Book review - Conversations with Lynn Johnston

 review by Neale Barnholden

McLaughlin, Jeff (ed.). Conversations with Lynn Johnston. University Press of Mississippi, 2026. https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/C/Conversations-with-Lynn-Johnston

 Readers of Lynn Johnston's For Better or For Worse have always located an interest in "the truth behind the work" in Johnston's personal life, as Jeff McLaughlin's volume of sixteen interviews with the cartoonist makes clear. With eight interviews conducted during the run of the strip and eight afterwards, the most consistent throughline is Johnston's account of how readers from her children's friends to strangers around the world interpreted the strip as a version of her own life. In a way that's what the strip was designed to do: at one point John
ston figures her own work as suiting the syndicate's need for a comic strip by a woman that (unlike Cathy Guisewite's Cathy) was about family life. Guisewite, an early mentor, told Johnston to make sure that, unlike Cathy, she didn't end up sharing a name with her character. Nonetheless the strip, arising from Johnston's cartooning about her own life for her OB-GYN and his other patients, retained an authenticity that has led many to read it as a kind of roman a cléf about a specific family in addition to a well-observed strip about families in general. Regarding the fictional Pattersons as the real Johnstons is by far the most common reading of the strip, for good or ill. In a surprisingly revealing interview with Tom Heintjes of Hogan's Alley, Johnston, her parents now deceased, is candid about her mother's history of physical abuse of Johnston and her siblings. This makes it even more interesting that McLaughlin's collected interviews twice mention For Better or For Worse portraying father John spanking his son Michael, based apparently on a real incident. In a 1980 interview John's real analogue expresses his discomfort with it (6), and a 1983 strip showing the same scenario was later redrawn as part of Johnston's revisiting (xvii). It shows the complexity of Johnston's work that this is both profoundly important and true to life, and also that it later came to seem like it didn't belong.

Over the years the main theme of the interviews—that the strip is Johnston's real life—takes on many different aspects. Youngest Patterson child April, the Millennial of the family and the only one born during the strip's run, has no real life analogue. This let Johnston use ideas that would have embarrassed her actual children (119). On the other hand, when her real husband Rod, a dentist and implicit model for fictional father John Patterson, had a marriage-ending affair near the end of the strip's run, Johnston wavered in another way between the character and his model, musing in 2014 that she would "bump off the husband" if she followed the strip into the future, "and I know exactly how to do it" (95). In the event, the last regular FBoFW strip has John and Elly reaffirm their marriage vows, suggesting Johnston's balancing act between fantasy and reality, or the more elusive comedy and drama.

Another source for For Better and For Worse is Johnston's observations of her friends and family. A remarkable phenomenon described at many points is Johnston's sense that she knows her characters as one would know a friend. The epitomal example is her decision to have Michael Patterson's friend Lawrence come out as gay. Angry over homophobic reaction to the murder of her own gay childhood friend, comedian Michael Vadeboncoeur, Johnston decided to write a gay child into her strip in 1993. This plot is described many times in this volume, sometimes delving into Johnston's decision to respond to her calmer hate mail, sometimes focusing on the business of newspapers dropping the strip, sometimes on readers seeing rare representation of their own or their child's experience. In the context of the strip, it always shows Johnston's admirable if depressingly timeless commitment to showing the reality of life. Significantly, the storyline isn't ultimately wish fulfillment or grim drama.

In one revealing incident bringing together authenticity, comic strips, and Johnston's own life, Johnston recalls reading comic strips as a child on her grandfather's lap, and reacting against his criticism of Charles Schulz' writing of child characters dialogue. To his remark that "no child has these thoughts", Johnston recalls thinking "We may not have the same words, but we have the same thoughts and the same feelings." Schulz later became a friend of Johnston's, but his approach to realism stayed psychological, and early  in her own strip Johnston made the key decision to age the characters in real time, parting ways from the majority of family strips. This moment is also discussed frequently, but for what must be one of the most consequential artistic choices of Johnston's life, it goes strangely unexamined. The reader is left with the impression that Johnston did it primarily to keep a flow of inspiration from her own growing children (fixed at several years older than the fictional ones). Another famous incident (as a child, I owned the book memorial) shows a stark divergence with Schulz' style, as family dog Farley dies heroically saving April from drowning. Schulz was deeply upset at the idea, first threatening to send Snoopy to the hospital on the same week so that nobody would pay attention to Johnston's work, then raving to Johnston about how "stupid" the little girl was to play on the creek. We might think of Schulz as the hallmark of a new age of comics' psychological realism—and the recent 50th anniversary of Peanuts certainly suggests this in its interest in Schulz' own private life—but Johnston's mix of life's good and bad is very different. Johnston's people grow up, and with that, can die.

Different interviewers seem to approach Johnston in her different facets, and reveal different responses. It's to McLaughlin's credit that he found interviews taking Johnston in somewhat different ways. She positions her strip as a feminist deconstruction of family strips written by working husbands (217)—think of the number of classic strip gags about men coming home from work, vs the number about cleaning up the house. In another sense her significance is the ongoing drama of the characters and the realism that flows from that. Still again, to some her Canadianness is important, and Johnston describes an early editor warning her to never use Canadianisms (254), thankfully overruled by other (American) editors.

This reminded me of the curious conversation at the beginning of American author Rainbow Rowell's 2011 novel Attachments, where two newspaper employees debate whether For Better or For Worse takes place in Canada. They locate part of the pleasure of the strip in the apparent riddle of whether today's installment will finally feature a bag of milk or a chesterfield. In reality the question seems quite obvious as Johnston's inspiration is exclusively from her time in North Vancouver, Lynn Lake, Hamilton, and other Canadian locations. Only the volume's Canadian editor Jeff McLaughlin, in an excellent capstone to the volume, asks about the strips' portrayal of Indigenous characters in a prolonged storyline set in a northern Manitoba community, receiving an answer that interestingly inverts the logic of Lawrence's homosexuality, in that Johnston did it to share a culture she expected her readers to know nothing about. Johnston's belief that settler Canadians are appalling unaware of indigenous culture and communities is rooted in her own experience and seemingly proven by this being the sole mention of the storyline.

McLaughlin's foreword notes that few interviews from during the strip's run were substantial, and also remarks that they were very repetitively focused on the same storylines (Lawrence coming out and Farley dying evidently); as a result the bulk of the book is retrospective. Johnston, however, is a complicated figure for temporality, having ended her strip with a years-long revision of her earlier work, to an extent that reminded me of Hergé's wholesale redraws of his work (with at least one motive for Johnston being the same as Hergé, the evolution of her drawing style). As with the best of the Conversations volumes, the interest for scholars is both the authorial voice and the intriguing threads to pull on. For my part, having recently read many Peanuts retrospectives, I was struck by the fact that Johnston, like Schulz, suffered from a neurological condition giving her a hand tremor—this despite the fact that unlike Schulz her art grew noticeable finer and more detailed over the years. Where Schulz' tremor has received some scholarly attention, I'm unaware of any medical interest in Johnston's work. And on the same lines, Johnston's career turn from medical illustration to cartooning is an interesting juxtaposition—and reminded me that Fred Kelly, a Canadian comics great of a different generation, made the exact opposite switch. While this volume would be fascinating and useful to fans of the strip, it is also an invaluable resource for scholars looking at what is indisputably one of the most important Canadian comics ever.

As a last note, it's made clear in this volume that Johnston was one of the last cartoonists to work with a two-decade long syndication contract, which enabled her work to sprawl for years and reach a relatively huge audience, even as it forced her to a rigid schedule of production and made her answerable to editors. A standout roundtable with Raina Telgemeier and Kate Beaton suggests a link between Johnston's work and the later prominence of memoirs in the graphic novel form. For Better or For Worse is perhaps the only daily newspaper strip to be so clearly recognizable as an ancestor of the form. I wouldn't suggest McLaughlin's selected interviews "reveal" For Better or For Worse as the memoir so many readers took it as, but I think some incidents make it clear that it was dedicated to a realism that approached memoir. For her part, as this book amply shows, Johnston has spent a career both acknowledging the authenticity of her strip, as well as disclaiming any one-to-one relationship between the Pattersons and her own family—and in a later interview, is magnanimous and generous to her the memory of her abusive mother. This book is a testament to the complexity of Johnston's work, a complexity connected directly to her conviction that gay children and overworked mothers (and dead dogs, and goofy sound effects) simply exist and are a part of life, which sadly continues to be a lesson worth teaching. "It's just stuff," Johnston remarks, introducing what seems like an alternate title to her strip: "Stuff that happens to everybody" (68).

 

Book Review - Crossing Lines: Comics About Human Migration

 reviewed by Alberto López Martín, Occidental College

Antje Ellermann, Frederik Kohlert, Sarah Leavitt, and Mireille Paquet, eds. Crossing Lines: Comics About Human Migration. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2025. $26.95 CAN. ISBN 9781049801223. https://utpdistribution.com/9781487533359/crossing-lines/

 

Scholarship on the representation of migration in comics has produced a substantial body of monographs and critical studies, while recent graphic narratives—whether autobiographical or working through genres such as comics journalism and dystopian fiction—abound with stories of diasporas, climate refugees, and the everyday challenges faced by migrants and migrant communities in their countries of destination. Crossing Lines joins this growing body of work examining migration, its causes, and its consequences through the medium of comics. What distinguishes the project is its collaborative premise: by bringing together academic researchers and comics creators, it puts the medium's capacity to tell migration stories to the test. As the editors observe in the introduction, emphasizing comics' potential to foster social change, the medium “can facilitate dialogue, fight disinformation, and generate empathy, thereby providing citizens with a more nuanced view of human immigration through narratives” (4).

Crossing Lines originated in a workshop organized by the editors in 2022 at the Centre for Migration Studies at the University of British Columbia. The event brought together nine Vancouver-based comics artists, community practitioners, and nearly forty scholars from UBC, Concordia University, and the University of Victoria. During the workshop, participants formed nine working groups, each led by a comics artist, to explore a specific dimension of migration and displacement that would ultimately take shape as a comic narrative. From the outset, each group was asked to ground its project in peer-reviewed research and to examine migration in all its complexity, avoiding simplistic or stereotypical representations. Interdisciplinarity lies at the heart of both the workshop and the resulting volume: contributors represent fields as diverse as anthropology, occupational therapy and social work, law, media studies, and Asian studies, complementing the editors' expertise in political science and English. Through this collaborative process and the subsequent editorial work, Crossing Lines ultimately took the form of eight comics, each created by a comics artist working with a team of three or four co-authoring scholars—a total of twenty-eight contributors, in addition to the eight artists and four editors. The result is a genuinely polyphonic collection that benefits from a diversity of perspectives and, importantly, includes a significant representation of migrant authors.

As one might expect, some comics are more effective than others, although all the stories carry considerable emotional weight. They also display a remarkable diversity of formal approaches and artistic styles. Kathleen Gros's "To/From" is among the collection's strongest contributions. Through a series of full-page illustrations, it explores the prejudice and exclusion embedded in the seemingly innocuous question "Where are you from?," juxtaposing the journey of an Afghan refugee and her family with the history of colonialism on the ancestral lands of what is now British Columbia. Jonathon Dalton's "Crossing Lines," the comic that lends the volume its title, presents six parallel storylines following six groups of travelers whose radically different experiences of crossing the Canadian border are determined by their legal status. Doug Savage's "Migratory Birds," in turn, reflects on the notion of citizenship through the naturalization ceremony of two characters in a world populated by anthropomorphic birds, including xenophobic Canadian geese and an Indigenous bird that reminds the newly naturalized citizens of the nation's silenced colonial past. In Hannah Myers's "Greener Grass?," the premise of a video game centered on the experiences of highly skilled migrants allows two friends to recognize both the obstacles migrants face—including barriers to employment and housing—and the privileges they themselves enjoy as Canadian citizens.

Emily Chou's "In Search of Bruce Lee" departs from the preceding stories by relying almost entirely on visual storytelling. It focuses on a migrant's intercultural and intergenerational connections through his admiration for the iconic actor and martial artist, reserving text for onomatopoeia and unintelligible speech balloons that convey the protagonist's struggle to navigate an unfamiliar language and culture. Scarlet Wings Kaili's "The Waiting Room" adopts a more somber tone, foregrounding the physical and psychological toll of migration by emphasizing the protagonist's stress, insomnia, and involuntary loneliness. Jess Pollard's "Butterfly," meanwhile, explores the shift in social status experienced by two migrants in relation to the lives they left behind in their countries of origin, their aspirations—whether for freedom or economic opportunity—and the sacrifices they have made to build a new life. Finally, Alyssa Hirose's "Belonging" offers an original exercise in abstraction, representing belonging and integration through a shape-shifting form that alternately blends with and stands apart from its surroundings, using synesthetic effects to evoke emotion. Each of the eight comics is followed by a brief discussion of its central theme, five discussion questions addressing issues ranging from content to formal choices, and an annotated bibliography of five additional sources for readers wishing to explore the topic further. Although the explanatory sections are occasionally overly explicit and may constrain the interpretive openness of the comics they accompany, they are, overall, an excellent addition that makes the collection particularly well suited for use in humanities or social sciences courses on migration at either the undergraduate or graduate level.

Indeed, the format of Crossing Lines—with the discussion questions and suggested avenues for further exploration accompanying each comic, together with the richness of possible interpretations and the complexity of the issues they address—makes it an exceptionally valuable pedagogical resource. Yet the collection's strengths extend beyond its rich and compelling stories. The workshop that gave rise to the volume offers a replicable model of collaborative practice, one that could be implemented with relative ease in groups of four or five students as a semester-long project. In such a setting, students would not only read comics but also create their own, drawing inspiration from ecosocial issues and causes they care about. Ultimately, Crossing Lines is a commendable project that brings together a remarkable range of voices while bridging the gap between scholars, activists, and comics creators. Although the individual contributions are inevitably uneven in quality, the volume as a whole is an impressive and worthwhile achievement.

Letting the Everyday Speak its Own Power: The Works of Von Allan - A Review Essay

 by David Beard, University of Minnesota Duluth

Canadian graphic novelist Von Allan (a pen name) persistently plays with the tension between the mundane and the enchanted in his work, which is usually self-published. In Love, Laughter, and Loss, Allan funnels the enchanted and the emotionally powerful through stories that emphasize the mundane, sometimes for humorous effect, sometimes for tragic. In Wolf’s Head, probably his best work to date, the fanciful elements of a science fiction tale are masterfully pulled into a grounded, emotionally realistic story about a child grappling with their mother’s legacy. As Allan has moved into nonfiction (both in his public writings for the Ottawa Citizen and in participating in the documentary I Am Still Your Child), he continues to pull us deeper into the everyday, hoping to find the meaningful, and the tragic, therein.

 In Love, Laughter, and Loss, Allan works through two modes of storytelling. In the first half of the book, he inverts our expectations of fantasy storytelling. Traditionally, we have read high fantasy like the Lord of the Rings and then seen those gorgeous fantasy worlds translated, often unsuccessfully, into the tropes and tricks of roleplaying games. The “halflings” in Dungeons and Dragons are a way to recreate the Hobbits in Lord of the Rings without violating copyright; role playing games are like a strainer, sucking the depth and elegance from high fantasy so that it can be brought to a table with dice and miniatures.

 In his stories, such as “The Cowardly Clerics of Rigel V,” Total Party Kill,” and “The Two Magic-Users,” Allan tells us stories that begin with mundanity of role playing games. What would, in high fantasy, be the story of two wizards becomes the story of “two magic users.” In starting from the limitations of the tabletop roleplaying game, Allan makes us chuckle at the deflation of the genre.

 That same tendency (to start with the mundane) also undergirds Von Allan’s attempts to show us tragedy in Love, Laughter, and Loss. In a story about the Voyager and Pioneer spacecraft (“When I Find You Again, It Will Be In Mountains”), Allan begins with a simple dream of lost love. It’s only at the end of the dream that we see that the dreamers are actually spacecraft. Similarly, “I Was Afraid For My Life” begins as a story about a boy and a dog, only in the last pages revealing its powerful statement on race, violence, and policing.

 In all of these works, Von Allan’s commitment to pulling the fantastic and the tragic into the everyday makes it easier for him to tell a story that creates a laugh or packs a punch.

 Wolf’s Head is a stronger work than the bits and pieces collected in Love, Laughter, Loss, and so deserves a closer look. Wolf’s Head begins, in a way, where “I Was Afraid For My Life” leaves off, and its introductory page is remarkable in that it uses texture to convey the energy of the moment. The figure in the foreground is angry, and the play of texture behind her propels her forward. The lines radiating from something like an explosion of color represent, in texture, what she is feeling inside: Lauren Greene’s anger is propelled by the structural racism and violence inherent in policing, especially after the events of 2020 in Minneapolis. Her conscience won’t abide her participation in that system, and so she quits.

 I love this panel because it really shows the nuanced ways that Allan uses both the extraordinary and the simple to communicate. In a longer work like Wolf’s Head, the interplay between the fantastic dimensions of his stories and the tiny details of life in his art are what makes his voice unique in contemporary comics.  

 When Lauren finds a new job, Allan deploys those same texture techniques (crosshatching and some computerized spotting) to create a muddy picture of the place where Lauren now works. Instead of being propelled forward, Lauren is caught in the muck and darkness of her new life.

Allan introduces us to Lauren’s mom with the same techniques. I absolutely adore this first image of her mom (all solid colors and dark, thick lines), in sharp relief against (again) the complex textures of the apartment hallway and doorframe. On first, quick read, it’s possible to miss the oddly shaped musical note coming from her bag.

 That “bag” is the touch of the extraordinary in the Wolf’s Head story. Lauren’s mom works as a janitor in a research & development firm (Advanced Research Projects Corporation). The singing shoulder bag is actually a shapeshifting machine, an ARPC invention that has achieved self-awareness. It protected Lauren’s mom from an explosion at the factory and becomes her companion and guardian. When Lauren learns about her mom’s self-aware machine (and the goons from ARPC who want it back), she and her mom get into a fight about what to do next. Their reunion is possibly the most touching moment in the book. The goons kidnap Lauren to get at her mom. While Lauren’s mom is interrogated, she passes away from a heart attack, and Lauren is left with the self-aware machine and the ARPC goons in hot pursuit. The machine protector steps up and saves Lauren from the ARPC.

Wolf’s Head is at its best in the small things – Lauren’s search for meaning after leaving the force, her reunion with her mother. The story of the self-aware machine is the tiny twist that helps bring Von Allan’s gift for bringing the everyday into view. It’s difficult not to read this touching, loving mother-daughter relationship in Wolf’s Head without a sense of Von Allan’s interest in mental illness in families. His 2009 work, the road to god knows, is no longer in print, but the narrative arc (of a mom separated her from her child) resonates.

 In the road to god knows, the separation between child and parent is more painful than the separation in Wolf’s Head. In the latter, Lauren’s mom finds and comes to care for a sentient machine – anything, including reconciliation with Lauren, is possible in such a story. In the road to god knows, parent and child are ruptured by an illness that cannot be removed, only struggled with.

 In an interview with the CBC after Allan won recognition as a “trailblazer,” we learn that his late mother had schizophrenia; in other of his writings, he has addressed mental illness. In interview and essay, Von Allan’s penchant for crafting a picture of a realistic world helps him communicate the complexities of living with mental illness. In his writings for the Ottawa Citizen, Allan (writing under his real name as Eric Julien) shares his relationship with his childhood friend,David Thomas Foohey. Allan lays the facts of Foohey’s life on the table for the reader: his struggles living with older, blind parents who divorced; his struggles losing those parents (in 2004 and 2008). His depictions of Foohey’s attempt to grapple with mental illness are straightforward:

In Dave’s case, the medication emotionally “flat-lined” him. He phrased it this way: all of his emotions, not just the sad ones, were shunted off. Not sad, not filled with loss, but equally missing out on happiness and joy. There was just nothing at all. As a result, Dave gave up on the medication. He never did try another.

No hyperbole, no drama – whatever emotion you draw from Foohey’s story, you draw from the straightforward presentation of Dave’s story.

 Allan knows that his power as a storyteller comes from letting the everyday speak its own power, whether in the short stories of Love, Laughter, Loss, in the longer works (the road to god knows and Wolf’s Head), or nonfiction essays like “Dave’s Story.” Across his diverse works, by placing his focus on the everyday, Allan makes me laugh, makes me sad, and gives me hope.

 References

Von Allan Studio website: https://www.vonallan.com/

“Julien: Dave's Story — and the Agonizing Dilemma of Mental Illness.” Ottawa Citizen July 4, 2022

Love, Laughter, Loss. Ottawa: V. Allan Studio, 2021.

the road to god knows. Ottawa: V. Allan Studio, 2009.

Wolf’s Head. Ottawa: V. Allan Studio, 2021.

 “Trailblazers: Eric Julien.” CBC Interactive. March 23, 2019

I Am Still Your Child. CatBird Productions 2017

Book Review- The Comic Book Western: New Perspectives on a Global Genre

 Reviewed by Chris York

Christopher Conway and Antionette Sol. The Comic Book Western: New Perspectives on a Global Genre. University of Nebraska Press, 2022. https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9781496218995/ 

[Until December 31, all books are half price - enter 6HLW22 in the promotion code field of your shopping cart and click "Add Promotion Code" when making your purchase.]

 Christopher Conway and Antionette Sol have assembled a well-conceived and well-executed anthology exploring the development of the Western genre in international comic books. Their introduction lays the foundation for the book by briefly summarizing the origins of the genre within the American comic book industry and the conduits through which the genre initially established itself in other nations. The introduction, however, is the last time the United States is the focus of the anthology. All ten of the subsequent chapters of the book are devoted to the Western within different comics traditions, Though Conway and Sol discuss the role of U.S. companies in popularizing the Western comic abroad, nearly all of the chapters are devoted to stories developed within the comics industries of these different nations, as opposed to merely imported comics.

            It may seem counter-intuitive that a genre so steeped in the ideological morass of exceptionalism, individualism, and colonialism peculiar to the United States would enjoy enduring popularity with international audiences. Even a casual observer of comics around the world, however, knows that the Western’s appeal is widespread. The Comic Book Western addresses how the genre gained a foothold internationally, but also how the genre evolved and, in many cases, thrived within these disparate cultures. The overarching premise of the book is that the global popularity of the Western genre has endured because creators “reterritorialize” or “destabilize” the conventions of the genre, adapting its recognizable conventions to fit within different cultural milieus.

The structure of the individual chapters is remarkably uniform for an anthology. Though the book is divided into “Transnational Histories” and "Critical Reinscriptions,” the difference between the sections seems to be one of degree. All of the chapters trace the growth of the Western within a specific comics tradition, many of them reaching back into the 19th century to identify the culture’s first exposure to the western form.  Each chapter also provides a deeper analysis of a specific title or titles to illustrate the unique character of the Western in that nation. Furthermore, the anthology strikes a good balance between chapters that focus on well-established, critically-acclaimed titles, such as Blueberry and Sargento Kirk, and titles that are more obscure.

            Each chapter traces what the editors call the “vital dialogues with local and transnational currents” that comprise the Western tradition around the world (3).  For instance, Sol’s chapter on Blueberry and the Franco-Belgian tradition identifies 1960s counter cultures as part of the impetus behind Charlier and Giraud’s anti-hero. While the counter-cultural revolutions of the 1960s changed the Western in nations around the world, Sol also notes that Blueberry’s aesthetic owes a great deal to the “local” cinematic tradition of the French New Wave.

            Much of the “reterritotrialization” occurs through the merging of genres. Manuela Borzone’s chapter notes how Argentinian creators merged the Western with their own gauchesca tradition. Similarly, Christopher Conway shows that, despite their almost exclusive portrayal of American settings and the absence of Mexican characters, Mexican Westerns are infused with melodramatic conventions of sentimentality and family values that make them a uniquely local product.

            In addition to the nations mentioned above, The Comic Book Western includes chapters on Germany, Italy, Poland, Great Britain, Spain, Japan and Canada. Joel Deshaye’s chapter on Canada is noteworthy because it includes the only exploration of an indigenous creator using comic book conventions and Western themes. Several chapters touch upon the portrayal of Indigenous Americans, but Deshaye’s discussion of David Garneau’s comics-inspired paintings—which make use of panels, gutters, and thought bubbles—is the only chapter to address an artist whose heritage is from one of the indigenous nations that the genre so exploits.

            The anthology contains sixteen black and white illustrations. Many of the images are covers. Nearly all of the images do important work, and the authors all explicate them well. However, I found myself wanting more. With such a wide range of source material, at least some of the comics are bound to be unfamiliar to portions of the readership. This is not a problem unique to this anthology of course. I would guess this was a limitation imposed by the publisher and not the editors. A more liberal use of images could have better illustrated points the authors are making.

            In the end, though, my criticisms are few. Conway and Sol have assembled a rich anthology, a balanced, insightful volume that effectively addresses the global nature of its subject. In their introduction, they articulate the modest hope that the book helps “to make the study of comic book Westerns less implausible than it has been”(6). I have no doubt of that. In fact, I suspect comics scholars interested in the Western genre, or in comparative studies in general, will find this a useful resource for years to come.

 

Table of Contents
Introduction: The Globalization of the Comic Book Western by Christopher Conway and Antoinette Sol

Part 1. Transnational Histories

1.      Italian Western Comics and the Myth of the Open Frontier by Simone Castaldi

2. Comic Book Westerns and the Melodramatic Imagination in Mexico by Christopher Conway

3. German Western Readers and the Transnational Imagination by Johannes Fehrle

4. Beyond Parody: Polish Comic Book Westerns from the 1960s through the 2010s by Marek Paryz

5. Blueberry: Remaking the Western in Franco-Belgian Bandes dessinées by Antoinette Sol

Part 2. Critical Reinscriptions

6. Argentina’s Outlaws and the Revisionist Western: The Case of Héctor Germán Oesterheld and Hugo Pratt’s Sargento Kirk by Manuela Borzone

7. British Comics and the Western: The Future West, the Supernatural, and Strong Women in The HellTrekkers, The Dead Man, and Missionary Man by Lee Broughton

8. Canada’s Triumph Comics and David Garneau’s Métis Response to the “Indian” of the Comic Book Western by Joel Deshaye

9. A Spanish View of the American West: El Coyote and His Comic Magazine by David Rio

10. Faraway So Close: The Representation of the American West in Igarashi Yumiko’s Mayme Angel by Rebecca Suter

Index