Weird West is a literary sub-genre that combines elements of the Western with another literary genre, usually horror, occult, or fantasy.
DC's Weird Western Tales appeared in the early 1970s and the weird Western was further popularized by Joe R. Lansdale who "is best known for his tales of the 'weird west,' a genre mixing splatterpunk with alternate history Western almost entirely defined by the author in the early nineties. His work reads a little like the sort of folklore in which Mark Twain dabbled (or the Gothic in which Flannery O'Connor was involved), but with zombies and gore."
Examples of these cross-genres include Deadlands (Western/horror), The Wild Wild West and its later film adaptation (Western/steampunk), Jonah Hex (Western/superhero), BraveStarr (Western/science fiction) and many others.
Read more about Weird West: Background
Famous quotes containing the words weird and/or west:
“Those Three Weird Ones, that tend Life’s loom.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)