References to the American western and frontier myth are scattered throughout French-language comics and graphic novels about the conquest of North Africa and the Algerian War. Together, they serve as an important paradigm for representing French colonialism in sequential art. The American frontier myth describes a violent, manichean world of savages and Westerners, incarnated in stock character types, such as Indian, cowboy, cultural transfuge (e.g., abducted settler or half-breed Indian), cavalry soldier, sheriff, bandit, rancher and farmer. Cartoonists and readers have reinterpreted the myth in significant ways as they have adapted it to the North African context: for example, through the redistribution of the roles of Native Americans to Algerians, settlers of the American West to French colons in nineteenth-century Algeria, and U.S. cavalry soldiers to officers in the Bureaux arabes or to French conscripts and career soldiers fighting the Algerian War.

However, French cartoonists and readers sometimes modify the conventions of the western to the point that they take on radically new meanings (this is similar to how the American frontier is revisited by Texan cartoonist Jack Jackson in his comics, analyzed by Joseph Witek in Comic Books as History). One obvious reason for this in the French context is that, unlike the Native Americans, the North Africans ultimately won full formal sovereignty over their countries.

One remarkable example of such a reinterpretation was when Algerian and Algerian-French readers of Blek le roc -- an Italian comic book series about the American Revolutionary era -- reassigned the roles of American trapper (i.e., European colonizer) to the Algerians and of British loyalist forces to the French. The readers identified the struggle of Algerians for independence from the French with the comic book portrayal of the American revolutionary war against the British, almost two hundred years previously. Algerian-French cartoonist Farid Boudjellal recently paid tender hommage to this childhood influence in Petit Polio (volume 1), set during the Algerian War. One of his earlier characters borrows traits from the same trapper figure and from Zorro.

My presentation surveys the range of references to the western and the frontier myth in comics and graphic novels about French North Africa and the Algerian War. I analyze the transformations of the western myth by authors with different relationships to the North African colonial legacy. I also examine the extent to which American colonial ideology is reproduced and contested in the works.