Western comics of the period typically featured dramatic scripts about cowboys, gunfighters, lawmen, bounty hunters, outlaws, and Native Americans.

Accompanying artwork depicted a rural America populated with such iconic images as guns, cowboy hats, vests, horses, saloons, ranches, and deserts, contemporaneous with the setting.

[1] Starting in the 1930s, Red Ryder, Little Joe, and King of the Royal Mounted were syndicated in hundreds of newspapers across the United States.

Dell Comics' The Funnies published a run of short adaptations of B-movie Westerns starting in vol.

Whitman Comics' Crackajack Funnies ran regular Western features (including Tom Mix stories) beginning with issue #1 in June 1938.

Other early DC Comics Western characters included Johnny Thunder, Nighthawk, Pow Wow Smith, Tomahawk, the Trigger Twins, and Vigilante.

Writer Paul S. Newman and artist Tom Gill had an 11-year stretch on Dell's The Lone Ranger, a 107-issue run that marks one of the longest of any writer/artist team on a comic-book series.

Gaylord DuBois excelled in writing Western comics featuring realistic animals: he wrote the entire run of The Lone Ranger's Famous Horse Hi-Yo Silver, the entire run of National Velvet under both the Dell and Gold Key imprints, and many other animal stories for a number of publishers.

Artist Rocke Mastroserio specialized in Western stories for such Charlton Comics series as Billy the Kid, Black Fury, Jim Bowie, Rocky Lane's Black Jack, Sheriff of Tombstone, Six-Gun Heroes, Texas Rangers in Action, and Wyatt Earp, Frontier Marshal.

At the same time, the comics industry was shifting back to superheroes (entering its "Silver Age") and away from some of the other genres which had flourished during the 1950s.

In fact, of the original Western comics series begun in the late 1940s and early 1950s, only a handful of titles survived the 1950s.

Elements include a darker, more cynical tone, with focus on the lawlessness of the time period, favoring realism over romanticism, and an interest in greater historical authenticity.

By then no major publishers were producing Western titles, though iconic characters from the DC and Marvel canons would occasionally make cameo appearances in other books.

The DC Comics imprint Vertigo reintroduced the Western genre in 1995 with Preacher, set in a contemporary version of the West.

Creators like Joe R. Lansdale, Michael Fleisher, and Tony DeZuniga were notable contributors to Western comics from this period.

Tex is among the most popular characters in Italian comics, and has been translated into numerous languages, including Portuguese, Finnish, Norwegian, Tamil, Turkish, Slovenian, Croatian, Serbian and Hebrew.

Carlo Boscarato and Claudio Nizzi's Larry Yuma was a popular character in the Italian magazine Il Giornalino throughout the 1970s.

Giancarlo Berardi and Ivo Milazzo's Ken Parker is a popular Western hero appearing in Italian comics since 1977.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, writer Gianfranco Manfredi's Magico Vento was a popular title from Sergio Bonelli Editore.

Since the late 1990s, Enrico Teodorani's Djustine has been featured in erotic "Weird West" stories in Italy and the United States.

Tintin magazine featured Western-themed comics starting in 1947 with Le Rallic's various series, and later, between 1955 and 1980 the humor-based Chick Bill by Greg and Tibet.

The Belgian publisher Le Lombard produced the title Buddy Longway, by Swiss comics creator Derib, from 1972 to 1987, and from 2002 to 2006.

Jim Edgar and Tony Weare's "Matt Marriott" was a daily strip which ran in the London Evening News from 1955 to 1977.

Hugo Pratt and Héctor Germán Oesterheld's Sergeant Kirk was a popular Western comics title in Argentina during the 1950s.

Western comics were popular in Japan in the early 1950s, both translations of American titles like Straight Arrow, the Durango Kid, and Tim Holt; and original Japanese manga.