Washington is not a place to live in. The rents are high, the food is bad, the dust is disgusting and the morals are deplorable. Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country. – Horace Greeley
I’m Max West and I’d like to tell you about my creation. I’ve been drawing comics for quite some time; I’m the creator of Sunnyville Stories plus its spin-off, Dominic & Claire. I also created the webcomic Tiffany & Corey and the graphic novel Von Herling, Vampire Hunter. I am also developing a picture book but that’s not what I want to talk to you about today.
Poison Ivy Gulch is an online comic strip that will launch on Monday June 1, 2020. It is entirely done by myself and will get updated twice a week on Monday and on Wednesday.
Poison Ivy Gulch takes place in a frontier town of the same name somewhere out on the Western frontier sometime in the 1870s. The comic strip features a cast with a number of stock characters. The main stars of the strip are Lotta Doler, a female gambler from back East, and her sidekick, a small boy named Ace. Why don’t we meet a few of them?
In Westerns, you meet a hardy bunch of characters. There is no jealousy on such pictures. – John Wayne
Lotta is considered the protagonist of Poison Ivy Gulch. She’s a redhead born and raised in New York City; she was born on July 7th as the seventh of eleven children. Learning card games from a young age, she took to them quickly and mastered them. Rather than be married off to some rich man, Lotta heard stories about the West and left her family behind to go out to the frontier. Lotta lives in her own house, financed by her gambling winnings. When not at her house, she can be found at the card tables of the local saloon, taking on all challengers…and cleaning them out of their money. I guarantee that you’ll be seeing a lot of her.
Ace is the deuteragonist. Ace is 9 years old and lives with Lotta in her house. When not at home or at school, Ace can be found wandering around Poison Ivy Gulch and its surrounding area. He’s an adorable urchin not unlike Dennis the Menace or Calvin of Calvin & Hobbes. You’ll be seeing much of him too.
There are other characters living in town. One of them is Mayor Samuel Sidewinder. Mayor Sidewinder is a Boston native who was once a legislator. A scandal forced him from office and he was declared State Fink. Eventually finding his way out West, he made his way to the ramshackle town of Poison Ivy Gulch where he became the mayor. Mayor Sidewinder is constantly being re-elected due to voter fraud; one of his favorite activities is visiting the town’s cemetery where he registers the deceased to vote…for him.
There’s other characters living in town but I won’t spoil them for you. You’ll just have to read the comic yourself to meet them all.
People love westerns worldwide. There’s something fantasy-like about an individual fighting the elements. Or even bad guys and the elements. It’s a simpler time. There’s no organized laws and stuff. – Clint Eastwood
Maybe you’re wondering why I chose the Western for the medium of comics. The Western is a fiction genre that has mass appeal throughout many cultures and over many borders. In spite of that, the Western is a uniquely American creation, essentially our own commedia dell’arte with well-established tropes, familiar plots and stock characters. Westerns have been made into literature, television shows, movies and comics; they’ve also been parodied, homaged and deconstructed numerous times.
The inspiration for Poison Ivy Gulch was the newspaper comic strip Tumbleweeds, created by T.K. Ryan (1926-2019) and running in newspapers from 1965 to 2007. To be honest, my creation owes more to the simple art style of Charles Schulz, creator of Peanuts. My own style has always leaned towards simplicity and ideas as opposed to capturing reality. The style itself would not look out of place alongside other newspaper comics like Peanuts, Wizard of Id, B.C. and the Far Side. It also owes much to such comedy Westerns such as Blazing Saddles, Three Amigos and the Shakiest Gun in the West. It does borrow too from the traditional genre media such as classic Westerns (John Wayne, etc) and spaghetti Westerns (Clint Eastwood, Sergio Leone, etc). As research, I spent countless hours reading Western literature and watching some of those movies mentioned above.
Westerns give people a chance to see wide-open spaces and life before technology took over. – Bill Pullman
There are very few Western comics online and this is a reason why I chose to create Poison Ivy Gulch. All in all, I think it is a very unique and original creation. You’ll enjoy it.
If you do like this comic of mine, why not tip me over on Ko-Fi?
Feedback is welcome too. You can email me at poisonivygulch(at)aol(dot)com or if you prefer snail mail (which I like as it is more personal), I get mail deliveries by the stagecoaches that pass through. You can send your letters to:
POISON IVY GULCH
℅ DIFFERENT MOUSETRAP PRESS
1100 19TH AVENUE N, #108
UNIT J
FARGO, ND 58102-2269
In conclusion, I hope you enjoy Poison Ivy Gulch. It is witty, clever and enjoyable. If all goes well, you may just see it in print form. There is always the possibility of a print comic or a graphic novel complete with original stories or books collecting the various comic strips.
“America owes nearly as much to Cooper as to Franklin and Washington: For if these two great men called the society of the Union of States into life through legislation and glorious battle, it was he […] who through his sympathetic story-telling and the sincerity of his patriotic sentiments spread its lustre beyond the sea.”
— George Sand, Fenimore Cooper (1856)
