Mr. Young of the Boothill Gazette

 

Cover art by Jose Delbo

From 1971 until 1974 (issues 88 through 110, with a few issues being skipped within that run), Charlton's Billy the Kid included a back-up feature titled "Mr. Young of the Boothill Gazette," with art and scripts by Pat Boyette. The premise is a fun one--in 1875, a young greenhorn from back East comes to the town of Boothill, Texas to work as a reporter. His editor mostly puts him to work sweeping the floor, while printing innocuous articles about Ladies' Aid Society. There's a lot of lawlessness in Boothill, but the editor (Maxwell Cosswell) doesn't want to rock the boat. Or get shot.

But his new reporter, Abel Young, is full of ambition and a firm sense of right and wrong. By golly, he'll confront evil whereever he finds it--despite the fact that he's completely hopeless in a fight. 

In Billy the Kid #89 (February 1972), Abel learns that a gunman named Fife Anson is planning on killed a gambler named Burley Meade. When Abel objects to this, Anson throws him into an open grave. Though terrified, Abel still wants to stop the murder.

He confronts Anson again in a saloon, but that simply gets him punched and thrown out the back door. Meade is coming in that way with the intent of back-shooting Anson. Desperate, Abel conks Meade over the head with a bucket. Then, when it looks like Anson is going to shoot HIM, Abel even more desperately attacks him and manages to knock him out. 

When Meades starts to regain consciousness, Abel knocks him out again as well, saving himself with a pair of last-resort lucky punches. The two gunmen are arrested by the sheriff and peace is temporarily restored to Boothill.

Boyette does some fun panel design during Abel's two-page confrontation with the bad guys, laying them out in a diagnal pattern that emphasizes the action quite nicely. Abel comes across as a bit self-righteous at times, but he is of course correct in objecting to murder and the self-righteousness can be an aspect of his naivety. He's an interesting character and we might return to Boothill again to see what he's been up to.

Next week, we'll discover that even dead Nazis will continue to follow orders..