Long John

There’s a strange phenomenon regarding the western genre that I feel––I’ve done no research to prove this; I’m just going by feel––in most cases whenever the word “western” is said in association with a piece of media, it is nearly always mashed up with another genre. The most popular western mashup genre out there I would say is the horror-western, but we also have sci-fi-westerns, comedy-westerns, neo–westerns, even acid westerns, and so on. Like with anything in terms of popular media, we can stratify as much as we want. While I don’t have a problem with any of this, this behavior seems to imply that a straight-up “western” is unsatisfactory, that we need to up the ante in some shape or form to make it clear that what ever it is, it’s at least not just a western.

Maybe that’s needed, to be honest. Traditional westerns, especially, seem to have died a cultural death, and those that try to bring it back tend to fail (with a few notable exceptions). Even I couch the comic as an “existential western” when flagging down passersby at a show because there is a part of me that knows I won’t catch anybody’s attention just by calling Long John a western. Once we get into the conversation, however, I make a point of saying that Long John is a straight-up western––no robots, no aliens, no vampires. I guess I’m part of the problem (I’ve said before that I actually think of Long John as more of a post-apocalyptic story than a traditional western).

I think this might be the one of the only genres we do this to, adding qualifiers to distinguish difference from the traditional.

Is Long John a western? Or is it something else?

So, even with Long John‘s dip into surreality I prefer to think of Long John as a western without qualifiers. I think the main difference is that I tried to not rely too much on tropes and expectations that come with the genre. I care more about the characters than I care that it’s a western, and I think that could be the thing that draws people to it. Famously, an early review of the comic on the now defunct Pandamanga podcast featured one of the hosts saying, “I hate westerns…but I love Long John.” If anything marks a point of pride for me, it’s that.

Or maybe, ultimately, Long John is not a western precisely because it’s not subservient to the formula. My definition of a western is a story set in the American west in the late 19th century and features cowboys and/or gunslingers. I figured that the setting (time and place) is what dictates the classification more than what kinds of stories can be told in it. However, maybe the tropes are a necessity for proper categorization.

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