetta post from last month, and the Darkwatch post, where I discuss the excesses of the game, is at 335 hits.  Google analytics leaves me the impression that most of the “readers” of this post are just looking for cowgirl boobies.  For some reason a Google image search for Conan lists this blog as one of the top 5 search results.

I’ll continue to post, because it is fun, it is a good intellectual exercise, and it is a nice break from the writing that I do at work, but it would be nice to know that someone actually reads this stuff.

Storyville- Upstairs at the Saloon

What sort of crazy decadent things happened in the back rooms of the saloons we see in Westerns?  I recently watched Storyville on Netflix, a Corporation for Public Broadcasting documentary about a red light district in New Orleans from the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.  Our forefathers were a crazed, decadent bunch.  Worth your viewing time, indeed.

Sixgun Galahads- When Westerns Ruled Television

In the March 30, 1959 issue of Time, the magazine ran an article on the dominance of the Western in prime time television.  At that time eight of the top ten television shows were westerns: Gunsmoke; Wagon Train; Have Gun, Will Travel; The Rifleman; Maverick; Wyatt Earp; Zane Grey Theater; and Wanted, Dead or Alive.  From what I can recall, we haven’t had a Western on television since Deadwood went off the air in 2006.  Read more in the Time archive here.

Outlaw Territory

Westerns once ruled the comics shelves.  Now, by my count, the only western comics consistently put out by major publishers are Jonah Hex and Lone Ranger (assuming you can count Dynamite as a major comics publisher).  One group that has not let the genre die in comics is Image, who has been producing an anthology called Outlaw Territory.

With two volumes out (and hopefully more to come), Outlaw Territory is a collection of short, eight page stories, each with its own take on the Western.  Some are funny, some are sexy, most are bloody and gritty.  There are some heavy hitter names in Outlaw Territory, like Mike Baron, Len Wein, Greg Pak, Robert Kirkman, Sean Chen, and Steve Grant.

The quality of the stories is, well, pretty mixed, particularly in the first volume.  It is clear that some of the artists have very little sense of the period.  Too often you see a sixgun being gripped like a Glock- I know that is picky, but it always tells me that the artist isn’t really a western fan so much as someone looking for a commission.  In a few cases the creators really lack a grasp of the period.  One story from volume one involved a disgraced Hessian soldier losing himself in the saloons of the west.  The story involved a revolver, introduced in the 1830’s, and since the Hessian was made out ot have fought in the American Revolution that puts his age somewhere around 70, although he was a best middle aged in the story.  Mistakes like that can really detract from the book.

One reason I love Ballad of a Bad Man

Enough of the bad parts, though.  There are enough gems tucked away in each volume of Outlaw Territory to make it work the $20 investment.  My personal favorite from Volume 1 is “Ballad of a Bad Man” by Joe Kelley, Max Fiumara, and Thomas Mauer, a story told in verse about a scared young boy and the scarred gunslinger he tracks down.  Quick and crisp, it nicely blends sex and violence with sharp tug at your heartstrings, and is easily one of my favorite comics stories from 25+ years of comics collecting. 

Although none of the individual stories in Volume 2 are quite of the level of Ballad of a Bad Man”, the second volume is stronger over all.  Three great stories, “Rustling Up Business”, “Cherokee Bill”, and “Cold Blood!” open the book, and the books keeps going strong throughout.  The story that stands out the most for me, however, is the crazed “They’ll Bury You Where You Stand” by Jeremy Barlow and Dustin Weaver.  Any story where by the end you still can’t decide if the “hero” is Satan or an angel is definitely memorable.

I hope to pick up Volume 3 when it is available.  Hell, I hope to contribute to this anthology one day.  Any artists out there interested in collaborating?

Shavetail- Brokeback Cavalry

One critic says that Thomas Cobb's Shavetail is a cross between Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy.  Another called it a cross between Blood Meridian and Red Badge of Courage.  My wife took one look at the cover and asked if it was gay porn.  They are all mostly wrong, but all a little right, too.

Shavetail, set in a US Cavalry fort in post-Civil War Arizona during the Indian Wars, is told from the perspective of three main characters:  Captain Franklin, a soldier’s soldier and disgraced veteran of past Indian Wars campaigns; his adjutant; Lieutenant Austin, a sensitive natural philosopher who may or may not be aware of his homosexuality; and Ned Thorne, delicate but rage filled native of Hartford, CT running from a dark secret.  These three characters orbit two others.  The first is Brickford, a strange mix of Sgt. Bilko and The Judge from Blood Meridian.  The last is Mary, the unseen voice of femininity in the novel, who we hear from only through her diary and rumors across the plains.  It is Mary, a fine lady from Massachusetts turned pioneer wife, that drives the story.  Her kidnapping by local Apaches is the inertia that drives the cavalry into action.

The action is in a way timeless.  The fort, the soldiers, the desert, the enemy.  Although set in the Indian Wars, this could easily be placed in Iraq in 2005, or Afghanistan today.  The Army is described continually as a force of destruction, moving slowly across the land, laying ruin to everything in its path.  Although the description makes it clear that there are smart, brave soldiers in this man’s army, we find few of them here. 

Here comes the Cavalry!

Oh, and the gay porn crack?  Thorne’s delicate features are described constantly, particularly by Austin.  Caught up in Brickford’s schemes, Thorne is routinely knocked to the ground by Bickford, who refers to him from the start as Marybelle.  Does anything happen while he is down?  In a camp full of lonely soldiers far from civilization, the men take turns as the woman as they hold dances in the desert.  When one asks Thorne, the “prettiest woman at the ball”, to dance, they drink and trip the night fantastic, only to leave the evening in a bloody fistfight.  Shavetail dances around homosexuality, never quite acknowledging it, but never leaving it far from sight.

Shavetail is a nicely literary novel at home in its western setting.  I am not sure that it is a western per se, but it is enough of one to earn it the 2009 Spur Award for Best Western Long Novel.  This will likely not make my list of favorite westerns, but it is certainly more entertaining than the mass of pretentious literary novels on the market today.

Fall and Rise of the Spur Award

When I started this blog about finding the perfect western, one of the goals was to start reading as many award winning westerns as I could find.  Since 1953, the Western Writers of America have been giving out a variety of accolades called the Spur Awards for numerous categories of storytelling.  I decided that I would pick my favorite western novels that had not won Spur awards, then read the novels that beat them the year that they were published.  Easier said than done.

There are nearly a dozen types of awards given out.  I still have trouble understanding the difference between “Best Western Novel” and “Best Novel of the West”.  The categories also change names over time, so trying to figure out which category my favorite novels should have fit into became a near impossible task.  Once I took a few random guesses at category, I began trying to track down some of these novels that represented the best of the genre. 

Several I could not find, in on-line books stores, ebay, or inter library loans.  Two others I did manage to track down, but frankly they read as alarmingly simple and not particularly worth my time.  I had seen some memorable books on the winners list (Aces & Eights by Loren Estleman, several books from the Lonesome Dove series, etc) but the books were terribly inconsistent.  The “Spur Award Winner” logo quickly faded as a sure signal that I was holding a quality book.

Two years ago I noticed that a creative writing professor from my alma mater had won a Spur Award, quite surprising since I didn’t recall him ever writing a western in the past.  Far Bright Star not only won the Spur, but it also received great praise from critics outside the genre as well.  Recently I picked up Shavetail, more for the main character’s background as New Englander going west than for it being s Spur winner.  As I am close to the end I find it to be an engrossing, well written book well worth the award.

The Spur Award seems to have gone through a series of changes over the years, but I am increasingly confident that future award winners will be worth my time, and yours.

Lady Mechanika

Sometimes I tell myself that I am too old to buy comic books just for the well drawn, ill-clad woman on the cover.  I’d like to think that I bought the first issue of Lady Mechanika specifically for this blog, to discuss the links between the western, steampunk, and comics.  Really, though, I know better.  Cyborg lady gunslinger?  She’s kind of hot.

From the artist’s web site: “The tabloids dubbed her "Lady Mechanika", the sole survivor of a serial killer's three-year rampage through England. Authorities found her locked in an abandoned laboratory amidst an undeterminable number of corpses and body parts, her own limbs having been amputated and replaced with mechanical components.

With no memory of her captivity or her former life, Mechanika eventually built a new life for herself as a private detective, using her unique abilities to solve cases the police couldn't or wouldn't handle. But she never stopped searching for the answers to her own past.

Set in turn of the century England, a time when magic and superstition clashed with new scientific discoveries and inventions, Lady Mechanika is about a young woman's search for her own identity as she solves other mysteries involving science and the supernatural.”

Hey, that sounds pretty good!  I should go back and actually read it some time.  Six months later, we still haven’t seen issue #2, but still have these images to savor.