Abstract
The nature and definition of the lone hero and the ways in which the West has generated various myths have a complex history. There are ways in which existing theories about the hero and myth in Western films can be applied to comics. Many of these comics feature Native American characters, which gives rise to problematic issues about the naming of the “Indian”.
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Notes
- 1.
J. Isen, “The Heroes of Myth and Folklore: Part One – Defining a Hero”, accessed December 12, 2017, https://onceuponatimeinthedarkness.wordpress.com/.../the-heroes-of-myth-and-folklore
- 2.
Quoted in Jeremy Agnew, The Creation of the Cowboy Hero: Fiction, Film and Fact (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2004), 49.
- 3.
David H. Murdoch , The American West: The Invention of a Myth (Welsh Academic Press, 2001), 14.
- 4.
Murdoch , The American West, 15.
- 5.
Janet Walker, Westerns: Films through History (American Film Readers, New York: Routledge 2001), 5.
- 6.
Murdoch , The American West, 15–16.
- 7.
Will Wright, Sixguns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).
- 8.
Christopher Frayling, Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone (London: Routledge, 1981), 43. Despite the fact that there have been comparatively few recent Western films, there is still a strong academic interest in the genre, as evidenced in works like Matthew Carter’s Myth of the Western: New Perspectives on Hollywood’s Frontier Narrative (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014) and John Nelson’s Cowboy Politics: Myths and Discourses in Popular Westerns from the Virginian to Unforgiven and Deadwood (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017).
- 9.
John Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1971).
- 10.
Buffalo were misnamed by settlers and, in fact, are American bison, but the name buffalo continues to be used in popular culture.
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Huxley, D. (2018). Introduction. In: Lone Heroes and the Myth of the American West in Comic Books, 1945-1962. Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93085-5_1
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