Arktoons Roundup Sept 17th 2022
Welcome to the Arkhaven Roundup, a regular feature at the Arkhaven Blog usually on Mondays but I’ll be moving it to Fridays for the duration of Amazon’s soul-destroying Lord of the Rings pastiche. Anyway, the Arktoons Roundup is where I take a look at stuff that is new and interesting in the world of Arkhaven’s webtoons.
If you aren’t familiar with Arktoons, this is meant more for you. I am the Dark Herald; I do the blogging here at Arkhaven. This blog is mostly pop culture news, reviews, and opinion, in short, the usual.
But you aren’t here for the blog. You’re here for the webtoons. Arkhaven is different from other webtoon publishers. While we have the kind of toons you would expect, like Chateau Grief we also have webtoons that are more like traditional comics, if you grew up reading comic books in pamphlet format it, you’ll feel more at home here than you would at say Tapas.io for example.
So, if you are new here, be welcome. Stay a day. Stay a month. Stay a year. You’ve found a new home.
Today we are going to be taking a dive into one of the genres that built the comic book industry but have been completely abandoned today; the Western.
If you ever get a chance to travel this world we are currently stuck on, you find that people in far-off lands tend to know four images about America: New York isn’t the capital but it really should be, Chicago is filled with gangsters (not wrong), Hollywood is where the movies are made (wrong these days, that’s Georgia), and everyone who lives west of the Mississippi wears a Stetson, cowboy boots and has a Colt on his hip.
They know these images are probably fabrications of their own imagination but they only really care that the last one isn’t real anymore, (well not in any serious way). The American cowboy has one strongest cultural impacts we’ve made across the globe. And it’s the one people don’t seem to mind about at all. In France there is the huge Festival Country Rendez-Vous, the Germans are more likely to get into native American lore. Even Stalin forced the Politburo is sit through his beloved John Ford westerns at his dacha. Perhaps the reason they don’t mind this bit of cultural overshare is because they know it is ours and only ours. It really can’t belong to anyone else.
The American West was the “land of savagery and the land of promise.” The lone tired rider on a tired horse riding towards a sun hanging huge in the western sky. The two men facing each other at midday with their hands inches from their holsters, waiting for the clock to strike twelve. Ranchers, prospectors, trappers, and mountain men. All of them looking for something or hiding from something but all of them were tough as nails. No one without the bark on ‘em traveled past Omaha.
I’ve written elsewhere about my views of the frontier and why it had such appeal to 1950s America. It was only natural that the comic books would move into what had once been the most fertile of pulp fiction ground.
Today the Western is all but forgotten in the comic book world.
But not at Arkhaven:
JESSE JAMES GANG’S GREAT PRISON BREAK
The Legend Chuck Dixon has the lead on this classic comic from the Fifties.
Yes, yes, I know Jesse James was actually a cold-hearted killer. I saw that episode of the Brady Bunch too. And in fairness to Judge Parker, at the time he was on the bench the law required execution for certain crimes. Parker had no lattidtude in the sentences he handed down. After he retired from the bench, he started campaigning against the death penalty.
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Another classic from the Dixon Files. In this one, the Legend recounts an adventure by trappers in the brutal winter of 1851.
Kill a man over a few skins? In that world, absolutely. There were no social safety nets in the 19th century American Frontier. If you stole a trapper’s skins, it was the same as taking food out of his mouth and there was never enough food to go around in 1851.
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Also, from the Dixon Files. This one is called Soiled Dove it was originally submitted by The Legend to the old DC Comics title Weird Western Tales. They bounced it, but Arkhaven didn’t.
I can’t give away the ending on this blog. You’ll know why when you see it.
Finally our Round Spotlight this week is on Chuck Dixon’s Sidewinders.
We’re trying something new here at Arkhaven because we are always trying something new.
Give it click and see for yourself what I’m talking about.
That’s it for this week’s Arktoons Roundup.
See you next week.
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