Cowboy

by Rikke Villadsen

Overview

This uproarious graphic novel is a surreal take on the classic Western — and a rip-roaring adventure in gender identity and queerness!

A rugged outlaw rides into a typical nineteenth-century Western town, swinging his six-guns and stirring up trouble. Meanwhile, an idle young woman gets the notion to outfit herself as a cowboy and makes her getaway. Danish cartoonist Villadsen's off-kilter vision of the Old West features exploding prostitutes, menstruating cowgirls, mysterious gender-bending, and much more. Giddyap!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781683962793
Publisher:	Fantagraphics Books
Publication date:	03/17/2020
Pages:	100
Product dimensions:	6.90(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	16 - 18 Years

About the Author

Rikke Villadsen lives and works in Copenhagen. Her first graphic novel, The Sea, was published in 2011, followed up with Cowboy (2020) and The Clitoris (2022), each demonstrating Villadsen’s singular, avant-garde graphic and narrative vision. In 2015, she was the first cartoonist to receive the prestigious Danish Art Council Grant, an honor heretofore bestowed upon novelists and poets.

Editorial Reviews

12/16/2019

Villadsen deconstructs the oft-deconstructed western genre—along with gender, narrative, and the comics form—in this feverish stew of pulp tropes and postmodern games. In a Wild West town populated by stock characters—helpfully labeled The Sheriff, The Coward, The Smoker, etc.—a familiar story of gunslingers facing off at high noon is repeatedly disrupted with sex, scatology, surrealist digressions, and unusual eroticism. The closest thing to a coherent plot follows The Window, one of the interchangeable women whose role is to peer fearfully out of windows at the men in the street, as she grows dissatisfied and plans an escape. She grabs the artist’s pen, draws a mustache and testicles on herself, and dresses as a cowboy and attempts to ride off into the sunset. In other vignettes, a wanted poster talks back to an outlaw, and a lady of the evening floats out of her brothel like a balloon. The loose, blue-tinted watercolor art has a deliberately unfinished look, adding to the sense of a fictional world disintegrating into chaos. If the book saunters lackadaisically toward its final pages rather than building to a satisfying conclusion, maybe that’s appropriate, as it’s more of a a formal experiment than a complete story. Wandering until he runs out of ideas, Villadsen takes readers on one bizarre ride. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"Danish cartoonist Rikke Villadsen's latest is a visceral, sexual and fantastical spin on the Western genre, disassembling norms and flipping gender roles."

Cool Yeah Alright

"Breaking barriers and forcing one to look at the familiar in strange ways has always been the hallmark of great art. Rikke Villadsen deserves accolades for this one."

Broken Frontier

"An aggressively peculiar take on an already aggressively peculiar genre. I'm already looking forward to whatever new Villadsen book they publish next."

PopMatters

"Take the stereotypical Western, and flip it on its head: instead, we find gender fluidity and powerful women, thanks to Rikke Villadsen, an artist and cartoonist from Denmark. A fun, adventurous read."

Bitch Media