Cover Cavalcade

Really nice cover art by Jose Delbo. From 1969.

A Gunfighter in a Sword Duel

The good guy version of Billy the Kid has quite a long run in both B-movies and comic books, so he racked up quite a few adventures for someone who got killed when he was only 22 years old. But the sliding time scale of fiction does have its advantages. 42 B-movies and 153 issues of his series from Charlton adds up to 195 adventures. Let's assume that in the universe in which Billy the Kid was a hero had him start his career at 16. That's 32 1/2 adventures per year, or one about every 11 days. Gee whiz, when did he have time to go to the bathroom?

With all that adventuring, I suppose its not surprising he managed to fit in at least one sword fight. This happened in Charlton's Billy the Kid #64 (December 1967). Billy is defending the honor of a beautiful French woman, only for the woman to decide he's as much of an oaf as the guy who was making unwanted advances. She whacks him on the head with a whiskey bottle.

When the woman learns that Billy is actually the guy she wanted to hire for a particular job, she nurses him back to consciousness and implies that it was someone else who wielded the bottle.

This, plus the fact that her assistant Fritz might as well be wearing a sign around his neck that reads "I'm a jerk and a bully" let us know pretty much right away that the woman is a classic Femme Fatale. But poor Billy seems to tumble for her pretty quickly.








That's a act, though. Billy is at least suspicious of her right from the beginning. She turns out to be the mastermind behind a plot to drive ranchers out of the valley and acquire the land cheaply. Billy and one of the ranchers stage a fight to make it look like Billy is completely under her sway, but Billy has to give himself away to keep Fritz from back-shooting the rancher.

This leads to Fritz challenging Billy to a duel. You wouldn't think the average Western gunfighter would also be a skilled fencer--and you'd be right. Billy gets the upper hand by pretty much turning the ensuing sword duel into a brawl. When Fritz's thugs turn out to have brought guns to a sword fight, the rancher and the marshal step in to help Billy bring them all down.

Fritz tries his hand once more at challenging Billy to a duel, this time with pistols. Billy counters by suggesting they just stand a few feet away from each other and pull the triggers simultaneously. Fritz balks at this, the woman admits to the land-grabbing scheme and the two are run out of town. Poor Billy doesn't get the girl--but then, who would have wanted her anyway?

It's a fun story, with Jose Delbo doing the art and the script tentatively credited to Joe Gill. A combination of basic good storytelling and the inherent pleasure of watching a bully get his comeuppance makes it a satisfying tale.  It's available to read online HERE. 

Next week, we'll follow along with an annoying little toy who tries to give Santa Claus some unwanted help.

Cover Cavalcade

Fun, kinetic John Severin cover from 1959.

Billy the Kid Meets a Giant Iguana!

A couple of years ago, I wrote a post about Billy the Kid's career as the hero of B-moves--a career that far surpassed his brief activity as a real-life outlaw. But Billy also had quite a few adventures as a comic book hero. In 1950, Toby Press (a comic publisher active from 1949 to 1955) gave Billy a 29-issue run. In 1957, Charlton droped Billy into their own series (beginning with issue #9, because it took over the numbering of another book titled The Masked Rider) that ran for 145 issues, coming to an end in 1983. Billy had some pretty wild adventures during that run. Heck, he once had to trail a corrupt Indian agent back to Washington and punch him out in front of President Grant!

That's from Billy the Kid #31 (November 1961) and is actually only the second most interesting thing that happens to the young outlaw in that issue. And not just because you could punch out pretty much any random guy in the Grant White House and it probably would have been a crooked politician. It's because in the story "The Monster of the Mountain," Billy the Kid has to fight a monster.

The script is tentatively credited to Joe Gill, with Charles Nicholas providing the art work. It's a tale that begins with Billy getting jumped by some Indians, members of a tribe whose warriors are reputed to be among the best, but still need an outsider to do something they won't do.

The tribe, you see, lives in a hidden valley. They mostly like it there, but a huge and carnivorous creature is driving down the property values. To appease the creature, they have to send someone in with food every so often. Whomever delivers the food doesn't always come back.

Billy tries to fight his way free, but is overwhelmed by sheer force of numbers. He's stuck with the job.



What I like about the story is that Billy isn't trying to be the hero this time around. He recognizes the danger involved and sees no sense in risking his life. He's perfectly capable of acting with courage if he needs to and certainly fulfills the role of Hero in other stories, but this time he just doesn't see the need. He tries to talk his way out of the job as well as fight his way out, but in the end, he carries a dead deer into the monster's cave.

Both the cover and a splash page that begins the story give away the monster's nature, so it's no surprise when Billy is confronted by a giant iguana. What follows is a nifty three-page battle as Billy employs first his torch and then a rawhide lasso to defeat the monster. The Indians are pleased with this--they can now safely wall up the cave and keep the creature from ever threatening them again. Billy rides free.

The story runs for 10-pages and to a degree it feels a little bit rushed, with necessary exposition being squeezed in sometimes a little awkwardly. But I like the bizarre idea of a giant iguana wrecking havoc in the Old West, while Billy's fight with it is nicely choreographed. That big lizard really does some across as creepy and scary, especially in that panel where we see him in a close-up as he lunges towards Billy.

I'd like to say that a giant iguana is probably the most bizarre threat Billy encounters in any of the post-real-life tales in which he appears. But there's a 1966 movie (not a very good one--sad to say) in which Billy the Kid battles Dracula. So the poor lizard probably has to move into second place. Gee whiz, if Billy had done stuff this interesting in real-life, he wouldn't need us to make up stories about him, would he?

You can read Billy the Kid #31 online HERE.

Two Billy the Kids for the price of one

In real life, Billy the Kid had a short but violent career before being gunned down by sheriff Pat Garrett. In the B-movie universe, though, he had quite a long (and rather more heroic) career.

In a series of 6 films made in 1940 and 1941, Bob Steele portrayed the Billy as a wandering Western hero who, despite his reputation as an outlaw, fights for the underdog and brings villains to justice.

The real Billy was involved in the Lincoln County War--a violent range war fought in New Mexico Territory in 1878. That's the backdrop of Billy the Kid Outlawed, Steele's first adventure as Billy. The villains are the owners of Lincoln's general store, who hold IOUs for just about everyone in the county and are using this to make sure one of them is elected sheriff. He has his thugs kill a troublesome rancher, but the murder victim was an old friend of Billy's. So Billy helps a federal judge try to clean up the town.

But the judge is murdered and the bad guy becomes sheriff. Billy and his two sidekicks are declared outlaws, forcing them to use outlaw tactics to fight back.

It's not a bad movie, though it has its flaws. It clocks in at under an hour, but still seems a little too long. The pacing is off--scenes of cowboys galloping from one location to another always seem to be a few seconds too long. The gun fights and fist fights are too loosely choreographed, with no real cleverness to them and with an over-dependence on Billy's comedic sidekick Fuzzy to provide slapstick moments.

But the story is a pretty good one and Steele does a good job of as Billy--especially in a scene where he bitterly decides the law is helpless and his only option is to embrace being an outlaw.

Buster Crabbe returned from Mongo and took over the role in 1941, playing Billy the Kid in 13 films. In 1943, he put on a lighter-colored shirt and became Billy Carson for 23 more films. He still had the same sidekick (with the same name) for a partner, though. Rumor hath it this was because someone (distributors, theater owners, or perhaps parents) were worried about making a real-life outlaw a hero. I suppose technically the Billy Carson films are a different series, but I prefer to think of them as the same--with Billy eventually adopting an alias so that he could leave his reputation as an outlaw behind. (You can even theorize that he and Pat Garrett faked his death between movies.)

Anyway, in 1942's The Sheriff of Sage Valley, Billy is still an outlaw. Despite this on his resume, the mayor of Sage Valley asks him to take the job of sheriff to clean up the town. He's reluctant at first, but

circumstances soon convince him to agree.

This puts him up against an interesting villain--the local outlaw leader is Kansas Ed, who just happens to be Billy's physical double. (And he just may turn out to be Billy's actual evil twin brother.) When Billy arrests one of Kansas Ed's men for murder, the villain kidnaps Billy and forces him to switch clothes. Then Kansas, posing as Billy, springs his man from jail. This convinces the townspeople that Billy has joined the outlaws. Now he not only has to catch the bad guys, he's got to prove his own innocence.

Sam Neufield was the director of all 42 Billy the Kid/Billy Carson films and he got better as the series progressed. Though still a little too dependent on poorly-done slapstick humor during the fight scenes, the action in Sage Valley is better choreographed and the story is better paced.

Crabbe is very likable as Billy (I like him better in the role than Steele, though that's very much just my opinion--both are good in the role) and he also manages to give a pretty good "evil" vibe in his double role as Kansas Ed. An actress named Maxine Leslie does a nice job as Kansas Ed's femme fatale girlfriend.

So Billy the Kid was quite active in the B-Movie universe. And changing his name and his shirt doesn't fool me a bit, by golly. Neither does changing actors. That's still Billy the Kid!

This clip will give you a chance to compare Bob Steele and Buster Crabbe in the role.