But when I began rereading those written by Hex's creator, John Albano, I was astonished to discover they were good, tough Western stories, but they weren't any supernatural elements. I remembered reading the Hex stories as being somewhat spooky, supernatural. Joe Lansdale reflected on this in his introduction to the trade paperback of Jonah Hex: Two-Gun Mojo: It's interesting to note the absence of overtly supernatural elements in the original Jonah Hex comics. These are not necessarily interchangeable terms though: Not all steampunk set in America can be considered weird western: neither The Amazing Screw-on Head or Boneshaker would be considered a western. When it treads into SF ground, it sometimes utilizes a steampunk aesthetic. I sit somewhere in the middle of this: Weird West is the western merged with the fantastic, either SF, fantasy, or horror, with a dark tone to it. This is a bit too expansive, as I don't think anyone would classify Blazing Saddles or Brokeback Mountain as weird westerns, despite the blending of western with another genre (comedy and romance). Wikipedia gives a more expansive definition, basically defining weird westerns as any western blended with another genre. I don't think I need to define western for anyone. The term, at the very least, is far more indicative of the content (I don't think anyone is debating the definition of Weird West too vociferously): the EF describes Weird Fiction as "fantasy, supernatural fiction, and horror tales embodying transgressive material: tales where motifs of thinning and the uncanny predominate, and where subject matters like occultism or satanism may be central, and doppelgangers thrive" (1000). In fact, over the past month I've kept wondering (though not too seriously) if I should have done my dissertation on Weird West stories instead of steampunk. So it's not surprising to me that I enjoy Weird Westerns. I owned Stoker's Dracula in grade four, and read my first Stephen King novel in grade six. As I grew up, I gained a love of horror as well. More about that in my upcoming post on The Year the Cloud Fell.I grew up in a family that loved westerns: I dressed up as the Lone Ranger and watched reruns of Gunsmoke. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to surmise why this part of the story was radically changed for the new film version. The cover of the second origin-story issues. Building on this foundation, writers should find-to use a decidedly American metaphor-a veritable gold-rush of ideas for a steampunked frontier.My original intention with this post had been to go and see the Jonah Hex movie and comment on it (not just use the increase in interest), but between working on my field papers and being between gainful employment, I've had to settle for talking about Weird West and its relationship to steampunk, via one of the great masters of the genre, Joe Lansdale, and his work on the DC Vertigo Jonah Hex miniseries Two Gun Mojo and Riders of the Worm and Such. Weird West narratives are gaining in popularity: Seattle’s Steamcon made it their theme for 2010, the popular Deadlands roleplaying game is making waves in a re-release Tess Fowler and Chris Gutierrez are hard at work on their martial arts steampunk western The Seven: Scarlet Fever and a Jonah Hex movie starring the bankable looks of Megan Fox being released later this year, to say nothing of the success of Stephen King’s epic Dark Tower series and his Clint Eastwood-as-Aragorn protagonist, Roland. Why a post on Weird West here at Steampunk Scholar? Aside from the pure opportunism of releasing a post about Jonah Hex in the film version's first release week, there's a growing interest in Weird West in the steampunk community, as I noted in my "Leaving London" article for Exhibition Hall:
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