Weird West

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"Weird West" was originally a film term, now used in a range of media, to describe a combination of the western with another genre. Examples include Deadlands (western/horror), The Wild Wild West (western/steampunk), Jonah Hex (western/superhero), Firefly (western/space opera), Cowboy Bebop (western/science fiction) and many others.

Cowboys and gunfighters are iconic American heroes and using them as heroes in other milieus was only natural. The western uses themes that are compatible with the themes found in other genres. Like science fiction stories set on distant planets, westerns use the themes of unknown wilderness and the survival of pioneers. Westerns also offer stories of struggles to maintain social order in a lawless environment.

This leads naturally into the science fiction western where anachronistic science is injected into a western setting usually in a steampunk manner. Given that space is the final frontier it is also unsuprising that the themes that originated in westerns re-appear in science fiction too, resulting in the space western.

The supernatural menaces of horror fiction are easy to inject into this setting, creating the horror western. Writer G.W. Thomas has described how the two combine: "Unlike many other cross-genre tales, the weird western uses both elements but with very little loss of distinction. The western setting is decidedly 'western' and the horror elements are obviously 'horror.'"

The superhero western grew out of the horror western as Jonah Hex first made an appearance in Weird Western Tales before getting his eponymous own series which went very weird in the hands of leading Weird West author Joe R. Lansdale. Hex has appeared alongside more obvious superheroes and has inspired other stories in which the JLA are shown in the wild west (in the animated series and in the Elseworlds outting Justice Riders). Recently, Marvel have introduced their own western superhero in the shape of Vegas.

The Weird West also accommodates less easily classified genres including alternate history, speculative fiction and more fantastical elements.

If anything, the Weird West genre is becoming more popular. It shows the potential to inject new life at a time when few authors are working with traditional western stories.

[edit] Fiction

The term is of recent coinage, but the idea of crossing genres goes back to at least the hey day of pulp magazines. There was at least one series character who could be classified as a Weird West character. Lee Winters was a deputy whose adventures often involved ghosts, sorcery and creatures from Greek mythology. The Winters stories were published under the name Lon Williams in the 1930s. Williams seems to have been a pseudonym or a publisher's house name for one or more unknown authors. A few years earlier, one of the oddest of all western characters, Six-Gun Gorilla, appeared. This was an actual gorilla who strapped on a pair of Colts to avenge the death of the kindly prospector who had raised it. His adventures appeared in the pulps Adventure and Wizard.

There have also been various Weird West novels including Joe R. Lansdale's Dead in the West. In this book an unjustly lynched Indian shaman curses the town of Mud Creek, Texas. After dark the dead rise and only the Reverend Jebediah Mercer can save the inhabitants.

Examples include:

• Dead in the West (by Joe R. Lansdale, 1986, ISBN 0917053044, 1994, ISBN 1892300001, 2005, ISBN 1597800147)
• Walking Wolf: A Weird Western (by Nancy A. Collins, 1995, ISBN 0929480430)
• Mad Amos (by Alan Dean Foster, 1996, ISBN 0345393627)
• Weird Western Adventures of Haakon Jones (by Aaron B. Larson, 1999, ISBN 1552461645)
• Skull Full of Spurs: A Roundup of Weird Westerns (anthology, 2000, ISBN 0966262913)
• Dead Man's Hand: Five Tales of the Weird West (by Nancy A. Collins, 2004, ISBN 1588468755)
• The Two Devils (by David B. Riley, 2005, ISBN 1885093403)
• Weird Trails (anthology, December 2006, ISBN 0971908109)
• Stephen King's Dark Tower saga

[edit] TV

In the 1960s, the television series The Wild Wild West brought elements of spy stories and science fiction to the Old West. The cartoon adventures of the Lone Ranger followed suit by pitting the famous western hero against mad scientists and other villains not often found in western stories. Rod Serling was fond of westerns and often used them as settings for his Twilight Zone stories. Kung Fu is another famous example of an unorthodox western considering it's about the adventures of a fugitive shaolin monk, armed only with the show's eponymous martial art skill.

Examples include:

• The Wild Wild West (1965-1969)
• The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. (1993-1994)
• Cowboy Bebop (1998)
• Firefly (2002)
• Justice League Unlimited: "The Once and Future Thing, Part 1: Weird Western Tales" (2005)

[edit] Comics

In comic books a number of heroes had adventures involving monsters, aliens, and costumed supervillains. Marvel Comics characters such as Kid Colt, Rawhide Kid, and Two-Gun Kid all had such adventures. Where Marvel went in for supervillains, DC Comics added more of a horror element to their stories such as Jonah Hex. The DC character Tomahawk could also be termed a hero of the Weird West, though his adventures were set in the colonies during the time of the American Revolution.

Examples include:

• American Gothic, by Ian Edginton and Mike Collins
• The Big Book of the Weird Wild West: How the West Was Really Won!
• Billy the Kid's Old-Timey Oddities, by Eric Powell and Kyle Holtz (Dark Horse Comics, 2006, ISBN 1-59307-448-4) [1]
• Cowboys & Aliens [2] [3] [4]
• Daisy Kutter by Kazu Kibuishi
• Dead West [5] [6]
• Dead in the West, by Joe R. Lansdale and Neal Barrett Jr., with artist Jack Jackson (2-issue mini-series, Dark Horse Comics, 1993) [7]
• Desperadoes
• El Diablo
• Iron West, by Doug TenNapel
• Jonah Hex
• Justice Riders (DC Comics Elseworlds) by Chuck Dixon and J.H. Williams III
• Lobo Annual #2: "A Fistful of Bastiches"
• The Rawhide Kid
• Season of the Reaper
• Strangeways, solicited by Speakeasy Comics before they closed.
• Sundown: Arizona, by Arcana Studios [8] [9]
• The Transformers: Evolutions
• Weird Western Tales
• The Wicked West

[edit] Films

In movies, notable Weird West stories include The Valley of Gwangi (1969) which used special effects wizard Ray Harryhausen's talents to pit cowboys against dinosaurs. Billy the Kid vs. Dracula (1966) saw the legendary outlaw Billy the Kid fighting against the notorious vampire. The same year, Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter paired another famous outlaw with another fictional horror character.

Examples include:

• Teenage Monster (1958)
• Curse of the Undead (1959)
• Billy the Kid vs. Dracula (1966)
• Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter (1966)
• The Valley of Gwangi (1969)
• The Beast of Hollow Mountain (1956)
• El Topo (1970)
• High Plains Drifter (1973)
• Westworld (1973)
• Outland (1981)
• Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann (1982)
• Pale Rider (1985)
• Near Dark (1987)
• Ghost Town (1988)
• Back to the Future Part III (1990)
• Grim Prairie Tales (1990)
• Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat (1991)
• Mad at the Moon (1992)
• Uninvited (1993)
• Oblivion (1994)
• Cannibal! The Musical (1996)
• Blood Trail (1997)
• Purgatory (1999)
• Ravenous (1999)
• Wild Wild West (1999)
• From Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangman's Daughter (2000)
• The Man with No Eyes (2001)
• Legend of the Phantom Rider (2002)
• Tremors 4: The Legend Begins (2004)
• Serenity (2005)
• After Sundown (2006)
• The Quick and the Undead (2006)
• Wanted: Undead or Alive (2007)

[edit] Games

One of the most famous examples of the pen-and-paper variety is the horror-hybrid, Deadlands. Set in an alternate 1870s America, the game draws heavily on gothic horror conventions and old Native American lore to derive its sense of the supernatural. Characters can get involved in situations ranging from banks heists to shoot-outs involving vampires and zombies over the course of their adventures.

Video games also use this same motif, one of the earliest horror-western games being SilverLoad for the PlayStation. The game has a variety of classic horror tropes in it, ranging from werewolves and vampires, to Satanic cults, that the player must contend with nothing more than a trusty six-gun at his hip. In this same vein is the modern PS2/Xbox first-person shooter, Darkwatch, in which the protagonist is himself a vampire, fighting through the west for either his own redemption, or furthering his own damnation.

A game which is a mix of straight western with a small amount of horror thrown in is the PS2 game Red Dead Revolver. It mostly follows a straight path, using many tropes made popular in the films of Sergio Leone for its basis, yet during a couple of levels throws in horror-related adjuncts, such as an evil carnival, or a ghost town where the bosses are implied to have either murdered the townsfolk, or to be dead themselves (such as a gunslinger who was hanged, but appears to fight once more, entering ghostly white and with the remnants of the noose still around his neck).

Examples include:

• Darkwatch
• Deadlands
• Red Dead Revolver
• SilverLoad

[edit] See also

• Cross-genre, of which Weird West is a key example
• List of steampunk works, as a number of the examples veer into this area
• Science fiction Western, a Weird West sub-genre with science-fiction themes in an Old West setting
• Space western, the application of western themes to a science-fiction frontier setting which has some crossover with the Weird West genre
• Western genre in other media

[edit] External links

• The Wild, Weird West, Part One and Part Two, Horror-Wood e-zine, 2002
• Crossing Horror: Using Horror in Other Genres, by G.W. Thomas
• Steampunk Central - The Home of Western Steampunk