Cowboys and Supermen?

I think the why is just that the Western was, until a few decades ago, a very popular genre. The comics were uneven, but mostly because of the short story type format -- that doesn't seem to have hurt TV shows much, but the stories usually seemed too quick and simple. There weren't as many two-parters as in the superhero comics, much less an equivalent to the Kree/Skrull War or the Korvac Saga.

I don't recall if there was any sort of mini-resurgence in the 80s w/ the Young Gun movie(s), but maybe the acclaim of HBO's Deadwood is beginning another sort of giddyup?

Comic books I think predated the TV shows, or at least developed parallel to them -- there were early "movie tie-in" western comics.

The western keeps seeming like it's going to resurge -- Unforgiven, Lonesome Dove, etc., every once in awhile something comes along and people wonder if it's the first in an avalanche -- but I'm not sure it'll happen.

I think if westerns can just re-establish themselves w/out trying to take over the ground squatted on by the predominant dramas of choice (cf. the cop / court / hospital drama, AKA modern-day stuff), then it can do just fine. I also really don't ever see it being top dog again, though.

Also: The Quick and The Dead, which was more like a hyper-Western (& a movie I love more than I can say), though I don't think it did so well in the theatres as to have the sort of impact that an Unforgiven or Lonesome Dove could've had.

I wonder if the western's been avoided or failed to take hold in recent times because it's resolutely an American genre, which means less and less to Americans that don't have roots in America. Or maybe it's been ursurped by the kung-fu / samurai genres.

Along the way, we've had stuff like Quigley Down Under, Posse, Bad Girls, the Paul Hogan thing (I want to say Lightning Hopkins and that isn't it), and Geronimo fail, even though they're all at least slightly skewed from the norm.

I'm not sure a genre can re-establish itself when its success stories succeed because of being exceptions to classical notions, though -- or by building itself around antiheroes. It would need to establish new kinds of stories, new standards, and ironically the existing western establishment (what little of it there is, with their two or three shelves behind the romance section) would resist that.

xpost; that must be a Canadian thing -- the western market is pretty tiny, all in all

(... "but that goes through periodic bouts of popularity in movies," is what I meant to add.)

On the other hand, the initial rise in popularity of the Western matches up perfectly to the "organizational period" in American history -- the 1880s to the 1920s, roughly -- when American identity shifted from the regional level to the national. The close of the frontier in 1890 is a big part of that, and the genre is definitely tied up in all the manifest destiny, taming of the West, rugged individualist, self-sufficiency, Yankee know-how, stuff in the national mythology, stuff that hasn't been as popular or resonant in the last few decades.

(As far as Deadwood goes, look at how it fits into that: on the one hand, yeah, you have these "rugged individualists" making new lives in Deadwood, and the whole deal with Deadwood being outside federal law but eventually being reabsorbed into the Union is like a dramatized presentation of Turner's frontier thesis -- on the other hand, it's a far cry from cowboys vs Indians, almost everyone's a bit of a bastard, and the most successful settlers would be criminals anywhere else: that kind of falsely self-effacing take on national myth has been popular for about as long as the Western hasn't been.)

he points out that the legendification of actual real historical (but soon to be mythical) cowboy-type figures began almost instantly, with newspaper reports of the trial - did you know that the earps had to go to court after the ok corral!? - and in fact pretty much with the lawyers inventing good-guy reasons for lawless incidents which pissed a lot of local citizens off

(he quotes a particularly tart bit of editorial demystification from the time)

Funnily enough, the two best Western comics there are are both French: Blueberry and Lucky Luke.