Abstract
The Hollywood studios of the 1950s and 1960s, in both film and television, used intense intertextual marketing. This applied not only to the major stars such as Roy Rogers and Gene Autry—even “sidekicks”, like Gabby Hayes, could feature in their own comics. Several key figures such as Dale Evans, Gene Autry, Lash LaRue, and the Lone Ranger demonstrate that there are different ways to be a Western hero. Television-based comics continue this trend with perhaps a more enlightened attitude toward Native Americans. The way in which the sidekick is woven into the narrative and how it affects the status of the hero is examined in several different cases. Dell’s Annie Oakley comic also demonstrates that the Western comic provided a space for a woman to be just as heroic as a man.
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Notes
- 1.
Maurice Horn, M. Comics of the American West (South Hackensack: Stoeger, 1977), 9.
- 2.
Bart Beaty and Benjamin Woo, The Greatest Comic Book of All Time: Symbolical Capital of the Field of American Comic Books (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 95.
- 3.
Ray Merlock, Preface in Peter Rollins (ed) Hollywood’s West: The American Frontier in Film, Television, and History (University Press of Kentucky 2005), ix.
- 4.
Tuska finds Autry , overall, to be a less than convincing hero. Jon Tuska, The Vanishing Legion; a History of Mascot Pictures 1927–35 (Oxford University Press 1982), 162.
- 5.
John Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture, University of Chicago Press, 1976, 38.
- 6.
Horn , Comics of the American West, 80.
- 7.
I came across these letter pages rather by accident. The core of my research was undertaken with American original copies and UK reprints, and in a Gene Autry British reprint #4 (Cartoon Art Productions) there was the ”Pow Wow” letter page from Fiction House’s Indians title #6. UK reprints could always be slap-dash, and these letters clearly had nothing whatsoever to do with Autry , but sit there talking about a totally different comic. Nevertheless they led to the original comic’s letter pages and a rare insight into contemporary reader responses.
- 8.
Horn , Comics of the American West, 187.
- 9.
Steve Kneale, Vanishing Americans: Racial and Ethnic Issues in the Interpretation and Context of Post-war ‘Pro-Indian’ Westerns in Back in the Saddle again: New Essays on the Western (British Film Institute Publishing 1998), 8.
- 10.
It is estimated that a quarter of American cowboys in the second half of the nineteenth century were African American. The history of black cowboys has been recuperated in a number of books, such as Tricia Martineau Wagner, Black Cowboys of the Old West: True, Sensational, and Little-Known Stories from History (Guilford: Morris Book Publishing, 2011).
- 11.
Black superheroes such as Black Panther and Luke Cage have been comparatively successful, but the major American Western character of the 1970s (as sales of most Western comics declined) was white—Jonah Hex, a scarred bounty hunter reminiscent of Clint Eastwood.
- 12.
Dwain Carlton Pruitt, “It rhymes with lust? Matt Baker and the ironic politics of race, sex and gender in the golden age”, The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Volume 7, number 2, June 2016, 203.
- 13.
Jennifer Holt, The Ideal Woman, accessed 27 November 2017, https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d53f/7b503540f490d395a3ca148895843d337a2a.pdf
- 14.
I have shown this kind of material to students on many occasions, both in print and television adverts, and it never fails to elicit a range of responses, but a combination of laughter and disbelief is the most common.
- 15.
Just as with Westerns comics themselves the situation is quite complex. Romance comics often feature excellent artwork, and some have more sophisticated or comedic plots. The romance comics of St John are particularly noteworthy, and some of the best examples have been collected by John Benson in Romance without Tears: 50s Love Comics with a Twist, Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2004.
- 16.
There are not as many books about Oakley as some of her contemporaries, but Shirl Kasper’s Annie Oakley, University of Oklahoma Press, 2000, recounts her career in detail. A good account of her relationship with Cody is given in Larry McMurtry, The Colonel and Little Missie: Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley and the Beginnings of Superstardom in America, Simon and Schuster, 2005. Further information on her career, and her rivalry with Lillian Smith, can be found in R. L. Wilson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: An American Legend, Greenhill Books, 1998.
- 17.
Michael A. Sheyahshe, Native Americans in Comic Books: A Critical Study (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2008), 44.
- 18.
Sheyahshe, Native Americans in Comic Books: A Critical Study, 41.
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Huxley, D. (2018). Roping n’ Riding: Selling Western Stars, 1946–1962. 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_4
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