Chris Hunt is the writer and artist behind Code of the West—an inquiry into what an old, unwritten standard of conduct can still teach us about freedom, responsibility, courage, and keeping your word.
Code of the West: A Frontier Guide for Modern Living
Three conversations about the ideas, experiences, and difficult questions behind the work.
A candid conversation about moral frameworks, AI and sovereignty, work and survival, creativity and identity—and the questions that open a life back up.
“If you don’t consciously choose your framework, you’re just cast on the wind.”Read at Huckberry
The landscape that formed Chris, the quiet expectations he absorbed there, and why consequence may be the clearest teacher we have.
“You can’t negotiate your way out of the consequences of reality.”Read at Boot Barn
A conversation about ordinary courage, sovereignty without isolation, and why a code has to work when the decision gets difficult.
“Without a code, you don’t have a decision matrix. You’re winging it.”Read the Q&A
The work sits where personal sovereignty meets social obligation: what freedom asks of a person, and why identity can never substitute for behavior.
What does a code give a person that a list of values doesn’t—and why does it have to appear in conduct?
Why does freedom eventually come apart when it isn’t joined to responsibility, restraint, and obligation to others?
Can durable standards of conduct be recovered without turning them into costume, tribal identity, or self-help theater?
Chris grew up around cowboys and truck drivers, learning “the Code of the West” as a colloquial standard of conduct rather than a formal doctrine.
After years working in comics and commercial illustration, he returned to those old ideas through a personal drawing project. That project became Code of the West: a body of writing and art, a community of more than 346,000 people, and now a book from Andrews McMeel.