Weird Western Tales comics. I think that's where it began for me.
If I trace my weird western tastes back as far as I can remember, it goes all the way back to my childhood when I picked up a worn copy of Weird Western Tales and my eyes were opened to the awesomeness of gunslingers, ghosts, devils, and dead men. I don't know where I got the comic. Maybe an older neighborhood kid or maybe at my elementary school library where I checked out all sorts of things that kept me awake at night.
There were other influences. In the 70s/80s, when I wasn't riding my bike all over the place, or playing soccer and basketball, I absorbed syndicated western TV shows on the weekend -- The Lone Ranger, The Wild Wild West, Gunsmoke, The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams, Bonanza, Kung Fu -- while the radio introduced me to country classics like "Ghost Riders in the Sky," "The Gambler," and "The Devil Went Down to Georgia." I just about lost my mind when my beloved The Muppet Show adapted those songs. But perhaps the strongest influencer was one of my favorite short-lived 80s cartoons, The Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers, which inspired me to draw my own ripoff comic called "Galaxy Law" about bionic-powered space rangers. Maybe I'll post about that one of these days (with pictures).
Flash forward a few decades, and I was brainstorming new ideas for short stories. Like most superfans, Firefly had left a gaping void in my nerdy heart, and I knew there was potential to fill it. I came up with "Ghost in New Town." The story was set in 1881, about a new Midnight Agency recruit with a cursed pistol who is partnered with an older mentor to investigate a series of mysterious crimes in Las Vegas, New Mexico, which was said to be as wicked as Dodge City.
Because the story sold rather quickly to Crowded Magazine, I knew I was onto something, so I started writing a novel called Midnight Agency. I wanted to write the kind of weird western I loved to read, a story filled with fantastic landscapes, cool guns, even cooler gunslingers, outlaws, magic, dead men, ghosts, angels, and devils.
I was about 70,000 words into the first draft when my friend, Des Fox, asked me if I'd like to join him in an experimental writing project. Four authors would each write a serialized novel set in a shared Storyverse called White Event, set in a post-apocalyptic western setting. Writing episodic fiction appealed to me, and I realized I could change minor details of my work-in-progress to make it fit in this new setting.
And so the Midnight Agency series, as you know it, was born.
I hope it contains everything you love about the weird west, too.
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