If Not Superheroes, What? Part IV: Western Comics

Unlike the superhero, the mythical gunslinger/cowboy enjoyed a robust multimedia existence independence of comics, and used comics as another in a series of delivery media. Comics did not create the cowboy. In the first half of the twentieth century, during decades when no one really used terms like "multimedia," one could encounter radio shows about cowboys, dime novels on the subject, movies and movie serials, television programs, toys, clothes, and probably a variety of merchandise like cards, candy, and whatever marketing might direct at a youthful audience much interested in the mythos of the Old West.

That the western comic should enjoy a long history therefore represents something of a historic inevitability. Given the onetime popularity of comics, and the persistent popularity of western lore, that the two should come together represents a rather obvious marriage.

The western comic (defined to include the comic strip) predated the superhero form, existed with it side-by-side for decades, and didn't completely expire until the 1970s, another casualty of the superhero monoculture. Until the 1960s, it fit in well with other varieties of adventure storytelling, enjoying an ethos compatible with that of costumed crime fighters and other variants of the hero presented in four-color form.

The Mythos of the Old West

The western form survives, most probably, because of its ability to adapt to varying degrees of moral complexity, to simplified or convoluted characters, to moralistic melodrama or amoral explorations of the depths to which the human character can sink, and, in the process, retain its essential conventions of guns, horses, gun fights, Native Americans, corrupt (or incorruptible) sheriffs, gangs of bandits, train robberies, and a variety of archetypical characters adorned in period dress.

The conventions of the western have become well-recognized enough that we need not explore them here at length. In general, they assume a nineteenth-century setting in frontier towns in cattle or gold country, where the rule of law had yet to firmly establish itself, and where, according to the myth, men of courage with the right touch with a gun (and a horse) could hammer some justice into a domain barely on the fringes of civilization.

In its classical sense, the western setting dispensed almost altogether with moral ambiguity. In this sense, it made a better fit with the post-superhero comic book than with the broody and often troubled (or troubling) pulp hero, a figure that frequently moved in an urban underworld where one might never see a white hat.

Western comics, however, would generally stamp the conventions of the medium on their stories, often borrowing, with the talent from other genres, certain storytelling or artistic conventions.

A Touch of Cheesecake

Mark Twain wrote about his days in Nevada with considerable exaggeration but frequently also with more truth than the legends that attached to the American expansion into western states. In one tale, he described (truthfully or not) the introduction of a single female into a mining town; the sensation, in the complete absence of females, locals might line up to peer through a knot hole to see this novelty, not unclad and at the bath, but in the everyday process of mundane activities like setting a table.

In the western of cinema, literature, and comics, however, females abounded, from the beautiful daughters of ranchers to dance-hall girls to whatever the story might require in the way of a love interest to reward the virtues of many a protagonist.

Many artists depicted the female form with considerable love for its salient features, even, sometimes, bordering on the lurid in the particular elements of they chose to make prominent. Through the Silver Age, some degree of anatomical plausibility still prevailed, but this did not prevent legions of artists from attempting to define what they saw as the aesthetic ideal of the type.

The Occasional Anachronism

The occasional anachronism that cropped up in western comics did not necessarily mean much. If we yearn for historical accuracy, we might do well to avoid the mythos of the gun slinging "Old West" altogether and invest in some textbooks.

Furthermore, the amount of anachronism varied from comic to comic, probably in proportion to the quality of the books in question; one could expect more out-of-place-and-time material in the slapdash and forgettable production. And, in to the credit of many comics, the anachronism did not necessarily sink to the lows of the serials and movies of the singing cowboy era.

Nonetheless, though, we must note the intrusion of elements that don't strictly belong. We can begin with decent haircuts, pristine shaves, recent baths, well-laundered clothes in bright colors, fine horses, fine weapons, fine saddles, fine names, fine grammar, excellent housing, plentiful food, top-grade liquor, and the like; while those who lay down the foundations of the modern city in the western states might have run into one or more of these things on occasion, their unquestioned universal presence does much to elicit skepticism. With all the comforts of New York or Boston, how can we consider a place a frontier town?

A certain pattern appears in distortions such as that of the scanned panel, above. While western comics frequently contained historical elements, ranging from the conflicts of ethnicities between European-descended and Native American residents of the continent, the advance of the railroads, the spread of barbed wire, and the like, editorial canons mostly imposed a model for behavior on heroes that excluded accurate but perhaps harmful or morally troubling traits like the ubiquitous use of liquor and tobacco. Therefore, we see a hero in a saloon drinking from a soda bottle, his temperate morality giving him the strength of character necessary to limit his consumption to products no one had invented or marketed yet.

A Strong Dose of Corn

The scanned specimen to the right seems pretty ludicrous by today's hiply cynical standards. The moral simplification of the conventional western (prior to the sixties) tended to cast characters as definitely-good or definitely-evil, with an unlikely kind of self-consciousness about their role.

Consumers of tales of the mythical west, particularly through the versions presented on television programs, however, sometimes heard of variants of a Code of the West (capitalization understood) that defined how folks behaved and, more importantly, what people of worth did not do. "Hank Horse-Thief" acknowledgment of his role here indicates some knowledge of this Code. And willing suspension of disbelief played an important role in this material, so we need not goggle at this livestock thief's title, wondering why Jeffrey Dahmer never took a similar handle like "Eat-'em-Up Jeff."

Remarkable Improbabilities

Western comics teemed with the unlikely. Heroes consistently could out gun pistoleros armed with a bullwhip; masked assistants, when rendered helpless, would provide proxies in the form of conveniently-appearing twin siblings; the goons who massacred heroes' families in their youth would reappear conveniently years later, betrayed by a characteristic trait such as a scar or laugh, for the heroes to render them unto justice (a process often thoroughly unpleasant as rendering them unto fat).

Such absurdity represented a true-to-genre approach here. For example, the movie serial, in which western heroes flourished, would frequently rely on the cliffhanger to retain the interest of audiences through the next episode, and these routinely involved unlikely (or, less kindly, ridiculous) contrivances to allow heroes to escape.

The cinematic western would not attempt to achieve especial reality until the dawn of the seventies, and would generally fail to achieve it. For that matter, by the time the realistic western became conventional, the surreal western would begin to appear: Consider, over a span of more than one decade, movies like "Greaser's Palace," "Zechariah," and "Walker." Though the western itself frequently bore attacks for its lack of reality, the aforementioned pieces suffered no particular criticism for their lack of it. The lack-of-reality accusation probably provided a simple mask for a lack-of-hipness argument.

In general, though, the western depended on certain distortions. Too many men could do too much with pistols that specialists often fail to achieve with the more accurate long-barrelled rifles. People enjoyed haircuts, fabrics, and tailoring generally denied to their historical equivalents in the real era. The line between corruption and virtue remained clearer than in real-world circumstances. Yet these elements represented features, not flaws, of the form.

The Masked Hero Projected Backwards

The banana belonged in the wardrobe of real-world cowboys (meaning people involved with the handling of cattle) as a device to keep choking clouds of dust out of their throats, but it tended to serve in the fictional western the purpose of useless ornament (on heroes) or convenient mask (on villains). By the time of the ascendancy of the costumed hero, however, some of the conventions of mystery-men and superheroes would infiltrate the western comic.

Note, for instance, this caped and cowled hero and his grotesque (even devilish) nemesis. The cape and cowl firmly belong to another form, but the appeal of the superhero overlapped somewhat with that of the western hero, so, for the non-purist, such an approach might have seemed to provide the best of both worlds.

A number of domino-masked western comics heroes, often owing considerably to the visual treatment of the Lone Ranger, had their day in the comics of a previous generation. The dress code this involved did not represent the most implausible element of either westerns or western comics, so the occasional domino didn't break the illusion any more than anachronisms, historical inaccuracies, and other elements typical of a broadly-disseminated artificial mythos.

The Talent

Western comics involved more than one generation of talent, with many of the names known to other comics forms taking their turns at the type. Jack Kirby, John Severin, Will Elder, Jean Giraud (Moebius), Nick Cardy, and other canonical names from the Golden Age through the Silver Age (and beyond) left behind pieces in the form.

From the reprints contributing to the scanned images in this study, one can glean additional names (unfortunately, this over represents artists, though doubtless some of these wrote the material they depicted): Dick Ayers, Frank Bolle, Reed Crandall, Myron Fass, Fred Guardineer, Paul Gustavson, Bob Powell, and doubtless most of the talents who bothered with comics between 1935 and 1960.

The Remnants

Currently, one could analyze the comics on today's shelves with an electron microscope and not turn up any decisive indication that the western comics had ever existed.

Marvel, to its credit, tried to find a place for its Silver Age western concepts in the superhero comics of the shared-universe model, with the Ghost Rider (the gunslinger version) and the Two-Gun Kid appearing in various Avengers books in the seventies and eighties. In both cases, the connection centered around not-too-inspiring time travel stories; though the earlier sequence, with Hawkeye and Two-Gun striking up a friendship in the seventies, had some possibilities, we might do well to forget the Rohypnol-scented sequences from West Coast Avengers where the last heir to the Ghost Rider title induced Mockingbird to become his love slave through nineteenth-century potions.

In general, though, the sad attempts to interconnect the old western comics to the superhero shared-universe suffer from a number of flaws: the scale mismatch between gunslingers and overpowered superheroes; the incompatibility of creations pulled out of one genre and thrust into another; the irrelevancy cowboys might hold to readers in superhero comics who never especially counted on seeing men with Colts and horses cropping up in their superhero fare.

The lore itself, perhaps, deserves better, even if only because of its long-enduring impact on popular culture of the twentieth century. However, even if mainstream comics no longer has the ability or market to create western comics for today's more eccentric and idiosyncratic market, the mythos itself still generates new material from time to time (movies) and the market still supports pieces such as L'Amour's books, rapidly becoming essential components of a canon of western-saga literature.

Considering the doomsaying about the comics business itself - I've heard that it won't survive into the new year of 1999, two years ago - we might see considerable irony if the comics business collapsed altogether, after ousting one of its forms, only to watch the western continue to endure.

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Column 212. Completed 02-JAN-2001.