Redrawing the Western: A History of American Comics and the Mythic West

“The ostensibly simplistic dramas that were common in western adventure comics could disguise highly political undercurrents,” according to this perceptive debut study. Grady, an editor at the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, contends that the late-19th-century political cartoons that paved the way for the western comic strip galvanized support for America’s quest to control the frontier by depicting Native Americans as violent and white colonizers as aggrieved victims. Though the “closing of the frontier” in 1890 led to nostalgic and melancholy depictions of the American West in early comics, Grady suggests that the hardships of the Great Depression reversed this trend, causing writers and illustrators to reimagine the western as an action-packed escapist fantasy absorbing enough to distract readers from their real-life troubles. During western comics’ post-WWII peak, stories about “cowboy heroes who settle lawless frontier towns or... Western gunfighters intervening in affairs south of the border” served as thinly veiled endorsements of U.S. interventionism, envisioning the world as a “frontier” waiting to be civilized by heroic Americans. Throughout, Grady combines sweeping analysis of how western comics reflect broader historical currents with fine-grained interpretations of individual comics (for example, he posits that the darkly cynical Jonah Hex comics from the 1970s reflected growing disillusionment with state-sponsored violence abroad and at home). This is worth rounding up. (Nov.)