Overview

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.

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9781477329986

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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 puts forth 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

Author Information

William Grady is an independent scholar and librarian.

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