Redrawing the Western
Redrawing the Western
A History of American Comics and the Mythic West
A history of American Western genre comics and how they interacted with contemporaneous political and popular culture.
Redrawing the Western charts a history of the Western genre in American comics from the late 1800s through the 1970s and beyond. Encompassing the core years in which the genre was forged and prospered in a range of popular media, Grady engages with several key historical timeframes, from the origins of the Western in the nineteenth-century illustrated press; through fin de siècle anxieties with the closing of the frontier, and the centrality of cowboy adventure across the interwar, postwar, and high Cold War years; to the revisions of the genre in the wake of the Vietnam War and the Western’s continued vitality in contemporary comics storytelling.
In its study of stories about vengeance, conquest, and justice on the contested frontier, Redrawing the Western highlights how the “simplistic” conflicts common in Western adventure comics could disguise highly political undercurrents, providing young readers with new ways to think about the contemporaneous social and political milieu. Besides tracing the history, forms, and politics of American Western comics in and around the twentieth century, William Grady offers an original reassessment of the important role of comics in the development of the Western genre, ranking them alongside popular fiction and film in the process.
Redrawing the Western is a brilliant feat of cultural history that will wow scholars and aficionados of the Western. William Grady’s sure and clear voice guides us through the development of iconic and lesser-known cowboy comics that embody myths of westward expansion, and ethnic and national identity. We have waited too long for an indispensable book like this one.
Redrawing the Western is a compelling and lively history of Western comics, with an impressive scale and scope that matches the book’s subject. Grady offers an authoritative account of a major yet overlooked genre in the comics medium, and the book makes the Western newly relevant to the art, history, and politics of modern America.
[Redrawing the Western is a] perceptive debut study…Throughout, Grady combines sweeping analysis of how western comics reflect broader historical currents with fine-grained interpretations of individual comics…This is worth rounding up.
William Grady is an independent scholar and librarian.
- List of Illlustrations
- Introduction. Rethinking the Western Genre through Comics
- Part 1. The Origins of the Mythic West in Comics, 1800s–1930s
- Chapter 1. “Print the Legend”: Imagining the American West in the Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Press
- Chapter 2. The Spectacle of the Southwest: Postfrontier Imaginings of the Far West in Newspaper Comic Strips
- Chapter 3. Saddling Up in the Slump: Retooling the Western during the Depression
- Part 2. A Golden Age of Western Comics, 1940s–1970s
- Chapter 4. Cowboys, Crooks, and Comic Books: The Western Stands Tall
- Chapter 5. Nuclear Showdown: Western Comic Books Ride through the Cold War
- Chapter 6. “I Know It’s Not in the Romantic Western Spirit”: Subverting the Mythic West in Postwar Comics
- Chapter 7. Blood on the Borders: Mixing the Wild West with Political Unrest in Comics from the Troubled 1960s and 1970s
- Coda. Walking on the Bones of the Dead: Comics and the Western’s “Afterlife”
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Shooting Stars of the Small Screen
Encyclopedia of TV Western Actors, 1946–Present
By Douglas Brode; Introduction by Fess Parker
