Wild West Obsessed
In a tent 30 feet by 30 feet, illustrator and Western historian Bob Boze Bell has drawings and paintings for sale of famous gunfighters and their encounters. He thinks of himself as a cartoonist and has that trade's professional detachment from his subject. Although he doesn't shoot, hunt, or wear costumes, he's fascinated by the Old West. He and some friends bought True West magazine almost on a lark when it was in financial distress years ago, and he remains its executive editor. He is a favorite writer and artist of many cowboy action shooters but not one of them. "I piss a lot of people off," he says, "because they expect me to toe the line about this stuff, and I won't if I think it's b.s." He does, however, admit to being "a hat Nazi," in that he can't stand it when somebody is portraying an 1880s cowboy while wearing a hat from the 1900s.

I ask if he is torn, as I am, between thinking this is all harmless fun and thinking these guys are all missing one strand on their ground wire. "Oh, absolutely," he says. "They all have a similar story of seeing a movie or a TV show or reading a book that captured their soul." Bell adds that, oddly enough, the 1993 movie, Tombstone, starring Val Kilmer and Kurt Russell, is a cult classic among today's kids. He reports having talked to kids who have seen it not just dozens, but hundreds, even thousands, of times.

"I'll tell you what drives this, what's always driven our fascination with the Wild West," he says. "Whenever America gets scared, it always looks backward. We get nostalgic for a time and place that was not as corrupt and vile as the world we see around us. Westerns took off when Al Capone and gangsters with tommy guns were scaring the hell out of people. Boomers grew up during the Cold War, when the Bomb could fall at any minute. We knew damn well that hiding under our desks wasn't going to protect us. So we look back through rose-colored glasses to a time when right was right and wrong was wrong, and the bullets were slower. In fact, the Old West was at least as nasty as the age we're living in. But that's not the point. Is it immature beyond belief? Sure. I outgrew it at 14. But you know what? I'm not that different from these guys. I came back, too."