Bill Elliot, like pretty much every successful B-movie cowboy hero, had his fair share of comic book appearances. In Bill's case, the numbering of these can get a bit confusing. He first appeared in Dell's Four Color #278 in 1950. When he got his own series later that same year, this began with issue #2--the Four Color appearance was counted as the first issue. This was common practice at Dell, though the publisher wasn't always consistent in this practice.
The 10th issue came out in 1952, then the series was cancelled. Bill had two more Four Color appearances after this (#472 & #520), then his own series restarted in 1954 with issue #13. So the two later Four Colors were counted as issues #11 & #12. Gee whiz, if you collected those issues, what order would you put them in your long boxes?
Anyway, we'll be looking at a story from that initial Four Color. Bill is asked by an old friend for help. The friend runs a paper mill near San Francisco, but a nearby rancher wants control of all the water in the valley, so is working to sabotage the mill and put it out of business. There's no legal proof, though, that the rancher is behind the sabotage attempts.
For instance, a wagon load of machine parts is driven off a cliff when a thug tumbles a big rock down on it. The artist--identified only as Cary--gives us a pretty brutal image of the oxen falling to their deaths. The driver and his assistant, though, leap clear.
In fact, "The War on Spider Creek" is as much a detective story as it is a Western, with Bill following up clues in a logical manner, engineering a trap to catch one of the rancher's minions, and later lures the rancher and his gang into a larger trap. Adding detective story elements to B-Westerns was pretty common in both the movies and their comic book counterparts. When done well, this makes for a nice recipe for fun storytelling.
Though I do enjoy the story, I have a couple of nitpicks. It's made clear that there is enough water for both the rancher and the paper mill. So the rancher wants control of all the water for no reason other than to be evil. Establishing that the water can be shared, though, was necessary to set up the ending.
The rancher is caught, but no blood has been spilled Well, no human blood. Those poor oxen are still dead.
Bill gets his friend and the rancher to work out a deal to share the water rights, with the rancher agreeing to do so to avoid jail. The rancher also agrees to pay for the damage his men have caused. This allows Bill to comment on how nice it is to solve a problem without bloodshed.
This is all well and good as far as it goes. As an evangelical Christian, I'm all for portraying the idea of personal forgiveness as the proper route to take, while the rancher paying for damages is showing him taking responsibility for his actions.
But civilizations work by having a rule of law and it is never wrong to apply legal consequences to crimes even when personal forgiveness is forthcoming. The rancher had hired men to commit acts of violence and it was only dumb luck that no one got killed. (Despite my joke above, the death of the oxen does not, of course, have moral equivalency with the death of a person.) Of course, there as times when forgiveness and clemency should extend into overt law-breaking. I'm just not convinced that this was the wise thing to do in this case. If your thugs try to kill people while acting under your orders, then you need to do some jail time.
But I get that the story wanted to make a point about settling matters peaceable. And it really is a fun, well-constructed tale. So, like Bill and his friend, we'll be forgiving and let the matter stand as is.
This issue can be found online HERE.
Next week, we return to the 2nd World War for a story that uses our own Genre Savvy against us to give the story a fun plot twist.
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