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Term applied to three hybrid genres of the Western

Weird West (aka Weird Western) is a term used for the hybrid genres of fantasy Western, horror Western and science fiction Western. The term originated with DC's Weird Western Tales in 1972, but the idea is older as the genres have been blended since the 1930s, possibly earlier, in B movie Westerns, comic books, movie serials and pulp magazines. and the novelette "Spud and Cochise" by anthropologist and Pulitzer Prize winning author Oliver La Farge, published in the non genre magazine The Forum in January 1936. One of the earliest novels to introduce fantasy into a Western setting was The Circus of Dr. Lao (1935), by Charles G. Finney, which won a National Book Award for the Most Original Book of 1935. The novel concerns the visit to a fictional Arizona town by a magical circus that features legendary creatures from mythology. It was later adapted into the film version 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1963). Later novels include those by Joe R. Lansdale, many featuring the heroic Reverend Jebediah Mercer. Lansdale has often mixed splatterpunk with alternate history Western. An example is Dead in the West (1983), in which zombies rise after an unjustly lynched Native American shaman has cursed the town of Mud Creek, Texas. The prolific Western author Louis L'Amour sometimes ventured into science fiction, as with The Haunted Mesa (1987), which is set amid the ruins of the Anasazi. Horror author Jack Ketchum's work includes The Crossings (2004), an occult novel set in 1848 Arizona. Author Edward M. Erdelac's 2009 series Merkabah Rider follows a Hasidic gunslinger tracking the renegade teacher who betrayed his mystic Jewish order of astral travelers to the Great Old Ones of H. P. Lovecraft.

From the 1940s, many Western comics published stories in which heroes would sometimes encounter monsters, aliens, supervillains, etc. Marvel Comics featured Kid Colt, the longest running Western character in American comic books, from 1948 to 1979. He became a time traveller, and ultimately, a mutant. The Rawhide Kid, another Marvel time traveller, debuted in a 16 issue series, from March 1955 to September 1957, from Marvel's 1950s predecessor, Atlas Comics. DC Comics added a horror element to their Western stories by introducing Weird Western Tales in 1972. The title of this series gave rise to the term "Weird West". It ran for eight years and 59 issues. The main character was Jonah Hex, whose popularity secured his own eponymous series. In the mid to late 1990s, Desperadoes by Jeff Mariotte, from Image Comics/WildStorm Productions, returned weird Western comics to the stands at a time when none of the major publishers had Western comics in their line ups. Preacher Special: Saint of Killers, a 4 issue mini series, was a spin off from Preacher by Garth Ennis. While the origin of the Saint of Killers in the Old West is the only true Western element in the comic book Preacher, the series has been described as a "Splatterpunk Western" or a mix of the Western with the Gothic.