From Bob Boze Bell’s Big Bad Book of Bad Diary Entries
July 25, 2017
I sent out a
call to my history gang back in the States to help me understand why European
comics and graphic novels are still celebrating and buying graphic novels about
the American West and in the U.S. it's a dead letter deal.
But before we
get to that, I have been attempting to read my German comics and they do this
crazy mash-up with their native tongue and American Western slang from movies,
to wit:
A typical
German-Western graphic novel word balloon mashup:
"Hauptsache,
du lasst meine kinder in Rume, Bastard!"
The Top Secret Writer's Take On Why Europe
Still Gets The Wild West
"Those
folks take the long view on history (since they really have a history as
opposed to our 200 years) and with the exception of WWII are pretty much over
it all. They have had so many colorful heroes and villains that they don't sit
in lofty moral judgements over their ancestors (no banning of images of
Cavaliers or Roundheads in England). Hell, when Napoleon is your national hero
how can you get upset over Custer and the American Indian Wars. Plus, thanks to
Buffalo Bill, they remain captivated by the American West.
—Paul Andrew
Hutton
A striking German
graphic novel cover by Xavier Dorison and Fabien Nury.
American Comic Book Writer And Editor,
Jeff Mariotte
Weighs In
"The heyday
of Western comics in the US ran from the 40s into the early 60s. By the late
60s, the revisionist history vogue was going strong. I'm not putting down that
revisionism--in many cases, it was just telling the story more accurately--but
it served to de-mythologize the Old West for a lot of people. Anti-heroes were
big, too, so the heroic western characters we grew up with were relegated to
the backseat. Think about the western movies of those days--for every Butch
& Sundance or Jeremiah Johnson, there was a Little Big Man, Missouri
Breaks, and the Altman's Buffalo Bill & The Indians movie discussed in the
current True West.
"That
didn't happen so much in Europe. Their cultures are old enough that they've
probably already dealt with their revisionists. When I was a kid in France in
the early 1960s, everyone I met assumed my family were cowboys. To correct that
impression, I told them I was from Chicago, which changed their assumption to
gangsters. We attended an event around '63 or '64 called--if memory
serves--"Trois Jours a l'Americain," which purported to be a
recreation of American life, but it was almost all cowboys and Indians.
An In-din Miss
Kitty from the German series, Der Stern Der Wuste.
"When I
lived in Germany in the early 70s, there were still plenty of Western comics
(and other genres--it wasn't just Westerns that disappeared here, but also
romance and horror and medieval, etc.; the lack of Westerns was notable because
they had been such a big part of the market for so long, but superheroes were
already taking over). In any given week, you could find Western movies playing
in German theaters. Not very good ones, but the mythology still lived over
there.
"It wasn't
just comics, either. Think how prevalent TV Westerns were into the mid-60s. By
the early 70s, how many were left? But we're talking comics, here, so I
digress.
"Comics
boomed in the late '80s-early '90s, but that boom was almost entirely
superhero-driven. By the time I created Desperadoes at Image Comics in '97,
there were no major-publisher Westerns on the market (and if there were any in
the small presses, they were well hidden).
"Now
fast-forward 20 years. The people making comics are mostly in their 20s and
30s. When they grew up, comics were all superheros, all the time. Sadly, most
of the creators in the comics biz don't have much frame of reference outside of
comics, and when they do it's usually movies and TV. Nobody who came of age
after the mid-'60s had the experience of seeing Westerns as a big part of the
comics market. And to exacerbate that, the sale of comics shifted from
newsstands to specialty stores during that same era--the early 70s and beyond.
"Since
Desperadoes, there have almost always been one or two Westerns on the market
here, and there continue to be now. But those are outliers, with marginal sales
at best. Nobody's getting rich writing Western comics in the US. Desperadoes
always did pretty well overseas. It had multiple translations, and I got fan
mail from France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Wales, etc. Here in the US, though, it
was always touch-and-go.
"So my
operating theory is basically this: In the US, we de-mythologized the Old West,
which made it harder to sell heroic stories in that setting. And we know what
today's West is like. In Europe, the mythical West remains a more universal
image of what the American West was and is than it does here, whereas comics
about contemporary American superheroes dealing with contemporary American
situations are of less immediate interest than they are here.
—Jeff Mariotte
"Because
too much focus placed on too few historical events. We need new definitions and
new stories."
—Vince Murray
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