Great West #4 - Myron Fass

July 1968 - True stories of old frontier days!

Ever since I read Mike Howlett's excellent Weird World of Eerie Publications book, I've been interested in picking up some more of Myron Fass' eclectic output, especially those titles I had never read before.

Great West is one of those, and I was really curious to see how Fass' in-your-face approach worked when applied to such a staple of Americana--the Old West. You can see from the cover--tame by Fass' standards--that they were at least trying to capture some of that blood-and-guts feel that was so successful for their horror and crime mags.

Unfortunately, the insides are pretty much a lone horse trail to Dullsville, featuring fairly mundane articles and some pretty weak artwork:

There's other articles of course, like "Fort Wallace 1870-1874", "Born in Violence", "Lost Ship of the Desert", "Gambling Gunslinger", "Cherokee", "Massacre at Dug Bar", and "Oregon Trail." There's also a profile of the grim-faced and even more grim-dispostioned teetotaler Carry Nation:

Some articles feature original artwork that isn't bad, like this one called "Posse Bushwhack" (which seems like a title you come up with via Western-style Magentic Poetry):

There are some fun ads in the back, like one for buying acres of Nevada real estate (a real estate offer in the back of a comic magazine? I'd be a fool not to sign up!), and then on the final page is this run of ads which seems to perfectly encapsulate the average Myron Fass reader:

...drunkenness, guns, knives, and patriotism. God Bless You, Myron Fass!