Long John

When talking to people about Long John I often say that it’s a “western” inasmuch as it is a story that takes place in the American west during the 1880s. But I didn’t dive into this wanting to riff on the tropes of the genre or to make a western because I love the genre so much. It’s just a story about a character that I wanted to tell and set it in a place that I love.

In a sense, that would then push the genre of the comic to something akin to “historical fiction” but even that is a loose designation. While I have done a lot of research into the area and its history, I am definitely not beholden to it, probably to the consternation of people that love the area and its history more than me.

My process was to learn about Mono Lake and its surrounding areas just to absorb what it was like and perhaps use some of its history within the storytelling of Long John. There are some things I was a stickler for, like making sure the names of places were accurate to the time––for example, what is now known as Lee Vining on the western edge of Mono Lake was still known as Poverty Flat at the time. The courthouse in Bridgeport was still under construction as of the time of the comic. I tried really hard to make sure I didn’t include any anachronisms of technology or language.

However, I was never shy to bend the regional history as I needed it, but when I did, I needed it to have some root in reality. Lady May isn’t a real person, but she is an amalgam of people I read about. There was no saloon called the Broken Barrels, but Dog Town was a real place just across the way from the road that takes you up the mountain to Bodie. As far as I know, there was no huge ramshackle mansion overlooking Bodie, but the town does have a little hill at the top next to the huge stamp mill; I just put Rich Jack’s house next to that.

I used Google Earth to map out a lot of the comic. Simons Spring lies on the south east shore.

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out where to put Hellrider Jackie’s burned down homestead. Luckily, I found a place on the south east shore called Simons Spring where there was, for a time, a cabin. Being a remote part of the lake––and being a place where someone actually lived––I figured I would confiscate it and make it Jackie’s former home.

The person that actually lived here was Louis Sammann, a German immigrant who seems to have been quite the character despite not much being written about him. Over time, the site was erroneously recorded as Simons Spring instead of Sammann’s Spring, but at least we have a record of it at all. As with Dog Town, there is nothing at the site anymore, so I feel I get to keep the memory alive at least a little bit by setting a very important location of the comic there.

Thumbnail drawing for this page. Click for larger version.