Blacktown is a comic strip in the series The spiffy adventures of McConey

The spiffy adventures of McConey

The spiffy adventures of McConey is a Franco-Belgian comic series by the popular French cartoonist Lewis Trondheim.The series mixes satire and fantasy...

(Les formidables aventures de Lapinot in the original French language), by the popular French cartoonist Lewis Trondheim

Lewis Trondheim

Lewis Trondheim , born 11 December 1964, is an extremely prolific French cartoonist and one of the founders of the independent publisher L'Association. Both his silent comic La Mouche and Kaput and Zösky have been made into animated cartoons...

. It was released in 1995 as volume 1 in the series.

Trondheim chose the western genre

Western (genre)

The Western is a genre of various visual arts, such as film, television, radio, literature, painting and others. Westerns are devoted to telling stories set primarily in the latter half of the 19th century in the American Old West, hence the name. Some Westerns are set as early as the Battle of...

 for this volume, a genre he claimed to hate, as an exercise: he wanted to find out if he could create an exciting adventure out of something he originally didn't care for.

Plot

This is the first volume in the series to be set in a stock historical setting: the Wild West. Although it uses the same main characters (Lapinot, Richard, Titi) and gives them the same type of personality, this story bears no relation to the continuing storyline of the volumes taking place in modern Paris. Lapinot is chased by outlaws for accidentally killing Rex Logan, their leader, and is later on mistaken for an outlaw himself by the villagers of Blacktown, who start chasing him as well. The story is often dark, contains plenty of action and witty dialogue, and moves at a quick pace.