About fifteen years ago I was listening to a lot of Western music. That’s Western, before it mutated into Country/Western and finally just Country. Western to me was everything from Gene Autry and “Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” to Western Swing as performed by Bob Wills, Milton Brown or Spade Cooley, to just any old ballad about doomed gunslingers and strawberry roans. Sadly the “Western” element has all but vanished from contemporary Country music, but all I had to do was toss in a CD by one of those artists, or catch a “Riders In The Sky” concert and I’d be back on the rhythm range once more, at least, in my imagination.
And it was out of those songs and my imagination that “Mutant, Texas” was born. I liked the idea of a weird little western town, too modern to be the old west, but not the contemporary west of Wal-Marts and NASCAR races. My off-beat pocket of never-was Texas would be a place where Buck Rogers collided with Roy Rogers. A place where amadillos talk and tequila planet women deliver 150 proof kisses. A concept not to everyone’s tastes to be sure, but an idea that amused me a lot. Enough anyway, to spark a four part mini-series, assorted short stories and the comic strip feature running on this site. If you’ve enjoyed the adventures of Ida Red, the Kiyotes and their various friends and foes in their published appearances in Oni and Dark Horse Comics, hopefully you’ll dig what David Alvarez, Antonio Alfaro and I have planned for them here. And if you’re new to Mutant, Texas, just click on the panel of the sneaky-looking coyote to your right and jump on in.
