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Full Description
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.
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
