692 WHAT IF?
mix of media; several Western television series were adapted to comics, which became a
form of merchandising for the TV series.
Th e most important subgenre of the Western is the parody of the Western proper,
which dates back at least to Ferd Johnson’s Texas Slim (started in the Chicago Tr ib u n e
in 1925). Outside the United States, a satirical view of the American West was brought
forth by Italian Benito Jacovitti in Cocco Bill (1957–98) with his chamomile- drinking
cowboy and his cigarette-smoking horse. Th e most popular and successful parodic
Western comic book is the French series Lucky Luke. In 1946, the cartoonist Mor-
ris (Maurice de Bevère, 1923–2001) created this aff ectionate parody of the Western
mythos and was joined in 1955 by scriptwriter René Goscinny (1926–77), creator of
Astérix. Lucky Luke and his talking white horse Jolly Jumper confront the whole world
of the “real West,” always with a passion for authenticity: Lucky Luke tries to put the
parodied version of the Dalton brothers behind bars, he teaches Calamity Jane how to
be a real lady, and runs across Billy the Kid, Jesse James, and a bounty hunter that looks
strikingly like Lee van Cleef, an actor in many Spaghetti-Westerns. To this day (with
the help of many ghost-writers and artists) Lucky Luke always rides away into the sun-
set in the last panel of every album, humming his famous: “I’m a poor lonesome cowboy
and a long way from home.. .”
Selected Bibliography: Bonelli, Sergio. Le Frontiere di carta. Piccola storia del western a
fumetti. Milan: Sergio Bonelli Editore, 1998; Briou, Jean-Michel, ed. Le nouveau West-
ern. De Jijé à Blanc-Dumont. Brussels: 1981 ; Brown, Dee. Th e Westerners. New York:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974; Frasca, Giampiero. C’era una volta il Western.
Immagini di una nazione. Novara: De Agostini, 2007; Frayling, Christopher. Spaghetti
We s t e r n s. London: I. B. Tauris, 1981; Horn, Maurice. Comics of the American West.
New York: Winchester Press, 1977; Screech, Matthew. Masters of the Ninth Art. Bande
dessinées and Franco-Belgian Identity. Liverpool: University Press, 2005.
Martha Zan
WHAT IF? Th e What If? series explores the motif of the alternative history within the
world of Marvel comics, as much as DC Comics had explored this motif in their “imag-
inary stories,” out of continuity tales (often about Superman ), that explored various
possibilities in the character’s life. Th is would later lead to their extensive Elseworlds
line of stories, such as those that place Batman in the Victorian era or in a modern
world in which the country is run by a theocracy, or putting Superman in the U.S. Civil
War or in Camelot. Yet when it comes to alternative comics history on a regular basis,
no one did it like Marvel and What If?
Th e original What If? series were 47 double-sized titles that ran, often bi-monthly,
from 1977 to 1984. Series creator and writer Roy Th omas summed up the origins of
the series:
I was looking for a new series to write that would keep me out of the Marvel
mainstream (so that, now that I was no longer editor-in-chief, I wouldn’t have to
