"Oh, they're tough, mighty tough, in the west"

I used to read westerns, well maybe for a year or so I read 'em, and in the Campbellian way, read every possible author on the market and analyzed the history of the whole thing. But I got the impression I was supposed to be reading science fiction. The whole 'comics fandom' thing was understood by everybody in it to be a sub category of sci-fi. Then in the seventies it became fantasy. I remember one fanzine defining its content as 'all the stuff we're interested in', and I thought: how would you know what I'm interested in? There was a sense of one thing connecting inevitably to another. I never got that. In fact, I've never got the idea of 'genre fiction' either. I mean, as a thing to which you pledge some kind of allegiance. Anyway, for a year, Westerns were for me. I spent an hour this morning trying to google up the cover of a book I owned way back when I was fifteen.



It wasn't easy because I couldn't even remember the author's name. All I could recall is that it was painted by Gino d'Achille. It was in '69, a few years before he came to the attention of American collectors with his painted covers for the Edgar Rice Burroughs books. Looking at those now, I care for none of them. But I did find my cover in the end and I still love it as much as when I once owned that little paperback written by Matt Chisholm. A British writer of westerns (real name peter Christopher Watts), with a painted cover by an Italian; indeed, isn't that cover just saturated with the stylings of the spaghetti western.

The Comic book was my customary means of expression, so I took Chisholm's Apache rogue, Gato, and drew a couple of 13 page stories around him, in full colour. This was in 1971. Don't expect more than juvenlia here, and by the end of the second story it's starting to look too much like Buscema's Conan (perhaps I had shifted my genre-allegiance by then.) Also, and alas, I had a habit then of drawing the action scenes as though I was taking part in them. It was many years before I'd learn to take pains over all aspects of the work. Still, one or two pages show a little promise.



I only located the links for Chisholm (whose name I had forgotten) due to the fact that I named one of the characters in this story after him.

The Black Diamond Detective Agency (my upcoming book from First Second Books- see yesterday's post) is not really a western, but it starts quite westerly, in Missouri in 1899, and then shifts to Chicago and becomes a gangster story (if you need to understand fiction in these terms). It's really more about the arrival of the train than the fate of the horse, but I find it interesting that I seem to have subconsciously remembered that horse from the cover above when i drew this silent sequence in Diamond. If I'd been more conscious of it, I'd have made more of the horse no doubt, perhaps going so far as to swipe that perfectly observed leg in the air in the d'Achille painting. But then I'd have been too ashamed to show the original here.



The title of this post comes from a 1937 hit sung by British jazzman Nat Gonella
"Oh, they're tough, mighty tough, in the west,
and their beards are thicker than an eagle's nest.
Their dentists have bad manners
and they pull out teeth with spanners..."

I have for a long time been of the opinion that this song was the inspiration for the British comic strip character Desperate Dan, which started in december of the same year.