Top Ten Western Comics

Can’t take credit for this one- click here for a great review of western comics through the ages.

Fear of a White Hat

Good guys wear white hats, bad guys wear black hats.  Simple, formulaic, and true.  Like a passion play, or Commedia dell'arte, traditional westerns lay out a clear formula for us to follow and from which to learn.  Take Winchester ’73- Jimmy Stewart white hat clearly marks him as different from the villain, setting us up for the great moral lesson of the film: knowing when not to shoot is as important as knowing how to shoot.

For a long time we have distrusted the white hat hero.  The good, pure(ish) cowboy, paladin, or caped crusader felt insufficient in the complexities of modern life.  The black hat anti-hero and masked vigilantes have ruled comics for decades.  Almost a decade ago we looked for a hero, and a cowboy with a white hat came riding out of Texas to show us what was right and true.  But he was only human, and flawed, and we expected better of him.  It has taken us a long time to trust a white hat again. 

I think that we are coming back to a place where we can start to trust the white hats again.  The latest incarnation of the Rawhide Kid is without a doubt a white hat- a solid, morally upright paladin of the plains, if also incredibly conceited and self centered.  The Lone Ranger run in Dynamite may stray into a dark territory now and again, but overall the tone of the story is that of a man trying to do good from outside of the law.  They exist in a time when the traditional comics heroes are starting to shine again.  After decades of bloodbaths and superheroic nihilism, there is suddenly room for heroes again.

Streets of Glory- A Derivative Mess

There are not many comic book writers out there that have a keen interest in the western.  Jonah Hex continues (despite the movie), Rawhide Kid makes an occasional appearance, and Two-Gun Kid still manages to find a place in modern Marvel comics, but it is rare that you read a comic and feel that the writer is clearly in love with the western.  Garth Ennis, an Irish writer who’s love of sarcasm and violence brought him into the comics spotlight in the 1990’s, is one of the few comic books writers today whose craft is immersed in and informed by westerns.  Some of his best works are inspired by or referential of Lonesome Dove and Blood Meridian.   His works in Preacher, particularly the Saint of Killers miniseries, are an awe-inspiring love song to the genre.  It was therefore with great enthusiasm that I picked up the Streets of Glory miniseries, Ennis’ first foray into a pure western.

Unfortunately, Streets of Glory felt like a mishmash of movies or books that Ennis has read recently (frankly, that is true of a lot of his work lately).  Look, there’s the kid from Shane, and Woodrow Call, and that cocky gunslinger from Joe Kid with his land grabbing boss, and they are out after Blue Duck, so cleverly disguised here as Red Bird.  There is nothing original here, except perhaps some really graphic gunplay and torture scenes. The big mystery (this can hardly be called a spoiler) is about chasing settlers off their land so a rich easterner can buy it up and sell it to the railroad.  I think I’ve seen that plot before.  

The things that you want in a Western are all here.  As Ennis says in this interview, a good western should have "plenty of country. Tough guys; good and bad. Clanky old Colt revolvers. Duster coats. Stetsons. A gal or two. And big, big sky."  And he delivers all these things you want in a western, it's just that I've seen them all before in other westerns.  

 Ennis can be an inspired writer, but this unfortunately was not the place to find it.  For a good Ennis western, try reading the Saint of Killers story from Preacher Vol. 4: Ancient History.  Again, it starts off like another film, this time Unforgiven, but soon spins off into places both demonic and metaphysical.  Try that one before reading Streets of Glory, and hope the inspiration strikes Ennis’ sixgun another time.

Did I mention there's a little violence?

Frank Frazetta and the Western

Anyone who has read fantasy novels, particularly ones printed in the 70’s and 80’s, will remember the achingly manly covers by Frank Frazetta.  What most of us don’t know is that in addition to the Death Dealer, Conan, and John Carter of Mars paintings, Frazetta did a fair amount of westerns, or western inspired, paintings and comics as well.

Cowboy Coffee

Have no doubt:  manly as they are, cowboys always need their coffee. 

“With Roberto Zavala at this side, Wallace crisscrossed the roads leading up from Old Mexico.  When their supplies ran low the two men trapped and lived off the land, eating antelope, wild turkey, and white tailed deer when the bacon and salt pork were gone.  Texas winter brought days of bright sunlight and mellow temperatures, interspersed with a week or two of freezing temperatures when a blue norther struck and lashed the desert hills with wind and rain and ice pellets that struck like buckshot.  But Wallace the kind of man born without an ounce of quit in him, so he endured.  And Roberto was not about to abandon him.”

However, with only enough coffee left for a couple of days and looking forward to their third evening meal of fried rattlesnake and boiled jicima root, the two men reached a mutual understanding and had just decided to start back for San Antonio when they spied a column of dust spiraling up against the hard blue sky.”

-From The Red Ripper by Kerry Newcomb

Red Ripper- Conan at the Alamo

Back in 2000 I remember seeing a book called The Red Ripper plastered on every drug store and supermarket book shelf.  It had a vaguely celtic, proto-Outlander cover, and I assumed it was some sort of Scottish romance novel.  Years later I connected the author, Kerry Newcomb, with a series of oddball westerns about a family that were all secret agents of George Washington, or something like that.  Turns out I loved The Red Ripper, despite (or maybe because of) it many glaring historical inaccuracies.

Any time that you read a Kerry Newcomb book, you have to be willing to completely push reality out of your mind. Although he writes historical novels, Newcomb is a fablist and a teller of tall tales, not an historian. Take the author's note, for example: "The Red Ripper is a work of fiction, and that's a fact. I have taken liberties with time and events where it suited the yarn. If you're writing a thesis on the Texas Revolution this probably isn't the research novel for you, unless your topic is tall tales, high courage, dangerous days, and a legendary hero."

And the there's the opening page: "This is his story, just as he lived it. And what isn't true... ought to be."

You can't read this opening and expect a fact based novel. Red Ripper is actually almost entirely fictional. The novel takes place from 1829 to 1836. The real William "Big Foot" Wallace didn't arrive in Texas until 1838. Almost nothing in the story is accurate, but that isn't the point. Newcomb probably saw that the Texas revolution was a great story, that Big Foot Wallace was a great character, and the two should be stuck together. So what if it isn't exactly true?

What you do get is a big, crazy, Kerry Newcomb story. I've read almost a dozen of his novels, and they all start the same way. An incredibly heroic young white man suffers tragedy, is betrayed, and spends the next couple of hundred pages exacting a bloody revenge and finding forbidden love. His novels don't read as westerns so much as sword and sorcery novels with the sorcery replaced by the mythic West. If you replaced Big Foot Wallace's red hair and sombrero with dark hair and a loin cloth, this could be renamed Conan and the Alamo (Conan was also created by a Texan).  The Red Ripper isn't accurate, but it is a ripping yarn, and that's all that it needs to be.

The Battle of the Alamo if Conan was there.

Pioneer Bacon

From the 2011 Daily Bacon Calendar:

“The pioneers who journeyed west in covered wagons brought bacon with them for sustenance.”

Outstanding.  No wonder so many people moved West.

"I'd trade all my gold some for some tasty bacon!"