Weird west steampunk2/29/2024 ![]() I first came across the Ghost Rider series in 1949 when I was seven. Horror or fantasy and westerns have a long history in comic books. I've been seeing more and more portal and some multiverse titles cropping up, and you can bet that Dark Tower is something those authors had in mind, plus King is due to come out with one more. Where the Dark Tower, though, may have more impact is not in western fantasy but in multiverse. Territory was published in 2007 and had a big impact. Westerns are only a sub-group of that, but they often do well. Historical is the third biggest group, so this is pretty normal. But to keep the growth going, writers have to branch out, and so dark fantasy, futuristic fantasy, comic fantasy, portal/multiverse and historical fantasy are all experiencing expansions. And then when they sucked up the mystery readers with urban fantasy, which coincided with changes and growth in horror and the success of paranormal romance, fantasy became the hot sector, even without YA and Harry Potter. Fantasy shrunk, but because it had a number of successes going, it did better than everybody else. Essentially, in the 1990's because the wholesale market shrunk and the Internet market wasn't thoroughly up and running as large as it would get, all the fiction types took a big hit. We're getting futuristic fantasy like God's War, and secondary world fantasy that is steampunked and has western themes and attributes. ![]() But with fantasy being able to hold on to its core secondary world stuff and re-grow its contemporary lists, it was simply a matter of time before the historical ones were going to increase in numbers too, and that's what happened in the mid-oughts.įor western-style fantasy, we aren't just getting the American west, though. King is known for his horror and a lot of folk see Dark Tower as horror/Goth, not fantasy per se. As King finished off most of the series in a burst of activity, there was already a full expansion of "urban fantasy" going on, so most writers were focused on that. By the time King came out with the next long awaited Dark Tower novel in the late 1990's, authors were already drifting back more into contemporary suspense fantasy. Fantasy writers were mostly interested in hoping on secondary world fantasy because of Williams and Jordan, etc. There were still plenty of westerns around, but they'd been swallowed into historical fiction and not a lot of series. In the meantime, the wholesale market collapsed and shrunk, which pretty much offed the western category market which had been losing male readers, just as romance had been losing female readers. It got reprinted in the late 1980's, early 1990's with the next two novels and they sold well of course as King was now even huger, but King went off and did other stuff. The formal first Dark Tower novel came out in the early 1980's and was a cult hit. By the 1990's, though, authors had become less interested in that device and in multiverse ideas. About two thirds of the secondary world fantasy in the 1980's was portal fantasy, where someone from Earth went somewhere else. Even more common was portal or multiverse fantasy and SF. When King started the Gunslinger stuff back in 1978, western fantasy was pretty common. Click to expand.It's actually a much longer progression.
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