"The Western, when I do one, will be one long, continuous story"
About this Quote
Sergio Aragones is telegraphing a quiet rebellion against the way Westerns have traditionally been packaged: as bite-sized, reset-button adventures where the hero rides into town, fixes the problem, and rides out with the world restored to factory settings. “One long, continuous story” reads like a vow to treat the genre less as a costume rack and more as a lived-in landscape, where actions stain the dust and consequences follow you across counties.
Coming from a cartoonist famous for rapid-fire gags and marginalia that feel almost improvisational, the line is also a flex of craft. Continuity is discipline. It means character development instead of character poses, emotional accumulation instead of clever punchlines. Aragones isn’t abandoning humor; he’s signaling that even comedy hits harder when it’s anchored to memory and change. A running story lets a joke become a scar, a rivalry become a relationship, a town become a community you actually care about.
The subtext is cultural, too. Westerns are America’s myth-making machine, historically good at clean morals and bad at mess. A continuous narrative pushes against that sanitization. It invites the boring parts: aftermath, regret, shifting allegiances, the slow creep of modernization that turns “frontier” into property and legend into paperwork. Aragones is promising a Western that doesn’t just reenact the myth; it watches the myth wear down in real time, panel by panel, like boot leather.
Coming from a cartoonist famous for rapid-fire gags and marginalia that feel almost improvisational, the line is also a flex of craft. Continuity is discipline. It means character development instead of character poses, emotional accumulation instead of clever punchlines. Aragones isn’t abandoning humor; he’s signaling that even comedy hits harder when it’s anchored to memory and change. A running story lets a joke become a scar, a rivalry become a relationship, a town become a community you actually care about.
The subtext is cultural, too. Westerns are America’s myth-making machine, historically good at clean morals and bad at mess. A continuous narrative pushes against that sanitization. It invites the boring parts: aftermath, regret, shifting allegiances, the slow creep of modernization that turns “frontier” into property and legend into paperwork. Aragones is promising a Western that doesn’t just reenact the myth; it watches the myth wear down in real time, panel by panel, like boot leather.
Quote Details
| Topic | Movie |
|---|
More Quotes by Sergio
Add to List
