A Western begins long before anyone draws a horse.
It begins in the books a future writer reads, the films that linger after the credits, the family stories that complicate a schoolroom history lesson. Sometimes it begins in an English seminar in New Jersey. Sometimes it takes shape through conversations with young people in Arizona, or at a drawing table in Britain, where an artist learns how much a face can disclose without a speech balloon.
Those beginnings help explain the richness of the comics gathering around the Western today. The genre has become a meeting place for creators with markedly different educations, cultural inheritances and professional experiences. Their work carries those differences into the landscape.
September’s releases offer a particularly revealing collection: the Indigenous anthology You Are On Native Land, Chris Condon and Jacob Phillips’ return to That Texas Blood, and another chapter of Joe Pruett and Marcelo Frusin’s Viking Moon. Michael Walsh’s forthcoming Jonah Hex and the Shadow of Death, scheduled for October 7, adds an aging gunfighter to the conversation. Together, these projects invite a closer look at the people deciding what the frontier can hold.
The most compelling discoveries emerge when we follow their influences into the work itself.
Consider Chris Condon, whose fictional Texas has roots in a university classroom. A member of Montclair State University’s class of 2020, Condon completed his degree as an English major after professional work had already complicated his route through higher education. He wanted to become the first person in his family to graduate from college. His account of returning to study contains a detail any novelist might envy: ideas for the first major That Texas Blood arc, A Brother’s Conscience, developed while he was rereading Hamlet.
Condon has explicitly connected his academic reading and research to the formation of his writing style. The connection makes artistic sense. Shakespeare’s tragedy offers an education in family obligation, compromised judgment and the unpleasant discovery that the past has made arrangements for your future. These are fertile concerns for a crime story rooted in a place where everyone appears to know somebody’s brother.
In That Texas Blood: Hell Comes to Allison Ranch, which began on September 23, Sheriff Joe Bob Coates and Deputy Wilson Hart arrive at an immensely wealthy ranch as family grievances threaten to become open warfare. The story takes place on March 19, 2003. That historical placement invites readers to consider the relationship between private power, public authority and the national atmosphere surrounding the invasion of Iraq. This is an interpretive possibility built into the setting, with the local drama retaining its own human scale.
A ranch is an especially effective setting for such a story. Acreage gives family feeling a physical boundary. Inheritance can be counted, fenced and fought over. A grievance has somewhere to live.
Condon’s collaborator gives those abstractions rooms, roads and faces. Jacob Phillips grew up surrounded by comics through his father, the celebrated artist Sean Phillips. At eleven, Jacob produced a comic called Roboy, printed roughly twenty-five copies at home and sold them from his father’s table at Brighton Comic Con. An early lesson in publishing, presumably including the discovery that being an author also involves standing behind a table.
He subsequently studied illustration at university in Manchester and worked for clients including the BBC and Arrow Video. His reading expanded toward Adrian Tomine and Daniel Clowes. An early professional comics project, Jack & Lucy, developed with writer Rachael Smith, drew upon workshops with teenagers discussing mental health. That trajectory places commercial illustration, intimate character observation and community storytelling alongside his experience coloring crime comics.
The partnership’s methods become especially clear in The Enfield Gang Massacre, their nineteenth-century excursion into the history of the same fictional county. Condon and Phillips agreed on a predominantly three-panel page structure, giving the images a broad, cinematic rhythm. Phillips also discussed varying his inking methods to distinguish historical periods, including traditional inks for scenes set in 1981 in an earlier That Texas Blood arc.
Here, influence becomes a practical decision. The widescreen Western changes the shape of the page. Historical distance changes the mark of the pen. Atmosphere emerges through deliberate choices that readers may feel before they consciously notice them.
A different set of formative experiences informs You Are On Native Land. Published by Mad Cave on September 15, the anthology brings together numerous Indigenous creators and includes a reprint of Tribal Force #1. The publisher states that all profits will go to Not Our Native Daughters, a Native-led, survivor-led organization addressing the crisis of missing, murdered and exploited Indigenous women and girls.
The collection belongs in this discussion through its engagement with land, history and authorship. Its contributors also deserve to be understood within their own artistic traditions and ambitions. An Americana readership can encounter their work without expecting it to revolve around the cowboy.
Jon Proudstar’s Tribal Force, co-created with artist Ryan Huna Smith in 1996, offers a powerful example. Proudstar has described childhood superhero reading as a source of moral guidance. Later, his work counseling survivors of child abuse and young offenders, including young people from communities near Tucson, helped shape his understanding of what stories could offer.
His characters’ difficult histories grew from that experience. He also resisted relinquishing control when larger publishers expressed interest, wanting to protect the stories he intended to tell. The resulting professional path included a prolonged interruption caused by limited funding.
That history changes the significance of the reprint. Readers encounter an earlier effort to give Native children heroes whose lives could speak to their own. They also encounter the persistence required to keep such a project alive. The anthology connects generations of creative work, allowing an independent comic from the 1990s to enter a new conversation about cultural continuity.
Steph Littlebird brings another kind of training. An enrolled member of Oregon’s Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, she earned her BFA in painting and printmaking at Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2015, having returned to education after ten years away. She has identified a course taught by Sarah Sentilles, examining privilege and the ethics of art, as particularly influential in developing her sense of what an artist could address.
Her subsequent career encompasses illustration, writing and curatorial work. In discussing her illustrations for Carole Lindstrom’s My Powerful Hair, Littlebird connected its account of boarding-school history to experiences within her own family and community. Her practice brings formal visual training into close contact with questions of memory, representation and responsibility.
Fellow contributor Gord Hill provides a further perspective. A Kwakwaka’wakw artist and author, Hill has named influences including Mohawk artist Louis Karoniaktajeh Hall, Gitxsan artist Art Wilson, comics journalist Joe Sacco, and Kwakwaka’wakw artists Tony Hunt and Mark Henderson. His work includes The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book and The Anti-Capitalist Resistance Comic Book. These references reveal an artistic education shaped by political history, Indigenous visual traditions and the possibilities of drawn reportage.
The anthology’s range matters. Indigenous creators have distinct nations, experiences, aesthetics and political commitments. Their proximity within one book allows those differences to remain visible.
Contributor Arihhonni “Honni” Cannon Clay David describes his illustrations as contemporary treatments of Flying Head legends, imagining young people confronting terrifying beings while emphasizing their resilience. His stated purpose links inherited stories to living communities. Readers are invited into a relationship between generations, with young people occupying the imaginative present.
Michael Walsh approaches the haunted frontier through a career steeped in genre storytelling. The writer and artist, from Southern Ontario, has worked across major commercial properties and developed a substantial horror practice through The Silver Coin, Universal Monsters: Frankenstein and Exquisite Corpses. His professional biography describes fifteen years of comics credits, alongside extensive illustration work for Magic: The Gathering.
For Jonah Hex and the Shadow of Death, Walsh has identified several ingredients directly. He admires the Weird Western possibilities demonstrated by Joe R. Lansdale’s Jonah Hex stories. He is drawn to the frontier’s isolation, darkness and limited means of communication. Most revealingly, he connects the older Hex’s remorse to his own experience of reconsidering youthful behavior.
The forthcoming story finds Hex in Ashecott, where a supernatural arrival disturbs his quieter existence. Walsh writes and draws the series, with colors by Toni-Marie Griffin. Its place within DC’s main continuity also imposes limits on graphic violence, encouraging careful decisions about how dread is generated.
These ingredients suggest a Western interested in the long emotional life of an action. A gunfight ends quickly. The person who survives may have decades to reconsider it.
That possibility gives an aging character unusual dramatic value. Experience can deepen judgment while making earlier certainties harder to defend. Walsh’s premise allows the genre’s familiar machinery of pursuit and danger to carry an intimate question: how does a person live with the accumulated knowledge of himself?
Joe Pruett’s Viking Moon emerged through a wonderfully concrete creative accident. Artist Jordan Raskin produced an image of a werewolf amid fallen fighters while preparing for a Werewolf by Night story Pruett had written for Marvel’s 2010 Tomb of Terror. The image lodged in Pruett’s imagination and eventually developed into a confrontation between Vikings and werewolves.
The idea then waited. Pruett explained that his responsibilities as publisher at AfterShock left little space for writing. Returning to freelance work allowed him to pursue the project, and Marcelo Frusin agreed to collaborate. Frusin’s credits, including Hellblazer and Loveless, bring relevant experience in supernatural unease and Western violence.
This is a useful glimpse into how comics are made. A single image provides the initial charge. Years of professional obligations delay it. A collaborator finally gives the concept a form in which it can proceed.
Because Viking Moon imagines Norse settlement in North America, its historical fantasy also raises questions about how Indigenous inhabitants are characterized. One review of its fourth issue criticized their cultural generalization. That represents an individual critical assessment; the broader question it raises is valuable. When a story borrows a historical encounter, how much specificity does it give the people on every side of it?
A richly imagined setting depends on those distinctions. Language, kinship, place and belief can provide the very details that make fantasy persuasive. Research gives the imagination something substantial to work with.
Across these books, the frontier emerges from many kinds of apprenticeship: Condon’s literary study, Phillips’ illustration and observational work, Proudstar’s engagement with young people, Littlebird’s art education and family history, Hill’s political and artistic influences, Walsh’s sustained exploration of horror, and Pruett’s long experience moving between writing and publishing.
Knowing those backgrounds makes the work more inviting. We can see how an influence becomes a panel, how a memory becomes a character, how a professional constraint helps determine the shape of a story.
The pleasures of the Western remain abundant: immense skies, difficult journeys, dangerous strangers and the suspicion that somebody has concealed something important at the ranch. These creators bring their own histories to those pleasures. The landscape grows deeper because we begin to recognize the lives that went into drawing it.