Tex: Captain Jack

Whenever I talk about Enrique Breccia, which is quite a lot, I often hear the retort that he’s not quite as good as his father, Alberto Breccia. That is true, because very few have ever been as good as the elder Breccia, and most of them are dead. But Enrique is as fine a comics artist as you can find on his own terms. Here’s a man whose been doing not only quality work for decades, but different types of quality work - he is not easily pinned down in style or approach.

If you are one of the unfortunate who only know Breccia through his various stints at DC Comics—the 2002 graphic novel Lovecraft with Hans Rodionoff & Kieth Giffen, or the 2004-06 series of Swamp Thing with writers Andy Diggle and Joshua Dysart—it would benefit you to try out his non-American stuff, such as Epicenter Comics' recent four-volume reprint of his 1977-83 adventure series Alvar Mayor; granted, you might find Carlos Trillo's writing a bit sub-Toppi in its exoticization of myth and fable, but the art - oh the art. The things he does with character, with shadow, the ways his panels curve, the way his backgrounds sing…

This is why I was surprised at how ‘regular’ Captain Jack is. Just look at the cover: the setting sun; the Native rider in the background; our hero with a chin so square and strong you can use it as a ruler; the loyal companion standing just the right amount to one side, hair white enough to show experience, but not so much that we would fear for his age. This is very much emblematic of the work inside, with Breccia drawing in a clean, no-frills style, putting storytelling over atmosphere. Page after page of gunfights,¹ daring escapes and ambushes await, with clarity stressed above all. Tito Faraci's story is loosely based on the real-life circumstances of the Modoc War in the late 19th century American west. The Modoc tribe, lead by a noble soul named Kintpuash (the titular Captain Jack), is brought to ruin by the low deeds of a violent tribesman, Hooker Jim (another real person); this introduces fictional heroic cowboy Tex Willer into the plot (and also the U.S. Army, to the extent that they can be shown up by Tex).

Who is this Tex? Created in 1948 by Giovanni Luigi Bonelli & Aurelio Galleppini, he is the hero of roughly eight billion pages of cowboy comics, almost none of which are in a language I can read. I do own several albums, pocket collections and stray issues, though. On a recent sojourn through Europe I crossed three countries, and in each one, whenever I went into a corner shop, there amongst the magazines would be a Tex adventure. They have always been at least a pleasure to look at.

Tex, both comic and character, is a preeminent example of that curious thing: the European Western. The Western, after all, is a genre born of the American West, speaking about American myth and history; a lifetime ago there were countless cowboy comic strips and comic books roaming their homeland, but almost nobody makes them anymore, and when they do it’s kind of a post-Western / 'modern' Western / Weird Western deal. Nobody wants to give it to you straight in the U.S.A. anymore. Even Jonah Hex can’t carry an ongoing series, forget about the Two-Gun Kid. Meanwhile, on the European continent, the genre seems to be ticking along just fine; Tex wasn't the only comic book cowboy I saw on my trip.²

There’s something to be said of the European longing for this genre, their endless interest in the United States as not as a concrete place but an idea - the land of freedom and opportunity, where a man can be a man. Also, you can not only own a gun, but you are actually expected to use it.³. The Western manifests the U.S. as the antithesis of Europe as a cultural idea: something that can be mocked, sneered at, but at the same time yearned for. I’m thinking now about Tintin in America, the Hergé classic meant to take place in 1930s Chicago, which avails itself of the first opportunity to ditch civilization and venture outside the city, where apparently the 19th century is still in full swing.

Tintin in America is also a good signifier for how the European Western deals with race. One particularly ingenious page (see just above) compresses the discovery of oil on a reservation, the Natives being cleared by the government, and the erasure of their cultural memory into a matter of hours. A sharp bit of satire… undone when one considers how stereotypically those same Natives are portrayed throughout the rest of the story: gullible fools easily led astray, perpetually a century behind the times. It’s easy to condemn American racism, but harder to give Native American characters actual depth.

Nearly a century later, Captain Jack (first published in Italy in 2016) tells the tragedy of the title character, but he finds himself pushed aside by Tex, an honorary Navajo with the too-cool name of Night Eagle - the Cowboy here is arguably a better Indian than the Indians.⁴ This is the archetype Richard Slotkin identified in his much-recommended 1992 study Gunfighter Nation as The Man Who Knows Indians: “mediators of a double kind who can teach civilized men how to defeat savagery on its native grounds - the natural wilderness, and the wilderness of the human soul.” For all the sympathy the story can offer to Captain Jack and his men, Tex must triumph, must prove himself the best.

In this way, I guess it fits that Breccia has illustrated this story in such an old-fashioned style (some panels remind me of Michael Golden, especially in the character faces). Despite the handsome package, a brawny 8.5" x 11" hardcover crammed with extras,⁵ Captain Jack is fundamentally the kind of story Alex Toth used to knock out in a 10-page "Johnny Thunder." This isn't Unforgiven, or even My Name Is Nobody, this is Bend of the River or Winchester '73 or Western Union, or a dozen other typical ways one could pass an afternoon. You can sense a greater battle going on in this story, between the desire to tell something complex, the story of Kintpuash and the conflicts of his political and military leadership, and the need to satisfy the demands of a Tex episode. It’s a bit sad that Tex wins that shootout.

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1. The concluding third of this not-especially-slim book is basically one long action scene. It’s to Breccia’s credit that it doesn’t get too tiring, though one does eventually wish for the curtain to fall.
2. In fact, Epicenter has just begun work on English translations of another Italian-made Western series, Ken Parker by Giancarlo Berardi & Ivo Milazzo.
3. The quick-shot gunfighter is, of course, a mythic character. As the filmmaker Sam Fuller once remarked, “I'm ashamed that in pictures they have not made the true story of the winning of the West - comprising 90 percent foreigners, 100 percent laborers, nothing to do with guns. Streets, mountains, roads, bridges, streams, forests - that’s the winning of the West to me.”
4. You see something similar whenever Blueberry chooses to feature a Native American character; they will be shown to be wise and strong, but Blueberry is wisest and strongest.
5. There’s an introductory essay on Breccia's career and an interview with him, plus some historical writing on the real events that inspired the story - laudable in its intention, though the prose isn’t particularly interesting.