Comics Rainbow - All-Star Western

One of the major trends of 2015 was a revival of the long abandoned genre of the American Western.  To a degree this has been building in the background for a while with major hit like Django Unchained, well regarded entries like True Grit, and even notable failures like Jonah Hex or Lone Ranger.  This year marked a full on explosion of the revival however with Revenant, Hateful 8, Ridiculous 6, Slow West, and Bone Tomahawk.  Given that two of those movies just came out and Jane Got A Gun is releasing soon I figured it’d be a good time to look at the Western and cowboy heroes of DC comics. 

DC has pretty much always been more than just its superheroes, mainly thanks to the decade it spent in the ‘50s cranking out war comics, cowboy comics, weird science stories, and horror comics.  Most of those elements were revived in the ‘70s to mass acclaim and their Western heroes were key among them, leading o a mass stable of gunslingers, bounty hunters, and sheriffs all under the DC banner in all their shames, shades, and successes. 

The Trigger Twins are one of the stranger installments on this list.  They date back to DC’s run of ‘50s cowboy stories but the version I’m focusing on are a lot more recent, which is why they get as much disdain as they do.  In the early ‘90s a new version of them with no visual difference from the originals popped up in Detective Comics as cowboy Batman villains.  It was incredibly stupid and honestly one of the most embarrassing Batman stories you’ll ever read.  It’s like throwing Batman, specifically dark and violent ‘90s Batman, against a pair of John Wayne villains and expecting it to gel perfectly.  This was actually the second time someone made the ill-fated mistake of throwing Batman up against a cowboy.  

The first time was in the Batman 1966 show where he fought the villainous Shame, a new bad guy made up to reflect the then topical Western film Shane.  Even as someone who likes the 1966 show it’s a pretty weird and less than stellar episode given how topical it was trying to be, seriously there’s a part that’s overtly parodying Shane that you will not understand without seeing that film. 

As for the Trigger Twins maybe their reputation would’ve survived if they had interesting original adventures but their claim to fame was being the Olsen twins of the Old West.  Essentially all their stories revolved around swapping places with one another to deal with Old West shenanigans.  The two eventually came back for one last hurrah as Black Lantern zombies but even that was just kind of awkward and unimpressive. 

Okay, this one is a bit of a cheat but I’d be remise not to mention my favorite damn thing ever.  The Justice Riders are from a one-shot comic under DC’s Elseworlds imprint.  Elseworlds are stories that star major characters but alters them in some way that wouldn’t fit, stuff like having Superman being a Soviet supersoldier or Batman become Dracula.  Justice Riders was a one-shot that reimagined a version of the Justice League into old west heroes.  They were led by Diana Prince, the wonder woman Sheriff of Paradise falls, and included a bounty hunter Martian Manhunter, sheriff Kid Flash, Native American Hawkman, the maverick gambler Booster Gold, and the crazy inventor Blue Beetle. 

Even though the team only road together one time they were a kick-ass group and DC has brought them back a lot in recent years as part of their multiverse.  I couldn’t say exactly why I like them so much other than that they’re just really well imagined.  Every body has a fleshed out identity and back-story steeped in the mythos of both DC Comics and the Western genre, plus nobody looks watered down.  Seriously, the amazing artwork is just incredible in this comic.  I might give them a full review down the line if the Western trend sticks around. 

You should really just skip this section.  Nighthawk and Cinnamon are the best argument I can make for comic book continuity being a danger rather than a feature.  Much like the Trigger Twins they’re an instance of DC making the mistake of trying to force their classic characters into a modern context and failing at it miserably.  Previously the two were a male/female gunslinger team who happened to be married.  They weren’t like extremely popular or anything but they did decently well and were useful as sort of background filler in a lot of DC Western adventures around the more interesting characters.  Then: stupidity happened, by which I mean we need to talk about the history of Hawkman.

When Hawkman was reintroduced into DC continuity for the third time in the early 2000s it was re-established that he and his wife Hawkgirl were the reincarnations of an Ancient Egyptian Pharaoh and his queen.  However, the new wrinkle was that they weren’t the first reincarnation and the two had been reborn across all of history in multiple time periods.  So it came that Nighthawk and Cinnamon were REALLY Old West versions of Hawkman and Hawkgirl without the flight powers and believe me: it’s absolutely as stupid as that sounds.  It was basically an attempt to retcon these fairly forgotten western heroes into something interesting by making them needlessly complicated and impenetrable. 

Don’t let the movie version of this character fool you: Jonah Hex is easily the best cowboy hero of DC comics and probably fiction overall if we’re being honest.  He’s a former confederate soldier turned bounty hunter after the Civil War with a massive scarred up face that’s always left mysterious.  He’s the coldest killer in the old west and one of the deadliest men to ever live but he’s also a major softy who helps out women and kids.  He’s sort of the perfect Man With No Name old west hero, a stone cold killer with his own moral code, a true bastard but an unfortunate necessity of the world that birthed him because he’s the only man bad enough to put much worse men in the ground.  

Of all the DC western heroes to pop back up during the ‘70s revival Jonah Hex was the most successful and it’s easy to see why given how much he came to embody the Spaghetti Westerns of the time.  As a result he’s continually come back for new series, including a top notch modern Western comic that was published in the 2000s and is a must read for any fan of Westerns.  There was also a brief lived mini-series where they dropped him into the distant future as a sort of Mad Max rip-off called Hex that you’d best avoid, just thought I’d let you know about it. 

The weird thing about a lot of DC’s bigger name Western heroes is that they came out of an attempt to blend the strange adventure fiction of the ‘50s with the cowboy craze of the time.  Folks like Jonah Hex, Scalp Hunter, and the blue shade’s topic El Diablo, were all born from the same title: Weird Western Tales.  However, El Diablo is the only overtly mystic character to arise from this particular stew as he sports a straight up paranormal fantasy origin story crossed with the kind of Golden age Western arc you’d see in Lone Ranger or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.  El Diablo was a Mexican bank teller named Lazarus Lane who, after getting struck by lightning while fighting off bank robbers, became the embodiment for a spirit of vengeance known as El Diablo.  The DC Universe is actually pretty replete with supernatural embodiments of the concept of revenge like the Spectre, Eclipso, and Crimson Avenger so chalk this up as a good example of blending past characters and modern continuity. 

El Diablo has never really got his due for how cool a character he is with his slick black and red costume and bullwhip but he’s easily one of the most interesting and rich western heroes.  I think the big problem is that people tend to run from his more supernatural elements when really they’re what make him great as he’s essentially cowboy Ghost Rider/Spawn. 

Super Chief is one of those very cool looking if not terribly interesting or well-developed comic characters that tend to populate so much of the medium.  His design with a big buffalo head and that cool glowing medallion is awesome as is his whole hour of super powers even if it was originally founded on some regrettable “native magics” claptrap.  He first popped up as a back-up feature in the ‘50s and then again as a back-up feature in the ‘70s.  Since then he’s always found his way to the forefront of DC events when a Western hero or something like that is needed like a bit of a bad penny.  His place in continuity is most similar to Nighthawk and Cinnamon in that he tends to pop up as a space filler character notable for looking cool and little else.  

He briefly flirted with relevance during the 52 maxi-series when he kicked off a new Justice League but whatever plans there might’ve been for him dried up quickly when he was unceremoniously kicked out of the comic.  Since then he popped up again on a cowboy themed Western universe but still has yet to really come to the forefront.  Given his incredibly limited, near non-existent back-story it’d be really easy to make him a stand out character, especially given his position as one of the few Native American superheroes. 

 Much like Jonah Hex was the perfect embodiment of ‘70s spaghetti westerns, Batlash is the perfect comic book embodiment of ‘50s golden age westerns like Stagecoach or Rio Bravo.  Though infused with a more youthful vigor and energy he’s cut from the same lovable heroic cloth as many of the heroes John Wayne or Steve McQueen portrayed in the genre.  Real name Bartholomew Lash he’s essentially a dopey lovable cowboy who tends to bumble his way into trouble due to his good looks and cavalier nature while relying on his charm and skill with a 6-gun to get him out of it again.  I think people tend to gravitate toward him because he’s rarely the star of his own story, or if he is it’s more of an action adventure comedy than anything else.  

Where Hex is usually involved hunting the scum of humanity or El Diablo fights bastards beyond the reach of men Batlash will fall into wedding or land grab schemes that can be solved as easily with a rigged game of poker or a well placed kiss as they could with a pair of fists and a pistol.  He tends to flitter in and out of more serious heroes story, wryly commenting on the adventure as he tags along to be the cause of and solution to untold amounts of shenanigans.  The fact that Channing Tatum is not currently playing this character in some form of adaptation is proof of our many failings as a species. 

Scalp Hunter is a lot like Jonah Hex in that they’re both tough as nails bounty hunters who emerged out of the Weird Western Tales imprint.  They both were also iterations of the gritty and stripped down western aesthetic that had come to dominate the genre in the ‘70s.  The big difference is in characterization and focus.  Where Jonah Hex was a very well realized character he often fell into adventures he was basically separate from, the thinking being that we’ll take this old west scenario, dress it up a bit, then drop the deadliest man ever born into the middle of it.  Scalp Hunter’s stories were based more on his identity, with him going toe-to-toe with bigots and even slavers on several occasions.  

This has the effect of making a lot of his adventures more unique and compelling as he’s basically an Old West X-Men without any powers, trapped protecting a world that fears and hates him.  He had a lot of great adventures in that period, especially the stuff with slavers that plays a lot like a Django Unchained rough draft.  The downside to all this is that where Jonah Hex was a well realized character dropped into adventures not his own Scalp Hunter is a very simplistic character dropped into stories very much his own.  His narratives are compelling but as a character there’s little else to him beyond being angry and often out for blood. 

Telulah Blackwood is one of the few modern DC western heroes to really work and stick in people’s minds.  She popped up in the mid-2000s Jonah Hex comic I mentioned earlier as a kind of mirror image of Hex’s character before morphing into a reoccurring character.  Her origin is a little iffy as it’s basically I spit on your grave but more extreme in that not only do the brigands rape her and kill her family she ends up a prostitute in the aftermath where the villains set upon her a second time.  It’s some serious overkill though after all that unpleasantness is out of the way she acquits herself well as a bad ass in her own right.  

The story is that she reinvents herself as a one-eyed gunslinger who makes up for her lack of depth perception with pure hate that overcomes any kind of pain the bullets of men might cause her.  As a sort of Furiosa type addition to the DC western canon she’s a kick-ass lady and it was a real shame she ended up as some damsel in distress prostitute in that Jonah Hex movie we all agreed to not acknowledge.  


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