Redrawing the Western charts a history of the Western genre in American comics from the late 1800s through the 1970s and beyond to show how they interacted with contemporaneous political and popular culture.

Encompassing the core years in which the genre was forged and prospered in a range of popular media, author William Grady engages with several key historical timeframes, from the origins of the Western in the nineteenth-century illustrated press, through fin de siècle anxieties with the closing of the frontier and the centrality of cowboy adventure across the interwar, postwar and high Cold War years, to the revisions of the genre in the wake of the Vietnam War and the Western’s continued vitality in contemporary comics storytelling.

In its study of stories about vengeance, conquest and justice on the contested frontier, Redrawing the Western highlights how the 'simplistic' conflicts common in Western adventure comics could disguise highly political undercurrents, providing young readers with new ways to think about the contemporaneous social and political milieu. Besides tracing the history, forms and politics of American Western comics in and around the twentieth century, William Grady offers an original reassessment of the important role of comics in the development of the Western genre, ranking them alongside popular fiction and film in the process.

University of Texas Press, 304pp, 15cm x 23cm, illustrated hardcover, 2024