Redrawing the Western
eBook - ePub

Redrawing the Western

A History of American Comics and the Mythic West

  1. 304 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Redrawing the Western

A History of American Comics and the Mythic West

About this book

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.

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Yes, you can access Redrawing the Western by William Grady in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & North American History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Series Page
  3. Title Page
  4. Copyright
  5. Dedication
  6. Contents
  7. List of Illustrations
  8. Introduction. Rethinking the Western Genre through Comics
  9. Part 1. The Origins of the Mythic West in Comics, 1800s–1930s
  10. Part 2. A Golden Age of Western Comics, 1940s–1970s
  11. Acknowledgments
  12. Notes
  13. Bibliography
  14. Index