Abstract
Comics have been important in perpetuating and informing the myth of the lone Western hero. The comic book can bring specific qualities to the creation of the hero and they can fix the visual image of given characters. Historical figures are retrospectively imagined as heroes in the traditional mold in comic book recreation of figures such as Billy the Kid. The figure of the lone hero, the nature of his actions, and how these change in different tiles and across time are examined. The comics under consideration led to a simplification and slow decline of the figure that lead, in later decades, to a new kind of more ambiguous Western hero.
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This revamp was, perhaps unsurprisingly, controversial, and although many critics were hostile, there is a defense of the series by Frank Bramlett in ImageTexT, Vol. 5, no. 1, (2010) http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v5_1/bramlett/
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Huxley, D. (2018). Conclusion. In: Lone Heroes and the Myth of the American West in Comic Books, 1945-1962. Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93085-5_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93085-5_5
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Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-93084-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-93085-5
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