True Grit was excellent. It is, if you can believe this, in pretty much the same genre as The Water Phoenix King, despite being a western instead of a fantasy yarn. If you like WPK you’ll probably like True Grit.
When I was first scripting WPK–not coming up with the core ideas, which took place a few years earlier, but laying out the first three issues–I was watching Deadwood, and looking back it’s interesting to see how much of that show’s sensibility crept into the comic, not just in the attitudes of the characters and the look of the world, but in the creators’ approach to their genre and its sensibilities.
I think modern westerns are interesting because most people hate most of the tropes. Horses and six-shooters are fine, but cowboys ‘n’ Injuns, black hats and white, circlin’ the wagons? Modern audiences are actively hostile toward many old western set-pieces, so it forces each new western to be unique. This means that while the genre itself is dead–you can’t rely on “western fans†to move product–the individual films produced within the genre are reliably excellent. I wonder if stock fantasy will undergo a similar conceptual collapse as people turn angrily against worn-out and now-irrelevant tropes, and if they do, I’ve tried to take lessons from westerns about what a “post-genre†fantasy story would look like.
Oh, I believe it — one of my less-communicable brainstorming attempts to describe WPK for potential target audiences went something like “Think if Dunsany had written ‘High Noon’ or ‘Shane’ instead — imagine the ‘classic Western’ not just in the world of ‘The Gods of Pegana’ but in the same darkly comic subversive style as ‘King Argimenes and the Unknown Warrior’ or ‘The Golden Doom’. ” (I figured that would hook about 3 other people in the world and leave the rest either staring blankly wondering what I was referring to, or reaching for the aspirin if they knew.)
I wasn’t sure until end of Book 3 (and REreading at that) that I was picking up on something really there, which is when I decided that it could be remade as a Western, being the tale of a small but growing railhead beleaguered by ex-Confederate outlaws and the Boston lawyer-turned-lawman trying to cope with them and the reckless prospectors digging in unstable mines and so on, but that locking it down to a single real historical setting would
be not as fundisallow all the other interesting things going on both world and story-wise. Couldn’t say anything till you confirmed it, of course.And the original True Grit was as creepily awesome as they could make a mainstream movie at the time, so it sounds like the remake did it justice! Will have to go see it now.
Aaaand I botch the code. Gotta love HTML!
What I mean is, it’s not just filing off the serial numbers and swapping out the set dressing for something fantastic/SF-nal. The Dunnett-level political intrigue, the metaphysics and the paradigm toppling could maybe be accomplished in a “Matter of America” pure historical, but not easily or quickly, and there wouldn’t be any spaceships or sorceresses without going way AU.