Panel Vision - Justice Riders

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ne of the more surprising trends of the 2010s is that the Western is back from extinction.  This is mainly due to Tarantino re-introducing us to the versatility of the genre in 2012 with Django Unchained but it’s spread well beyond that.  There were more Westerns than superheroes movies in 2015 and now we’re gearing up for a double dose of the old west with the twin remakes of Magnificent Seven and West World.  This is hardly the first time Westerns have impacted the cultural landscape but the revival and the genre versatility it’s brought with it have certainly cast a new light on an old style. 

Even though this current crop of films are set in the Old West and feature cowboys and gun fights they all come with additional genre elements like Bone Tomahawk’s position as a horror movie, Hateful Eight is an Agatha Christie mystery, Ridiculous 6 was a comedy (hey I’m just talking about Westerns, not GOOD Westerns.)  All this genre crossover reminded me of my favorite Western comic book courtesy of DC Comics- the late ‘90s oddity that was The Justice Riders. 

Panel Vision - Thrillkiller

Edited by Robert Beach

It’s time once more for everyone’s favorite genre of Panel Vision: topical oddities. One of the curious attempts by modern TV to remain relevant in an era of streaming and binge watches has been a revival of live performances. This has seen a mixed bag of success and interest, but last weekend, the format saw a fairly major success when NBC produced a live performance of Grease.  I don’t really care for Grease myself, though the production did give me cause to remember a very good Elseworlds comic that DC produced called Thrillkiller.

 In case you’ve never heard of them before, Elseworlds were an imprint of DC comics that re-imagined classic characters in situation that couldn’t fit into standard continuity. They’d take a character like Superman and show us what might’ve happened if he had landed in Soviet Russia or Gotham City instead of Kansas.  Thrillkiller, written by comics legend Howard Chaykin and illustrated by the eclectic but striking Daniel Brereton, takes the familiar Batman mythos and drops right in the middle of 1961. 

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.