How the West was drawn

The way the western has been represented in comic strips over the years has followed the same evolutionary trail as the western in cinema and books.

Here we look at several western based strips over the last few decades that show how the form has progressed from the simple good guy/bad guy type moral tales of the early days to the revisionist oaters where the good guys are usually just a fraction better than the bad guys.


The first strip shown here is from The John Wayne adventure annual 1959. The style of storytelling is quite simple and is more like the B-westerns the Duke made a decade or so earlier than the classic westerns he was making during this period.

The bulk of the annual is made of text stories with only two comic strip stories throughout its 95 pages. Note the sinister way in which the powerful rancher is drawn - shadows and a Fu Manchu moustache. During the early days of the western a well trimmed moustache was part of the uniform of the bad guy.


The following strip comes from the Gunsmoke Annual 1963 - Gunsmoke which started on the radio in 1952 before becoming a long running TV series in 1955 was billed as the first adult western and the storylines were often more detailed than that which came earlier. The style of the strips represent the more realistic visuals of the TV series. The strip here - The Bounty Killer looks at the morality behind making a living by hunting men down for their cash rewards.

The strip is also more wordy than was usual for western strips and most strips contain 14 panels per page which allows for sub-plots and character development within the storyline.


Anyone wanting to read a variety of western comic strips in differing styles I would point you to the excellent High Noon collection edited by Steve Holland and published by Prion Books. The stories are taken from the pages of Wild West Picture Library and the editor has done a great job in his selections as they cover many of the stock storylines from western cinema.

The modern form of western comic strips owe much to the latter day westerns of Eastwood, Leone and Sam Peckinpah. The hero has become the anti-hero and this is taken to the extreme in the supernaturally flavoured Jonah Hex stories. The example left comes from Max Comics four issue mini-series, Apache Skies.