Mothers, don't let your sons...
I love cowboys.
No, no, no.
I love cowboys.
That's clearly not surprising from a chap who is writing Western comics but hang with me a moment.
Violent, sexy, morally dicey, there's something about them that colonized my imagination. Tough guys, standing up to bullies, not interested in the Good thing, willing to do the Right thing, which is way more interesting to me. Men who achieve fine things through methods murderous. Oh yes. These men were not afraid, not intimidated, ready to carve out justice with iron and fist.
It meant something to young Christian and no mistake.
When I was a little kid, I lived in Canberra, Australia, on the outskirts. Back then, that city just ended like a curtain came down. Suburb, suburb, bush. If you've never been to Australia, one of the things you'll never realise is how prevalent the bush is. Leave a city and there it is. It goes on forever, scrubs and thick black trees. Dryness clings to everything. Long low mountains that arch out of the earth slow and strong. The colours change by the hour, going blacker and redder and stranger.
Cowboy movies reminded me of where I lived. Frontiers. Look one way, schools and shops. Turn the other, scoria and heat as far as I could ever see. Its funny, so much early Australian art, done by pale Victorian Englishmen involves pallid, overdressed figures staring into illimitable horizons, overwhelmed by scale. John Ford and Sam Fuller movies have that same feeling of overwhelming scope of land. Cowboys were there from the start for me and living big inside of my brain.
Lets move forward a few years and I started digging history. All sorts. Didn't matter what or where. WWII, Ancient Rome, the waves of invaders poor old England endured, a bad day at the post office in Dublin and all of it. Seriously, I'm super fun at parties... Then I sort of rediscovered cowboys. See, when you read history you have to balance out the stories of great men and women with understanding social orders, historical contexts, all that stuff. Very interesting of course but sometimes you just want to read a story about a badass just putting the beat down on a scumbag.
My friends, Western history is full of it. My spiritual hero Doc Holliday and his nemesis, Johnny Ringo, his romance with Big Nose Kate... my god. Fascinating man. The violent, smart, haunted John Wesley Hardin, Bass Reeves, the first black Marshall and genuine tough guy. Black Jack Ketchum, the little man with the soul of steel, Elfego Baca and all the rest. Love 'em. Read about them. Violent, brave men stamping their mark on history.
Yet, a look under the surface strips these guys of their myth. Big Nose Kate never knocked out a sheriff and saved her man from a burning building. The Irish gentleman Bat Masterson killed one guy in a gunfight. Wyatt Earp was as much a criminal as he was a lawman. Then there's the destruction of the Native Americans, the Trail of Tears, the scum Van Buren, the Mexican-American war and more and more. Don't look at cowboys in the light of truth if you want grand stories. It ain't there.
Sooner or later, I wanted to write about cowboys. About a frontier land, about a tough man dealing justice, about finding his way between Right and Good.
From the seventies onwards, movies and books became what they called 'revisionist'. The idea was that cowboys became bad guys and the Indians became the noble and put upon victims of white Imperialism. There's two problems with that. Firstly, it is swapping one didacticism for another. Secondly, academia comes along and says that finally the genre is finally growing up. As is usual, literature majors jump up and down, desperate to become taste-makers, never realising they are plain fucking wrong. Westerns have a long history of moral ambiguity and interest in opposing viewpoints. But revisionism muddies the waters. Things swung so firmly towards the revisionist point of view that I can't imagine writing a genuinely newly rebellious cowboy book without handsome white guys getting saved by the fucking cavalry.
No one wants to be a propagandist, writing about the West as a cheerleader for industry and cleruchy and ignoring all the ground that was legitimately made up by the revisionist movement. Then again, writing something boring and depressing strikes me as outside my interests as a fiction writer.
Wanting to write something about cowboys, wanting to write about grand figures of violence and justice, feeling weirdly hobbled by prevailing literary opinions, there I was, sort of trapped.
Then I remembered something. I love cowboys, I love history but... oh yeah, I'm a geek!
Which means I also love monsters. And magic.
No, no, no.
I love cowboys.
That's clearly not surprising from a chap who is writing Western comics but hang with me a moment.
Violent, sexy, morally dicey, there's something about them that colonized my imagination. Tough guys, standing up to bullies, not interested in the Good thing, willing to do the Right thing, which is way more interesting to me. Men who achieve fine things through methods murderous. Oh yes. These men were not afraid, not intimidated, ready to carve out justice with iron and fist.
It meant something to young Christian and no mistake.
When I was a little kid, I lived in Canberra, Australia, on the outskirts. Back then, that city just ended like a curtain came down. Suburb, suburb, bush. If you've never been to Australia, one of the things you'll never realise is how prevalent the bush is. Leave a city and there it is. It goes on forever, scrubs and thick black trees. Dryness clings to everything. Long low mountains that arch out of the earth slow and strong. The colours change by the hour, going blacker and redder and stranger.
Cowboy movies reminded me of where I lived. Frontiers. Look one way, schools and shops. Turn the other, scoria and heat as far as I could ever see. Its funny, so much early Australian art, done by pale Victorian Englishmen involves pallid, overdressed figures staring into illimitable horizons, overwhelmed by scale. John Ford and Sam Fuller movies have that same feeling of overwhelming scope of land. Cowboys were there from the start for me and living big inside of my brain.
Lets move forward a few years and I started digging history. All sorts. Didn't matter what or where. WWII, Ancient Rome, the waves of invaders poor old England endured, a bad day at the post office in Dublin and all of it. Seriously, I'm super fun at parties... Then I sort of rediscovered cowboys. See, when you read history you have to balance out the stories of great men and women with understanding social orders, historical contexts, all that stuff. Very interesting of course but sometimes you just want to read a story about a badass just putting the beat down on a scumbag.
My friends, Western history is full of it. My spiritual hero Doc Holliday and his nemesis, Johnny Ringo, his romance with Big Nose Kate... my god. Fascinating man. The violent, smart, haunted John Wesley Hardin, Bass Reeves, the first black Marshall and genuine tough guy. Black Jack Ketchum, the little man with the soul of steel, Elfego Baca and all the rest. Love 'em. Read about them. Violent, brave men stamping their mark on history.
Yet, a look under the surface strips these guys of their myth. Big Nose Kate never knocked out a sheriff and saved her man from a burning building. The Irish gentleman Bat Masterson killed one guy in a gunfight. Wyatt Earp was as much a criminal as he was a lawman. Then there's the destruction of the Native Americans, the Trail of Tears, the scum Van Buren, the Mexican-American war and more and more. Don't look at cowboys in the light of truth if you want grand stories. It ain't there.
Sooner or later, I wanted to write about cowboys. About a frontier land, about a tough man dealing justice, about finding his way between Right and Good.
From the seventies onwards, movies and books became what they called 'revisionist'. The idea was that cowboys became bad guys and the Indians became the noble and put upon victims of white Imperialism. There's two problems with that. Firstly, it is swapping one didacticism for another. Secondly, academia comes along and says that finally the genre is finally growing up. As is usual, literature majors jump up and down, desperate to become taste-makers, never realising they are plain fucking wrong. Westerns have a long history of moral ambiguity and interest in opposing viewpoints. But revisionism muddies the waters. Things swung so firmly towards the revisionist point of view that I can't imagine writing a genuinely newly rebellious cowboy book without handsome white guys getting saved by the fucking cavalry.
No one wants to be a propagandist, writing about the West as a cheerleader for industry and cleruchy and ignoring all the ground that was legitimately made up by the revisionist movement. Then again, writing something boring and depressing strikes me as outside my interests as a fiction writer.
Wanting to write something about cowboys, wanting to write about grand figures of violence and justice, feeling weirdly hobbled by prevailing literary opinions, there I was, sort of trapped.
Then I remembered something. I love cowboys, I love history but... oh yeah, I'm a geek!
Which means I also love monsters. And magic.
Labels: Backstory, Cowboy Love, History
