Western comic

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Western comics are comics that are set in America at the time when the western part of the continent was colonized by European immigrants from the mid-18th to the late 19th centuries. Themes of the treated actions are, as with the genre of the westerns in the film, mainly the conquest of the continent ( Indian wars ), the advancement of the European-influenced civilization, the consolidation of state formation (colonization and the struggle for supremacy on the continent, independence and Civil War ) and those with all the related circumstances ( railway construction , pasture wars and others). This results in conflict-laden, conflicting issues such as whites against Indians, ranchers against farmers, French against English, lawbreakers against law enforcement officers, northerners against southerners. Although, as Andreas C. Knigge puts it, the Western is “American folklore in its own right ”, Western comics have never achieved the importance of Western films in the USA. So are "the best and most successful Western comics ... of European origin", such. B. the most famous western comic, the 1946 Belgian comic series Lucky Luke by the Belgian comic artist Maurice de Bévère ("Morris").

history

While the western emerged in literature when the epoch dealt with was still relevant in terms of contemporary history (see leather stockings ) and the genre debuted in the film during the lifetime of legendary personalities of the western, it took a relatively long time for the topics to be taken up by the comic. Although film and comic as a medium emerged roughly at the same time and one of the first feature films was already a western with The Great Train Robbery (1903) , the first western comics did not appear until the end of the 1920s, almost thirty years later. In 1933, Bronc Peeler was the forerunner of Red Ryder (from 1938), the first important series for western comics. By then there were other significant comics in which western elements can be found, but only incidentally and not as a formative element of a western genre. An example of this are Tintin and Struppi (1931) by Hergé . The first western comic was made in the United States. It was followed by Lance from Warren Tufts , Rawhide Kid (German: Rauhfell Kid ) and Jonah Hex , as well as the Funny Chief Feuerauge . When, in the second half of the 20th century, the competition between the Franco-Belgian comic magazines Tintin , Spirou and Pilote kept producing new series that increasingly helped the comic to gain artistic recognition, the most important western comics from today's perspective were created there.

The starting point of the Franco-Belgian western comic tradition is Jerry Spring by Jijé , other works are the series Leutnant Blueberry , Comanche , Mac Coy and Jonathan Cartland , which have become classics .

Anglo-American comics

The modern comic originated in the entertainment section of American newspapers as a comic strip and lives there to this day. In addition, there were the so-called "comic books" in booklet form. With the loss of importance of newspapers due to the advent of other media, the number of newspaper comics decreased. In contrast, comics in booklet form assert themselves, some of which are reprinted in the form of anthologies. In addition, the European album format is rather uncommon as part of literature in the USA. For decades , American comics had only a short-lived entertainment character due to their appearance, an artistic evaluation and appreciation only took place later in retrospect and only in comparatively few series ( Harold Foster's Prince Eisenherz , Burne Hogarth's Tarzan , etc.). The funny comics from Disney and comics with omnipotent heroes dominated here (DC comics like Superman, Batman and Marvel's Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, etc.).

For these reasons, of the many American western comics, only a few have outlasted the ages as important or significant. Wolfgang J. Fuchs and Reinhold C. Reitberger stated in their standard work on comics anatomy of a mass medium as early as the early 1970s that there were not too many Westerns among the newspaper strips compared to the comic books. A large part of the series were only part of a cross-media marketing of heroes who appeared in films, dime novels and books, the radio play series popular at the time, and later TV series, live shows, etc. occurred. They weren't original comics, just adaptations from other media. Tom Mix , Hopalong Cassidy , Roy Rogers , Gene Autry are prime examples of western characters who were represented in almost every medium. The Lone Ranger also rode across the media . Invented for radio in 1933, comics in this series were published in 1938. It was not only published in Germany, there were even action figures similar to the Big Jim figures by Mattel for this series in the 1970s , which did not appear under a uniform title in this country ( The lonely rider , The lonely ranger , The masked ranger and Prariewolf ).

There was a particularly close relationship between the television series and comics. So there was practically every television series also a comic version, such as the series Bonanza , Maverick , Wanted: Dead or Alive , Gunsmoke , The Rifleman and Rawhide, which are well-known in Germany . Comic adaptations were also produced for the “big brother” of the television series, the cinema western (including Rio Bravo , Last Train from Gun Hill , MacLintock and How the West Was Won ). Another field for comic westerns were western heroes who supposedly or actually actually lived, whereby the described adventures hardly corresponded to reality in cases of real, historical persons, including Davy Crockett , Jesse James , Buffalo Bill , Kit Carson , Wild Bill Hickok and Billy the Kid .

When traditional American western films were dead in the early 1960s, Europe, and especially Italy , set new accents with spaghetti westerns . In the case of comics, it was above all the Franco-Belgian comic authors who initially took up the topics in a conventional way.

Franco-Belgian comics

The series Red Ryder appeared in Spirou as a license takeover from the USA since 1939 . When there was no supply of artwork from America during World War II , Jijé took on the task of continuing the adventure that had already begun in the magazine. The western quickly enjoyed great popularity with readers, so that an album was published by Dupuis . In 1946 the funny western Lucky Luke started in Spirou , which in the following years and decades would become the best known and most successful western comic. In addition, Western short stories of four to six pages appeared in the Uncle Paul series . Among others, Liliane and Fred Funcken work on Uncle Paul , who later switched to the competition paper Tintin , where they contributed the western series Lieutenant Burton (from 1962), Doc Silver (from 1967) and a few more. In Spirou , however, Jijé, who had taken his first steps in the western area at Red Ryder , started the Jerry Spring series from 1954 . This advanced to become the first real classic of the genre and thus forms the basis for further successful, realistically drawn Franco-Belgian western comics.

Just as Jijé forms the link between Red Ryder and Jerry Spring , so Jean Giraud represents the connection between Jerry Spring and Lieutenant Blueberry : Giraud assisted Jijé on the 7th volume of the series, before he worked with its editor-in-chief for the Spirou competition paper Pilote in 1963 Jean-Michel Charlier launched the Blueberry series . At first so close to Jijé's drawing style that this Giraud was able to represent Giraud during a stay in America without a noticeable break in style, Giraud continued to develop his style, broke away from Jijé's, became more detailed, "dirtier", and broke up conventional page layouts. The experience of graphic experiments that Giraud allowed himself under the pseudonym Moebius also flowed into Blueberry , whereby Giraud in particular perfected the way of depicting materiality and shades with dots and lines. Over the decades, Giraud / Charlier created an epic western comic classic with Blueberry , which tells a coherent story over several cycles.

Blueberry is also interesting in this context because the references to film - especially western films - are very obvious here. It starts with the fact that the protagonist Mike Steve Blueberry was modeled after the then popular French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo at the beginning of the series . The first Blueberry cycle has, in terms of content and optics, clear borrowings from the classic (cavalry) westerns (in particular The Battle of the Apache Pass and The Broken Arrow , both with Jeff Chandler in the role of Cochise ) and films like The Black Hawk . The Apache chief Cochise looks like Jeff Chandler at Blueberry , who embodied this Indian for a third time in Taza, the son of Cochise , in addition to the two named . The album following this cycle (the only one in the series that can be read independently of the other volumes) is a variation of the western Rio Bravo , for which John Wayne and Dean Martin are granted a brief cameo appearance (the panel is not like this, however succeeded so that the two are barely recognizable). With the following cycle about railway construction and the adaptation of the Battle of Little Big Horn , the series slowly breaks away from the classic American western and the first spaghetti western influences become visible.

Western film and western comic

When the first western comics were made, the western as a film had about thirty years "lead in development" and the number of films was already quite extensive. However, it was not the westerns of John Ford , Henry Hathaway or Howard Hawks that could serve as models for the first western comics, as their "personal descriptions (...) are too complicated". Rather, the western comics, as well as the "Serials", the television westerns, are fed by the B-Pictures: films that are well crafted, but are bursting with clichés and stereotypes in terms of content. The films about the actors Tom Mix , Gene Autry , William Boyd , Roy Rogers and many more. were extremely popular in the thirties to fifties and thus made the leap into the drawn medium.

The western comic was mostly influenced by the western film, but there are also influences in the opposite direction. So already managed Red Ryder , pioneer among Western comic books, with four films in the forties the leap to the big screen.

In comparison, it is noticeable that the film western has been declared dead again and again and only sporadically produces new works after its heyday, and the western comics met a similar fate in America, while the western comic book has continued to exist in Europe.

Criticism, clichés and stereotypes

In most westerns, the fight between good and evil (personified by the hero and his antagonist) plays a decisive role. These were often portrayed stereotypically according to their role, whereby in early westerns (in films as in comics) the color of the hat (black or white) allowed conclusions to be drawn about the distribution of roles. As early as the late 1970s, however, Fuchs / Reitberger, citing an investigation by Jutta Wermke, stated that the times were over when the stereotypical portrayal of villains based on external attributes ("receding forehead", "missing chin" or "physical deformities") ) successes. Rather, they state that stereotypical representations are primarily dependent on the skill of the draftsman: "The worse the draftsman is, the more stereotypical his characters are". Another example of this can be found at Blueberry , whose hero looks more and more shabby in the course of the series, but in the album of the same name he has to do with Angel Face , a cold-blooded killer, who is blonde and has such fine, delicate facial features that in the course of the story he can even slip through a control disguised as a young girl.

Although already The Squaw Man of Cecil B. DeMille had been criticized at the time, turned in 1914 when to "indian friendly," the prevailing stereotype of the early Western was set to a division of roles in which the Indians, the role of "evil" was intended. Another point becomes clear here, which is why Red Ryder is of particular importance, because the original supporting character, the little Indian boy Little Beaver , not only did not correspond to this prevailing cliché, he even developed into the actual main character of the series and thus ran the radiant (and white) heroes.

With all the clichés and stereotypes that turn a western into a western, western comics can also be used to convey educational content. Under the heading “Dismantling the racial barriers”, for example, in their comics handbook, Fuchs / Reitberger name the trapper Buddy Longway , from the award-winning series of the same name, as an example of a white man who loves an Indian, marries and has children with her.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Andreas C. Knigge : Comic Lexikon. Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main 1988, ISBN 3-548-36554-X , p. 470.
  2. ↑ Thomas Jeier : The Western Film. Heyne, Munich 1987, ISBN 3-453-86104-3 , pp. 7, 9f.
  3. ^ Paul Burgdorf: Der Western - An analysis of American western comics taking into account the intermedia dependencies , in: Comixene # 19, p. 4.
  4. ↑ M. Keith Booker (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Comic Books and Graphic Novels. Volume 2. Greenwood, Santa Barbara 2010, ISBN 978-0-313-35746-6 , p. 691 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
  5. ↑ a b c d e f Wolfgang J. Fuchs , Reinhold Reitberger : Comics - Anatomy of a mass medium. Abridged edition as Rowohlt-Taschenbuch, ISBN 3-499-11594-8 , Reinbek bei Hamburg 1973, here: 4th edition 1977, license from Moos-Verlag, Graefelfing before Munich. Pp. 124-128.
  6. ↑ Thomas Jeier : The Western Film. Heyne, Munich 1987, ISBN 3-453-86104-3 , page 148
  7. ↑ a b Andreas C. Knigge : 50 classic comics. Gerstenberg, Hildesheim 2004, ISBN 3-8067-2556-X , p. 175.
  8. ↑ Andreas C. Knigge : 50 Classic Comics. Gerstenberg, Hildesheim 2004, ISBN 3-8067-2556-X , p. 177.
  9. ^ Paul Burgdorf: Der Western - An analysis of American western comics taking into account the intermedia dependencies , in: Comixene # 19, p. 4.
  10. ↑ Paul Burgdorf: The Western - An Analysis of American Western Comics taking into account the intermedia dependencies , in: Comixene # 19, p. 5.
  11. ↑ Paul Burgdorf: The Western - An Analysis of American Western Comics taking into account the intermedia dependencies , in: Comixene # 19, p. 5.
  12. ↑ Markus Kuhn, Irina Scheidgen, Nicola Valeska Weber (eds.): Film-scientific genre analysis. An introduction. de Gruyter, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-11-029699-0 , p. 391 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  13. ↑ Wolfgang J. Fuchs , Reinhold Reitberger : Comics manual , ISBN 3-499-16215-6 , Reinbek bei Hamburg 1978, p. 133f.
  14. ^ Paul Burgdorf: The Western - An analysis of American western comics taking into account the intermedia dependencies , in: Comixene # 19, p. 4f.
  15. ↑ Wolfgang J. Fuchs , Reinhold Reitberger : Comics Manual , ISBN 3-499-16215-6 , Reinbek bei Hamburg 1978, p. 129f.