Would The Duke Approve?

[Bob Boze Bell]

July 18, 2011

   Spent most of the weekend working on our next cover: Cowboys & Aliens: Would The Duke Approve?

Played with a couple of different ideas, like this one of the Duke lumbering across a desert landscape with a squadron of fifties style flying saucers firing at him:

 

 

Also, noodled a close-up of the Duke looking down on an alien invasion:

 

 

I'm concerned about a dark cover. We have had a string of excellent white and stark covers, although the last issue with Geronimo is very dark. I'm just not sure I want to do two in a row. Did a third and fourth cover idea, including a very large painting of the Duke standing over a downed alien craft, the crash part of the scene poached from one of the Cowboys & Aliens movie stills. I think it may be the one. Robert Ray sent it down to Dan The Man this morning and he is going to work his magic.

 

I also want to run some comments from the readers (and you) about whether you think The Duke would approve of Cowboys & Aliens. I need your comment, one or two sentences, plus your, full name, city and state. Need it by tomorrow, so get with it.

 

Nice to be back in the office after our three-state road trip. Speaking of road trips, a great review by Tom Vanderbilt in the New York Times of The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways, by Earl Swift.

 

Some of the observations are quite astute, like the fact that old style road rambling "may soon be obsolete as America enters its High Civilization period and no one will get sentimental or poetic anymore about trains and dew on fences at dawn in Missouri."

 

"With the modern car on the modern freeway, the modern traveler is left with practically nothing to celebrate but the ever-briefer time he had to devote to getting from one place to another." That is the author Earl Swift describing the decline of enjoying a road trip.

 

It was John Steinbeck who famously said you can now drive from "New York to California without seeing a single thing."

 

"Whole states have been relegated to vague blurs of asphalt." And, "the windshield becomes a proscenium through which we watch the countryside pass without actually experience it; we're in it, not not on it."

 

The interstate highways carry us without incident, without drama. They offer up food and lodging with minimum fuss. The carve the shortest path all the way home. And most important, "we made good time."

 

But is it time well spent? Not really. And finally, "The future [of our roads] it seems, is getting away from us, even as we keep asking, with a plaintive cry from the back seat: "Are we there yet?"

 

Sweet. As a weekend road warrior, I want that book, as well s the others Vanderbilt recommends:

 

• Divided Highways, (1997) by Tom Lewis

 

• Open Road (1986) by Phil Patton

 

• Interstate 69, (2010?) by Matt Dellinger

 

"For everything you gain you will lose something, and for everythinig you lose you will gain something."

—Old Vaquero Saying

 

"

[Mark]

I'll recommend 2 other books that (depending on which states we'll be travelling in) I take on road trips:

"A Tour Guide to the Old West" covering most of the states west of the Mississippi; and

"A Tour Guide to the Civil War" covering pretty much every state.  Both books are by Alice Cromie and are excellent.  They tell what's worth stopping at in every state (by town) covering these 2 subjects.  We've made numerous happy side trips because of these books.  They tell of historical sites, museums, roadside markers, battlefields, etc.  They even cover sites that are no longer there or for some reason are not open to the public.  I highly recommend them.

[anthony martin]

 I talked with a friend who used to work with Wayne and still chats with his son Patrick.He felt the Duke would have thought the whole notion just silly.Now, cowboys vs. commies, he would have been behind that one! Anthony Martin-Riverside'Ca.

[Gold Lady]

You didn't mention how kids today watch movies, play games, or listen to music with their electronic devices. They're not even looking out of the window.

My husband and I went to Bellemont, just west of Flagstaff last weekend. I was glad to see old Route 66 was still there. The road by the Pine Breeze Inn is still the old concrete sections that caused the bump-bump-bump that I remember as a kid. Awhile back, we actually sat in folding chairs in the road west of Bellemont and had lunch right on 66!

[Bob Boze Bell]

Love that image Gold Lady of you in folding chairs in the middle of old Route 66. And Anthony,
"Cowboys & Commies" is the title. Very funny, and true!

[Bonnie Condict]

I can't drive a regular car anymore , must have convertable top , like big screen cinema can see lots more !

[anthony martin]

  Bob,

     Yes,perhaps a very apt title as so many of those great old 50's science fiction movies were thinly disguised metaphors for the big red scare.Wayne and his close actor pals like Ward Bond were seriously committed conservatives and very vocal about communists and pinkos.One has to give Wayne his due for having cajones of steel even when he was making an old fashioned patriotic movie in the Vietnam Era and it was widely criticized.One wonders what he'd make of the current P.C. that's all over our culture!

[anthony martin]

 Bob,

  I just thought of cross over possibilities fo the whole Duke vs.aliens angle-Gene Barry as  Bat Masterson  poking with his gold headed walking stick at a martian's three fingered hand with the little suction cup fingertips or James Arness as the Thing-There's a new marshal in town,a soulless vegetable out for blood!Love the great gouaches of the Duke with the saucers!

[James Allder]

My thoughts are that Wayne (The Duke) would only make polite, supportive comments about Cowboys & Aliens, publicly -- but privately he would be very dismissive of the whole genre-bending take on the traditional western.

James Allder, Katy, Texas

[Bob Boze Bell]

Thanks for the comments. Might use them. Stay tuned.

[Christopher Zimmerman]

I think the Duke would have a hard time with Cowboys & Aliens.  He was all about the heroic men and women who struggled with taming the West.  Adding aliens to the mix makes it all seem kind of silly.  Why add ET when you have Indians and evil cattle barons to deal with?