Beyond the American Western: Picturing the Far West in Global Comics
Call For Papers
The Western genre has been widely read within the confines of a national cinema and culture of the United States. However, the field of Film Studies has increasingly sought to emancipate the Western genre from discourses of American myth and identity, instead exploring its ongoing production, circulation, and reception beyond the borders of the United States (including Miller 2013; Higgins 2015; Mayer 2022, among many more). This body of work has significantly expanded our understanding of the Western’s transnational dimensions by highlighting the genre’s local rewritings on a global scale, and unpacking the complex transcultural negotiations involved in appropriating what is often considered an inherently American genre. Nevertheless, in the broad exploration of the ways in which the Western has been deterritorialized from its traditional American context, much of the focus on cinema leaves other visual storytelling forms underexplored.

One such example is the comics medium. The presence of Western adventure in non-American comics traditions dates back as early as the 1889 French album La Famille Fenouillard, in which artist Christophe introduces his globe-trotting Fenouillard family to the Wild West during their travels through North America. However, comics have a rich history of imitating and reinterpreting the American Western for readers around the globe. Broadly speaking, Western comics bring together pulp fiction’s formulaic approach to frontier adventure stories about vengeance, conquest and justice with the dynamic visual storytelling properties of comics, which give dramatic life to the genre’s gunfights, high-stakes horseback pursuits, and mesmerizing desert vistas. Beyond the thrilling yarns about law and order, exploration and discovery, or colonial fantasies regarding violent white encroachment on Indigenous land, comics globally have vividly engaged with the Western. They have transformed the genre in weird and wonderful ways to suit local tastes, used its mythical/historical distance as a cover to dramatize contemporaneous social and political concerns, and provided captivated readers outside the US with an accessible window into the enthralling world of the Far West. Coupled with the lack of creative limitations afforded by the hand-drawn form, the small production teams involved in comics (typically a writer, artist, and editor), and the relatively low production and distribution costs, I have argued elsewhere that “comics democratized the American Western for global audiences” (Grady 2024).

Drawing on a number of recent studies on the subject (including Huxley 2018; Conway 2022; Martinez 2023), I have observed that “as the fields of Western Studies and Comics Studies strive to expand beyond the confines of established canons, chronologies and corpuses, one fertile area for new enquiry it seems is the vibrant history of comics and the fabled West” (Grady 2023). This edited collection is put forward in the same spirit, and seeks to expand the scholarly conversations about the global production and circulation of the American Western, exploring the many ways in which the genre has been reappropriated, reimagined, and retold in comics from across different countries and contexts.

Proposals are sought that might consider (but are not limited to) the following topics:
-Surveys of the Western genre in specific national comics traditions (from France, Canada, or Mexico, to India, Japan, and beyond).
-Case studies of specific stand-out Western comics titles (e.g. Belgium’s Lucky Luke (from 1946), Italy’s Tex Willer (from 1948), Argentina’s Sgt. Kirk (from 1953)).
-Creator-focused studies (e.g. the Westerns of Giraud/Moebius, Hermann, Derib).
-Comparative analysis of American and non-American Western comics.
-The translation and adaptation of Western comics.
-The influence of American comics and film upon “foreign” Western comics.
-Subversions, critiques, or parodies of the American Western in comics.
-The Western as a lens to explore colonial histories and imperial legacies.
-The representation of race, gender, sexuality, environmental issues, and so on.
-The discussion of national identity, society, and politics through the Western.
-Examining Western themes and iconographies in other genre comics (genre mash ups like Britain’s 2000AD (from 1977), South Korea’s Priest (from 1998), and so on).

Interested researchers are invited to submit a 350 word proposal (and a short bio) outlining the content and aims of their chapter to William Grady (williamebgrady@gmail.com), on or before 14th December 2025. Informal queries are also welcome. Authors will be formally notified of their acceptance by 16th January 2026. Full chapters of between 5,000 and 7,000 words will be expected in October 2026.

Bibliography
Conway, Christopher & Antoinette Sol (ed.). The Comic Book Western: New Perspectives on a Global Genre. University of Nebraska Press, 2022.
Grady, William. Redrawing the Western: A History of American Comics and the Mythic West. University of Texas Press, 2024.
——— “The Comic Book Western.” Studies in Comics 14.1, 2023, pp.151-154.
Higgins, MaryEllen, et al. (ed.). The Western in the Global South. Routledge, 2015.
Huxley, David. Lone Heroes and the Myth of the American West in Comic Books, 1945–1962. Springer, 2018.
Martinez, Nicolas. Reframing Western Comics in Translation. Routledge, 2023.
Mayer, Hervé, and David Roche (ed.). Transnationalism and Imperialism: Endurance of the Global Western Film. Indiana University Press, 2022.
Miller, Cynthia J., and A. Bowdoin Van Riper (ed.). International Westerns: Re- Locating the Frontier. Scarecrow Press, 2013.