Tex Willer: The Italian Western Comic That Outsells Superman in Italy

Every month, without fail, a new album of Tex Willer appears in Italian newsstands and bookshops. It has been this way since 1948. Tex is a Texas Ranger, a man of iron principles and few words, who roams the American West dispensing justice. He was created by writer Gian Luigi Bonelli and artist Aurelio Galleppini, and he has sold hundreds of millions of copies. In Italy, Tex is not just a comic — he is a cultural monument. Yet outside Italy, almost no one knows he exists.

Tex Willer began publication in September 1948, just three years after the end of World War II. Italy was rebuilding, and Italians were hungry for escapism — particularly American-flavoured escapism. The Western genre was enormously popular in postwar Italian cinema (which would eventually produce its own Spaghetti Western tradition), and Tex fit perfectly into this hunger. But unlike American Westerns of the era, Tex had something different: a deep, consistent moral code, real political complexity, and an Italian sensibility. Tex respects Native Americans — he is an honorary Navajo chief and blood brother to the chief Aquila della Notte (Night Eagle). This was radical in 1948, and it gave the comic a moral seriousness that set it apart.

The longevity of Tex is staggering. The comic is now in its seventh decade of continuous publication. The original artist Aurelio Galleppini (known as Galep) continued drawing it until his death in 2011 at age 92. New artists and writers have continued the series, maintaining an extraordinary consistency of tone and character. What Tex represents in Italian culture is the ideal of the uomo giusto — the just man, the man who does what is right even when it costs him. Tex never compromises, never accepts corruption, never lets the powerful abuse the weak. For Italian readers, in a country long familiar with corruption and political compromise, this is not escapism — it is aspiration.

Gian Luigi Bonelli was a sophisticated writer who used the Western genre as a vehicle for stories about justice, loyalty, and the rights of the dispossessed. In Tex's world, Native Americans are not savages to be conquered but peoples with their own dignity and rights. Black characters appear with respect long before it was common in American popular culture. Women are treated as full persons. The villains are often not simple criminals but representatives of corrupt systems — land-grabbing railroad companies, crooked politicians, hired guns serving the rich. Bonelli's Western was, in this sense, a political fable — and Italian readers understood it that way.