The Double Distortion of a Danish Cowboy

I always find it disconcerting when the uniquely U.S. genre of the Western ends up in the hands of a non-U.S. author. It’s like blinking into a fun house mirror and trying to understand what you look like through the distortions.

Since the western is already a massive distortion, the warpage can be a kind of corrective, especially in the artful hands of Danish artist Rikke Villadsen. Cowboy is her second English-language graphic novel, a kind of thematic sequel to 2019’s The Sea, also published by Fantagraphics. I’m already looking forward to whatever new Villadsen book they put out next year.

Though so many U.S. pop culture hero types cry for feminist revision, the pseudo-historical and hyper-masculine gun-slinger is at the top of my list. Since the western is probably best known through films, comics are an apt medium for re-exploring the genre since they are equally visual but are also fantastically unbound by physical reality. Lisa Hanawalt’s 2018 Coyote Doggirl offered a useful gender-flip (with a dog-headed cast) while maintaining a love for landscape and horses, while Frederik Peeters and Loo Hui Phang’s 2017 The Smell of Starving Boys scrambled sexuality with a muddled mystic take on Native culture. Villadsen’s approach is something entirely different.

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