An Eventful Stagecoach Ride

 

cover art by Jack Kirby

In 1955, when Marvel Comics was still Atlas Comics and westerns were king in comic books, movies and TV, the original Rawhide Kid (a blonde gunfighter whose real name we never learn) began a 16-issue run that ended in 1957.

In 1960, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby revived the character name with a new gunfighter, keeping the same original numbering. Rawhide Kid #17 (August 1960) introduced us to dark-haired Johnny Bart, who has a reputation as an outlaw but is really a good guy. Taught to handle six-shooters by the former Texas Ranger who raised him after he was orphaned. 

His father-figure is killed in the very first story and Rawhide Kid becomes a wandering hero. The second story in that issue was used to both emphasis his public reputation as an outlaw, his status as a wanderer and his nigh-superhuman skill with a gun.

"Stagecoach to Shotgun Gap," by Lee and Kirby, starts with a great Kirby splash page that makes it look as if the Kid is indeed planning on robbing a stagecoach.

It turns out he just wants a ride, having missed the stage at its last stop. He climbs aboard, discovering that the other passengers are scared of him. Unwisely, a lady announces her entire life savings are in her bag. A kid traveling with his dad lets Rawhide Kid know they are carrying THEIR life savings as well, intended to pay a doctor to repair the boy's injured leg.

Gee whiz, these people are stupid. It's not the sort of think you should be telling the man you think is going to rob you.

Well, Stan Lee had only so much space to set up the situation and he was writing a zillion scripts a month at the time, so we can cut him a break. But the story is contrived in its set up.

The stage is stopped by a gang waiting along the road. It appears they've hit the jackpot with the passengers carrying so much cash. Of course, the owlhoots are indifferent to the pleas of those they are robbing.

Even when the outlaws have the drop on him, Rawhide still moves "like a bolt of unchained lightning," drawing and shooting the guns out of their hands. After that, he frankly shows off a little, holstering his guns so he can take the three guys in a fist fight.

The stage continues on its way. It's not clear what they did with the outlaws--tied up inside the stage, perhaps?--but the other passengers are now grateful and friendly to the Rawhide Kid.

It is a contrived story, but Kirby's dynamic art looks great and it is fun watching Rawhide's superhuman-level gunplay. Though I'm probably tossing around the word "superhuman" a little too casually. Gunplay such as this is common in various legendary versions of the Wild West. We're fortunate that no one at Marvel later retconned Rawhide Kid into being a mutant. Western gunfighters of legend (Rawhide, the Lone Ranger, Hopalong Cassidy, etc) should be as good as they because they are simply as good as they are. 

Next week, we'll begin a look at a two-part Batman story involving the Penguin and a bunch of really big robot birds.

Dakota Kid the Second

 

cover art by Larry Lieber

Last week, we looked at the one and only appearance of a character called The Dakota Kid. And that was indeed his only appearance. But in 1973--16 years later--ANOTHER Dakota Kid made his one and only appearance.

Western Team-Up #1 (November 1973) was also the one and only issue of that particular comic. It teams up the Rawhide Kid with the new Dakota Kid.

By the way, as I speculated last week, I think the repeat of the name was a coincidence, not a deliberate attempt to create a new version of an obscure character. If I'm wrong and if anyone out there in Comic Book Land has better information, please comment and correct me.

Written and drawn by Larry Lieber, the tale picks up with Cliff Morgan (who goes by Dakota Kid) running into the Rawhide Kid. He challenges Rawhide to a fast-draw, but Rawhide declines. R.K. is just looking for a job.

Dakota, impressed by Rawhide's cool courage, takes him home to meet his dad. This is Colonel Morgan, who disapproves of Dakota's wild ways and openly shows a preference towards his other son, Wayne.

After Rawhide is given a job, Dakota rides into town to meet his gal. This is despite the fact that he's supposed to be riding herd. Wayne volunteers to take Cliff's turn out on the range. Dakota, in the meantime, is forced to kill a man in self-defence. He's arrested, but even the sherriff knows he'll beat the rap. The witnesses all support the self-defence claim.

Back on the ranch, though, rustlers strike, with the Morgan's foreman acting as an inside man. They kill Wayne, take a bunch of cattle and leave the foreman behind to accuse Rawhide of the crime.

So Rawhide has to go on the run. Back in town, Cliff hears of his brother's death. He breaks jail to track down Rawhide. But when the two meet, Rawhide has tracked down the real rustlers. 

Rawhide and Dakota team up to take them down. But, because he broke jail, Dakota is now a fugitive. He rides off---like Rawhide Kid, he's now a man with no home and a reputation as a bad guy.

Like the first Dakota Kid story, it's a well-told Western, though there's nothing inherently special or exceptional about it. And, like the first Dakota Kid, Dakota the Second will also be galloping off into Comic Book Limbo. Westerns, by then, were fading from the comic book landscape. And besides, his origin story made him essentially a clone of Rawhide Kid. Perhaps there simply wasn't room for another "Kid" in the Marvel Wild West.

But he did exist and was at the center of a good story. Characters like that should never be completely forgotten.

Next week, we'll stay in the Marvel Universe and visit with the Avengers.

Cover Cavalcade

 

May is DRAMATIC WILD WEST ENTRANCES month!

A 1972 cover by Larry Lieber.

Bank Robbers and Pretty Girls

 

cover art by Jack Kirby

Being a wanted man does indeed make it hard to carry on a stable relationship with a purty young gal. In Rawhide Kid #19 (1960), Stan Lee & Jack Kirby teach the Kid this lesson in no uncertain terms.

The story opens with the Kid ignoring a bully. He's worried that if he draws on the guy, everyone will quickly realize he's the Rawhide Kid. But when that bully moves on to bother a lady--well, that's a different situation.

The Kid takes down the bully with his fists, thereby still hiding his real identity. But trouble is afoot. Because now a woman (named Susan) is involved. And, by golly, wimmen is nothin' but trouble!

Susan and the Kid hit it off, and the Kid soon finds himself wishing that he wasn't a wanted man and had the option of settling down. Because by this point, he and Susan have fallen in love. 

Making the situation even more awkward is the fact that Susan's dad is the local sheriff.

The Kid realizes that there's only one intelligent way to handle his love match--sneak out of town before he meets Susan's dad. But this doesn't work out. The sheriff sees and recognizes him. This leaves the Kid with no choice but to claim Susan means nothing to him. He was playing up to her only to get on the good side of the sheriff.

At this point, bank robbers arrive in town, taking Susan hostage. The Kid gets away from the Sheriff and takes on the bank robbers. In a typically fun Jack Kirby fight, he takes them out. But he still needs to convince Susan he could care less about her. So he grabs a bag of gold and makes a getaway.

Later, he confronts Susan's dad outside of town and gives back the gold--on the condition that Susan be told the gold was recovered when the Kid was briefly captured before escaping again. The sheriff realizes that the Kid really loves his daughter, though she can never be told so.

To a large extent, the story is predictable. We know up front that the Kid isn't going to settle down and get married. But it's still a very enjoyable tale. Jack Kirby wasn't able to let his imagination fly as wildly on relatively realistic Westerns as he did with superhero and science fiction tales, but he's always a superb visiual storyteller. And Stan Lee's script provides a nice touch with the sheriff realizing the truth but being obligated to keep it a secret. It provides a bit of real pathos to the story that gives it emotional backbone. 

That's it for the Wild West. Next week, we'll watch the Thing and the Hulk punch each other out.

Never Bring a Puma to a Gunfight!

"The Plunderers," from Rawhide Kid #55 (December 1966) was written and drawn by Larry Lieber.  I'll admit upfront that I like Lieber's art, but I'm not usually knocked dead by it. His work is servicable and enjoyable, but doesn't particularly stand out.

But in this story, Lieber really had his game on. His script is a perfectly good one, but it's his art, with a very effective use of shifting camera angles and some well-choreographed fight scenes, that make everythying click.

The Kid meets a family of poor farmers, who assume there's a reward and arrest him. Not wanting to fight innocent people, the Kid allows himself to be taken into town.

He's not wanted in this particular county, though. But while he's in jail waiting for the sheriff to check up on him, he sees the patriarch of the farming family getting roughed up by some thugs.

When he's released, he runs to help the farmer. But the farmer assumes the Kid is working with the thugs and some of the townspeople jump him as well after also automatically assuming he must have busted out of jail.

That leads to the first of several action sequences as the Kid fist-fights his way out of town. Determined to help the farmer regardless, he rides out to their homestead. Here he discovers a rich rancher is trying to run them off the land so that he can grab it for himself.

The farmer and his two kids don't trust the Kid at first, but when the bad guys attack, they are forunate to have him around.

This leads to yet another effective action scene, in which the Kid takes out most of the rancher's gang, despite the use of a haywagon to smash into the farmer's house.

This flows into the climatic scene. Using the farmer's daughter as a hostage, the rancher flees back to his own place. The Kid pursues, so the villain releases his pet puma. This tactic quite literally comes back to bite the rancher.

The story is structured to give us one nifty fight scene after another and, because Lieber's art stands out, it works really well in this regard. It can be said that the Rawhide Kid stories were stuck in the same rut--he's always distrusted by the people he meets and this always forces him to move on in the end even if he has made a few friends. But within that framework, some very entertaining stories were told.

We've visited with Turok and Andar recently, but I've acquired an unusual multi-part story arc from that series, so we'll return to Lost Valley next week.

Cover Cavalcade

A really dynamic cover by Larry Lieber from 1968.  Like many great covers, it makes effective use of perspective.

Bank Robbers and Mountain Lions

The cover story for Rawhide Kid #25 (December 1961) is "The Bat Strikes," which provides us with evidence that there were masked villains using secret identities even back in the Old West. But then, in any Comic Book Universe worth its salt, there was probably cavemen villains who were using secret identities while employing trained sabertooth tigers to rob the local cave village bank of its deposits of shiny rocks.

In this particular story, the villain is "The Bat," who keeps robbing the local banks. So when Rawhide Kid shows up, wanting to deposit some money in a bank, everyone assumes he must be the Bat. His reputation as an outlaw and tough guy has proceeded him, even though he's not wanted in this county.

Everyone either treats him with contempt or is in object terror of him. He reacts to this with a mixture of anger and bitterness, but what can he do? Fear and false accusations follow him whereever he goes.

Well, when the Bat robs another bank, the Kid figures he can catch him and clear his name of at least one false accusation.

I like this short but well-constructed tale (written by Stan Lee) for telling a good story and providing us with some real emotional impact, but I have to say that the page just below--showing the Kid's pursuit of the Bat and then the Bat's unfortunate encounter with a mountain lion--is what sells the story for me. Jack Kirby's artwork provides a real sense of kinetic energy while unfolding the action in a clear, logical fashion. It's a model of effective visual storytelling:

Anyway, the Bat turns out to be the owner of a local bank, robbing the place to cover financial losses.

A local who had given the Kid a particularly hard time shows up in time to hear the banker's dying confession and has the grace to apologize to the Kid. Then, despite the bitterness he'd shown earlier, the Kid tells him to he'll take the blame for being the Bat rather than have to tell the banker's wife and daughter the truth. The banker can be portrayed as having died a hero while chasing a crook.

The story had done a very good job in highlighting the Kid's bitterness earlier in the story, so this act of nobility really does have some emotional bit to it. One can argue that before Lee and Kirby started added maturity to the portrayal of comic book characters with Fantastic Four #1, that such characters were usually one-dimensional. And this is often a fair point--probably even usually a fair point. But we can see there that there are stories out there that did give comic book characters some real depth.

We're due for another visit with Tragg and the Sky Gods, so we'll do that next week.

Kid vs. Kid

Kid Colt Outlaw #121 (March 1965) reminds us that there's an awful lot of Kids in the Old West.

Remember that Kid Colt and Rawhide Kid were both wanted men. Neither was actually bad guys--but circumstances early in the respective careers left them both with prices on their heads.

That makes their first meeting an interesting one. Each knows that he's really a good guy, but has no way of know the other one isn't a bad guy. So they have no reason to trust each other.

The story begins when Colt is outsmarted and captured by veteran marshal Sam Hawk. Not long after tossing Colt into the clink, Rawhide arrives, bringing a warning that the nearby town of Silvertown has been taken over by outlaws.




But someone recognizes Rawhide. Sam Hawk arrests him, then decides to scout out Silvertown alone so that no one else will be endangered if Rawhide's warning is some sort of trick.

Colt breaks out of jail, leaving Rawhide behind--remember that he thinks the other Kid is a real outlaw. But Rawhide uses the confusion of Colt's escape to pull of an escape of his own. Knowing he needs help to save Silvertown and Sam Hawk, Rawhide follows Colt in hopes of enlisting his aid.

It's here that the story breaks down a little. I grant that Rawhide thought Colt was a bad guy. But, in
order to follow the tradition of two comic book heroes fighting prior to teaming up, Rawhide decides the best way to make friends with Colt is to immediately jump him and try to beat the tar out of him.

Artist Jack Keller gives us a perfectly fine 1-page fight scene, but in terms of storytelling, the incident is simply too contrived to be effective.

Adding to the story's woes is that Colt and Rawhide really don't have distinctive personalities--at least when compared to each other. Consequently, there isn't much other than their clothing and hair color to make them stand out from one another. Both have identical motivations and identical speech patterns that make use of the words "hombre" and "owlhoots" a bit too often.


I'm not knocking the characters--taken on their own, both Kid Colt and Rawhide Kid gave us wonderfully entertaining stories. But I don't think Stan Lee ever succeeded in making them distinctive individuals to the degree he did so with Marvel's superheroes. Of course, by the 1960s, superhero books were the big sellers, while Westerns were on the verge of fading into the cultural sunset. Perhaps Stan simply put more effort into the superhero books.

But once the two Kids get together, the story picks up again. Sam Hawk has been captured by the outlaws in Silvertown. The villains are led by Iron Mask, a re-occurring character who wears bullet-proof iron plating. The two Kids charge into town just in time to prevent Hawk's murder, but the three are soon pinned down and running low on ammunition.

Rawhide Kid saves the day by luring Iron Mask down an ally and getting him to drop into an abandoned well. When you wear iron plating, it's not a good idea to go swimming.

The action sequences, most notably Kid Colt's encounter with the posse at the beginning and the climatic battle against Iron Mask and his gang, are quite good, with Keller's art definitely reminding one of Jack Kirby. This story does highlight the lack of distinctive characterization among Marvel's Western heroes of the day, but all the same, it's a fun read.

Next week, we'll get a reminder that real heroes do math in their heads.

Cover Cavalcade

I like the perspective in this cover.

Making a six-gun the star

In 1951, Jack Davis was working for EC Comics. In the March/April issue of Two-Fisted Tales (issue number 20) that year, Jack penciled a fun Western called “Army Revolver.”

It’s a story that centered on the titular pistol rather than any one character. A prospector uses the gun to back-shoot his partner. Later, he loses it to a saloon gambler.

Violent events continue, causing the gun to change hands several more times, until it ends up back in the hands of the prospector, who is now lost in the desert and dying of thirst. Fortunately, the revolver still has one bullet left in it…

It’s not the best of the Two-Fisted Tales stories, but it’s still a strong story. Tales took an issue or two to find its footing, but during its all-too-short run it regularly contained well-constructed adventure and war stories—usually ending with an ironic or unexpected twist. “Army Revolver” is a good example of this.

Now let’s jump ahead a decade or so. Jack Davis is doing some work for Marvel and is about to become the regular artist on Rawhide Kid.

Rawhide Kid usually featured two or three short tales involving the Kid and one random Western story. The random western in Rawhide Kid #30 (October 1962) featured a story called “This is… a Gun.” It revolves around the titular weapon rather than one single character.

A guy buys a high-quality six-gun. He figures the gun makes him a big man and becomes an outlaw, but the law soon catches up with him.

The gun is lost in the woods, where it’s found by a cowboy, who uses it as a useful tool and in legitimate self-defense while he works for a living. The moral, of course, is that a gun is a tool that can be used for good or evil depending on who owns it.

It’s not as strong a story as “Army Revolver” and the moral—though perfectly legitimate—comes across as a bit heavy-handed. All the same, it has a very strong thematic similarity to “Army Revolver.”

“This is… a Gun” was drawn by Dick Ayers, but Davis was already doing some work on Rawhide Kid and would be the regular artist by the next issue. It makes me wonder if he and Stan Lee weren’t trading ideas and perhaps Davis mentioned a Western he’d done for EC back in the day. Stan then may have used the general idea to craft a new story.

I have no idea if this is true. If you asked Stan Lee about it, I doubt he’d remember one minor story out of the literally hundreds of tales he churned out during the 1950s and 1960s. And, as usual, I don’t really have a point. It’s simply kind of fun to recognize the similarity in the two stories possibly linked together by Jack Davis.