Western Picture Stories ran four issues in 1937. Star Ranger ran for 12 issues, becoming Cowboy Comics for a couple of issues, and then becoming Star Ranger Funnies. Star Ranger and Western Picture Stories both debuted from the publisher in late 1936, cover-dated Feb. The first stand-alone Western comics titles were published by Centaur Publications. Whitman Comics' Crackajack Funnies ran regular Western features (including Tom Mix stories) beginning with issue #1 in June 1938. Dell Comics' The Funnies published a run of short adaptations of B-movie Westerns starting in vol. 1935) ran the modern-West feature 'Jack Woods' and the Old West feature 'Buckskin Jim' Centaur Publications' The Comics Magazine #1 (May 1936) ran the feature 'Captain Bill of the Rangers' and David McKay Publications's Feature Book #1 (May 1937) and a single issue of King Comics (also 1937) featured King of the Royal Mounted reprints before Dell took over licensing of the character. The first Western stories to appear in the comics were in the mid-1930s: National Allied's New Fun Comics #1 (Feb. Garrett Price's White Boy (later changed to Skull Valley) was another syndicated strip from the 1930s. Starting in the 1930s, Red Ryder, Little Joe, and King of the Royal Mounted were syndicated in hundreds of newspapers across the United States. Harry O'Neill's Young Buffalo Bill (later changed to Buckaroo Bill and then, finally, Broncho Bill), distributed by United Feature Syndicate beginning in 1928, was about a group called The Boy Rangers, and was a pioneering example of the form.

Western comics first appeared in syndicated newspaper strips in the late 1920s.

Western novels, films, and pulp magazines were extremely popular in the United States from the late 1930s to the 1960s. Accompanying artwork depicted a rural America populated with such iconic images as guns, cowboy hats, vests, horses, saloons, ranches, and deserts, contemporaneous with the setting. Western comics of the period typically featured dramatic scripts about cowboys, gunfighters, lawmen, bounty hunters, outlaws, and Native Americans. The term is generally associated with an American comic books genre published from the late 1940s through the 1950s (though the genre had continuing popularity in Europe, and persists in limited form in American comics today). Western comics is a comics genre usually depicting the American Old West frontier (usually anywhere west of the Mississippi River) and typically set during the late nineteenth century. This type of comic can be broken down into: This topic covers comics that fall under the Western fiction genre. Cover art by Dick Giordano and Vince Alascia. Charlton Comics' Billy the Kid #9 (November 1957).

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