The cover is from a comic strip, instead it is a novel: a western novel. “The Ballad of Colton Red” contains all the elements of the genre: sheriffs and cowboys, bandits and traffickers, Indians and cavalry, Apache duels and shootings, from one twist to the next. In addition, behind it there is a painstaking work of historical and graphic documentation by the two authors Gian Mario Mollar and Marcello Bondi. Bondi is a professional from the Reggio Emilia International School of Comics; Mollar, despite having begun a path that seemed to be destined for something else (he graduated in philosophy with a thesis on magical Platonism, sic) is an expert on the American West, collaborates with various sites and magazines and has recently published the book ” The mysteries of the Far West ”. In “The Ballad of Colton Red”, just to say, the gun is not a generic gun but precisely a Colt Navy, the knife is a Bowie and so on. Everything else is documented with equal accuracy. Since then Bondi’s specialization is the screenplay, the book proposes a narrative rhythm from a film or a comic strip.
The western genre has an element of eternity because it deals with the fundamental challenges of fear and courage, evil and justice, reduced to their raw essence, with the solemn nature of Monument Valley as a backdrop, as the films have taught us. by John Ford. Critics of the western find it childish, but more recent films whose theme is shooting as many zombies as possible, like in a video game, are a step backwards from the western. The western genre was also criticized as being reactionary in its contents, then it was purified and ideologically renewed, but if you look at it without ideological prejudices, you can see that John Ford’s “Fort Apache” in 1948, with John Wayne, presented a American commander slale with the Indians and guilty of a massacre; we did not have to wait for Vietnam and “Blue Soldier” (1970) to understand the natives’ reasons, indeed it seems that films like “Blue Soldier” are more disascalic and more childish in assigning the parts of good and bad cut with the accept.
We break a lance for John Wayne’s films from another point of view as well. Look at his westerns without prejudice: the constant theme is the richest man in town (banker or landowner) who, as a rich man, pretends to buy the law and the sheriff, indeed, if the sheriff is not John Wayne himself, in the film shows the sheriff already handsome and sold to the capitalist. This already in the films of the 1950s or even earlier. Then mind you, the solution to the problem is seen in guns, rather than in a social awareness or something like that, but don’t say that all these John Wayne films in which the capitalist is the villain are functional to the system. Those who came later did not invent anything new, everything was already there.
Luigi Grassia was a cowboy in Arizona, is an honorary citizen of Texas and has published the book “Italians to conquer the West” (Mimesis Edizioni).
