The Western movie as book
I have been largely a stranger to the
graphic novel. It is not a genre I have ‘got into’, really. That’s maybe odd,
though, because I love Western movies and Western novels too, and graphic
novels are a kind of blend of the two. And some of them are quite adult and
intelligent. They aren’t just ‘comic books’.
My very kind and generous nephew James
recently gave me one, Law of the Desert Born, A Graphic Novel by Louis L'Amour (Bantam, New York, 2013), hardbound, A4 size, and I’ve just read it (it
doesn’t take long!) It is ‘new’ in the sense that it is, apparently, the first
time a Louis L’Amour work has been given this treatment. I’ve always been a bit
of a Louis fan on the quiet. Well, not so quiet, in fact. Anyway, I was pleased
to try it.
It started life as an early L’Amour
short story published in the April 1946 edition of Dime Western magazine. The 40s and 50s were of course the heyday of
the Western short story. Louis’s son Beau has produced and co-written the
graphic novel and he says that up till then L’Amour had concentrated on
adventure and crime genres, and Law of the
Desert Born was only the third Western story he ever sold. Beau makes an
interesting point about the shift (or shift back) to Westerns:
…after three years of war, America’s taste for exotic locales was
waning. Too many GIs had returned from traumatic experiences in the Far East or
on the high seas, and too many had spent their time on tropical islands or in
the deserts of Africa dreaming of home. A new sort of adventure was needed, one
located in North America and set reassuringly in the past.
At the time Law of the Desert Born was a tale which earned less than sixty
dollars (at a cent and a half a word), quickly written and just as quickly
forgotten after publication. It resurfaced forty years later as the title story
of a Bantam collection. Then Beau made it into an audio book, then he wrote a
screenplay based on it. Now it lives again – though with many changes from the
original.
It is very well drawn by Thomas Yeates,
in gray and white, like an old B-Western. It does rather remind me of the
comics of my (distant) youth. But the text is more adult and addresses
interesting themes of racism. Beau L’Amour and experienced writer Katherine
Nolan co-authored the audio version, filling out the original very short story, then cutting
it back when they realized they had overdone it, then brainstorming a different
ending. Graphic novel hand Charles Santino worked with Beau on the text of the graphic novel version.
Set in New Mexico in 1887, it’s a
pursuit story, as a tough old sheriff sets out with a small posse to catch the
foreman of a rancher who has shot and killed the rival rancher and then gone on
the run. An imprisoned Mexican-Apache (with certain similarities to Massai in Apache) has his own reasons for wanting
to catch the fugitive and persuades the sheriff to let him scout for the posse.
The reasons behind all this death and destruction become gradually clear as the
story progresses (there are many flashbacks).
Recommended.
What an interesting post. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteYou're very welcome!
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