Travis Hedge Coke
Patricia Highsmash
The Mighty Marvel Western in the 21st Century
by Travis Hedge Coke
Each with a main comic and shorter backup comics’ stories, comprise with the field guide to characters, The Mighty Marvel Western imprint, a selection to highlight old, rarely used old west characters Marvel owns. Many had been revised, in recent years, first in the John Ostrander/Leonardo Manco series, Blaze of Glory, and its sequel, Apache Skies, which put a revisionist lens over colorful outlaws and cowpoke superheroes. And, there had been a turn on the Rawhide Kid which straddled a classic visualization and the millennial tendency to eighteen plus variations of haha he’s gay!
Those revisions had complicated matters, with one comics writer gritting his teeth at the assumed slight of Marvel lying to the elderly penciler to get him to draw it (they had not), and other writers wishing to indulge in the sillier aspects of those characters’ traditional handlings and costumes, while audiences were sometimes simply left perplexed or unsure where the joke was, if there was a joke, or if it was a gag, what exactly was the gag.
In comics like Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers’ Black Homecoming and Tall Tale by Keith Giffen, Robert Loren Fleming, and associates, the West was made political, the myth of the west revealed as farcical, while Eduardo Barreto and Dan Slott brought contemporary superhero hinjinks into the mix and Jack Kirby, Dick Ayers, and Stan Lee featured in reprinted tales as ballast and anchor. Jeff Parker, Eric Powell… everyone came to play fair and play for real.
The Mighty Marvel Western puts all its cards on the table, unlike those earlier revivals, which held some close to the chest and maybe one up a sleeve.
It is hard to argue with, or to misconstrue, a Marshall Rogers’ comics page. That is communication as straight and pure as a bullet from a quality gun.
And, who writes a steely eye like Joe R. Lansdale? Lee Loughridge colors Lansdale’s short comic like oil and piss swimming around Rafa Garres’ line art.
She-Hulk and Dr Strange, Clea and mechanical flying horses do not add impurity to the political revisionism, to the setting right of wrongs made through mistake, hubris, racism or lingering anxious desperation for mythology. One of the reprints chosen for an issue is The Bat Strikes, a deadpan lark about a masked man who causes a whole town to quake with fear. His name is the Bat, but our hero, the Rawhide Kid, cannot help but to keep referring to him as the Bat Hombre.
Federica Manfredi makes those old flashy patterned and rawhide outfits look good, drawing her characters in a liminal existence, half set piece from an old show, half real barely-constructed town. The Arizona Girl encountering, with Kid Colt, stunted, green, shapeshifting aliens, it is implicit that the Old West, as it were, of the Marvel Universe, had to be just that way. These shoot-em-up lunatics and wild-times adventurers are a formational landscape for the America to come; ours and Marvel’s.
Like the Bat Hombre, there is a joke in there, somewhere with the sadness and the grief. The Bat was an old man trying to make up a myth to help people out. It gets him killed, and of course, our hero rides away.
Barreto, Manfredi, Englehart, Kirby, and Giffen all build a shape of a national conscience. An inability of a nation to reckon with itself, and the awkwardness sometimes left to forebears and to foreigners to reconcile what they can. Ain’t that the Old West?
To quote Stan Lee, “Although the truth is sometimes slow in revealing itself, it is always discovered in time — and so, today a grateful America knows how much the west really owes to that grim, angry man who rode alone!”
Or as Will Rogers had it, “I think the same fellow who started that self-made man gag started that other asinine expression, ‘100 per cent American.’”
About the same thing.
