Overview

2025 Best Single Author Book, Midwest Popular Culture Association 2025 Longlist, Reading the West Book Award in Nonfiction, Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association 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.

Full Product Details

Author:   William Grady
Publisher:   University of Texas Press
Imprint:   University of Texas Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 3.30cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.454kg
ISBN:  

9781477334614

ISBN 10:   1477334610
Pages:   328
Publication Date:   03 March 2026
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming
Availability:   Not yet available  
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Table of Contents

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

Reviews

""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."" - Christopher Conway, author of Heroes of the Borderlands: The Western in Mexican Film, Comics, and Music ""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."" - Daniel Worden, author of Petrochemical Fantasies: The Art and Energy of American Comics ""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."" - Publishers Weekly ""Redrawing the Western is an important addition to the burgeoning field of comic book scholarship."" - Houston Press ""Grady does a very good job detailing the trajectory of the comic Western genre...Unlike some books from higher education sources Grady does not go overboard with acadamese. The book remains readable and entertaining and educational."" - Daily Cartoonist ""I would recommend Redrawing the Western to anyone interested in (Native) American history, (American Western) comic books, or popular culture in general. It is a well-prepared cultural reader and a most welcome addition to all of these fields of literature."" - H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences ""Grady presents a complex and multifaceted argument for reimagining the power and impact of comics in Westerns...[This] page-turning work is an important corrective to a historiography that, for decades, largely flattened the many crucial ways in which cartoons of the West, and comics that helped comprise the world of the Western, worked together to craft a national imagination that persists in our expansionist certainty—and perhaps our arrogance—to this day."" - Journal of Arizona History

Author Information

William Grady is an independent scholar and librarian.

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