I had a similar thought re the two plots: there's the Western, where the good guy is gonna fix up the town and s/he hasn't got a lot to learn, or the rest, where the protag is there to get fixed.

I was thinking about modern westerns - Die Hard pointedly draws the parallel with Yippy-Ki-Yay - but then McClane has a few things to learn about his relationship with his wife. A bit of both, then, perhaps also evident in the psychologically tormented / vulnerable superhero (latest Spidermen flicks), which seem to have become their own sub-genre.

I may be drawing a long bow here, but there's something shared by superheroes like Ulysses and the old style Western cowboys - the Wyatt Earps etc.

And, something that seems to be true more of Hollywood film making / American modern mythology than say European / Australian / New Zealand modern mythology, is the love of Olympian figures - superhero gods like Superman. The Japanese have got loads of superhero kids' stuff, but can you think of other cultures that have such a successful late teen / adult audience for the modern Olympic god?

Unpaid villain said, "I may be drawing a long bow here, but there's something shared by superheroes like Ulysses and the old style Western cowboys - the Wyatt Earps etc."

That's an insightful comment. I've never drawn quite that comparison as the Ulysses's of the story universe would seem, on the face of it, to have more in common with current and past comic-book superheroes.

And yet especially with American westerns in the 40s and 50s, that story world was mythic in its own right, and the distinction between 'good' and 'bad' drawn pretty clearly. I mean, compare High Noon (1952) or Stagecoach (1939) to Deadwood and the movies give us a highly sanitized view of the west, a landscape against which 'regular' men and women could take on mythic qualities, at least morally, if not with the pyrotechnics of the current crop of superheroes.