Ishmael Reed didn’t invent the black Western or the Afrocentric vogue for Ancient Egypt. But he may have been the first writer to synthesize their iconographies—a feat he accomplished, to great comic effect, in *Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down*. Published in 1969, Reed’s sophomore novel is a Western-style showdown over the origins of “Western” civilization. Its hero is the Loop Garoo Kid, “a desperado so onery he made the Pope cry,” who fights to liberate the frontier town of Yellow Back Radio from a malevolent cattle baron and his venal cronies. Their cartoonish strife draws inspiration from Egyptian mythology, skewering the mystique of the Old West through surreal pastiche and slapstick. In a 1972 interview with John O’Brien, founder of the Dalkey Archive Press, Reed described the novel as “artistic guerrilla warfare against the Historical Establishment.”