Post by MWGallaher on Nov 5, 2022 12:43:14 GMT -5
In 1948, Marvel Comics published the first issue of what would be one of their longest-running Westerns, TWO-GUN KID #1. After the first Two-Gun Kid story ever came a four pager under the banner logo that simply read: The Sheriff:
This nameless sheriff finds his checkers game interrupted by one Bat Miller, who is caught beating his horse. Humiliated, Bat works up a grudge and holds up the local bank, planning to escape over the border to show the Sheriff a little humiliation in return, but Bat Miller’s plans go awry when his horse, “the fastest hoss this side of the Rio Grande”, immediately tosses him!
The Sheriff returns in the next issue in the slightly longer “Killer’s Alibi!” This one is not anecdotal like the first, but tells a more traditional Western adventure, in which the still-unnamed Sheriff is out to stop some cattle rustlers one of whom, though masked, was identified as “Emerson” by a victim who died shortly after. That would be Dwight Emerson, the son of the highly respected town banker.
When the Sheriff calls on young Emerson the next day, the fellow’s father swears that Dwight had been playing checkers with him since 8:00 the previous night.
The newspaper publishes the accusation despite young Emerson’s alibi, which leads to masked men breaking up his printing press, and then the gang gets right back to rustling. This time the Sheriff and his posse are able to catch the gang in the act, and the truth comes out: the gang leader was the elder Emerson, not the son! The Sheriff had jumped to unjustified conclusions based on the dying victim’s fingering “Emerson” but not a specific one!
In August 1948, another Western character gets his own comic with the publication of TEX MORGAN #1, and The Sheriff is there to round out Tex’s debut with “Death Rides the Gun!” This one goes a page longer than his second appearance, with a big six pages that leads to a finale in which the Sheriff spares an old man’s memory of his son by denying that the now-dead boy was one of the outlaws he battled.
The Sheriff returns to TWO-GUN KID #3 as a back-up that ends with him reading a dime novel magazine instead of attending the hanging of the killer he just caught. Next he helps out yet another debuting Westerner doing back-up duty in KID COLT #1’s “The Killer of Timberline Strikes!” This one’s back down to 4 pages, and has the Sheriff resolving a dispute between young Dan Brewster and his father-in-law who has accused Dan of killing his calves. The Sheriff proves that the killer was in fact a cougar in the area, and the grateful old man reconciles with the younger man, who reveals that his father-in-law is soon to be a grandfather!
The Sheriff joins several of his fellow Marvel Western features in their anthology comic WILD WESTERN #3, with “Law Comes in Greased Holsters!” This six-pager is an emotional one, with the Sheriff having a conflict with the violent gunfighter Durango. The Sheriff allows himself to be humiliated by backing down to the owlhoot. The townspeople wonder why the Sheriff keeps complying with Durango, but the Sheriff loses it when Durango fires a slug through a precious photo that the Sheriff carries.
It turns out that Durango was married to the Sheriff’s sister, who made the Sheriff promise never to harm Durango before she died.
This story does finally give the Sheriff a name, when he’s called “Al” in a flashback to his sister Jane’s final hour.
With all these Western heroes getting their own comics, why’s the Sheriff limited to back-up duty? Well, Marvel rectifies that in September 1948 with BLAZE CARSON (subtitled The Fighting Sheriff!) #1.
This time, Tex Taylor backs up our newly (re-)named Sheriff, who gets four short stories and an informational one-pager:
Blaze continues appearing in his own title and WILD WESTERN 5-7. Along the way he dutifully fills pages in more issues of TEX TAYLOR, TEX MORGAN, TWO-GUN KID, and KID COLT OUTLAW. He picks up a Gabby Hayes-like sidekick, Deputy Tumbleweed. Carson’s comic concludes with issue 5 in June 1949, in a classically cramped cover with lots of text:
After that, Blaze continued to appear in back-ups for Tex Taylor and Two-Gun Kid, making his final appearance in TWO-GUN KID 9 (August 1949) in “When a Man Has Faith!”
Well, that was sort of his last appearance. In WHIP WILSON #11, September 1950, he appears one last time under the alias of “Speed Larson”. So why “Speed Larson”? Perhaps he was feeling embarrassed because Whip Wilson had claimed Blaze’s own comic, taking over its numbering with the 9th issue.
Sheriff Dan “Blaze” Carson never made it back to the stands among Marvel’s 1970’s reprints, which largely accounts for the character’s obscurity. The Sheriff started out as an interesting concept, a nameless lawman recounting short, interesting anecdotes gathered over a long career. It was a good idea for a convenient back-up when the Atlas Westerns depended on several short stories every issue. The character’s transition to headliner was not surprising—when Atlas decided to add a new solo title about a Western lawman—an obvious premise to try--The Sheriff was still enough of a blank slate that he could fit the bill. There were some adjustments: the character seemed younger, and talked more like a swaggering cowboy than a seasoned officer, but it wasn’t such a dramatic change as to lead one to doubt that this was indeed the same Sheriff.
The GCD has lots of question marks on many of the installments’ art attributions, but declares Pierce Rice the artist for BLAZE CARSON #3. In general, the art for all of the character’s appearances is on the crude side, which was probably a big factor that prevented Marvel from reprinting any of it.
So if BLAZE CARSON was cancelled with issue 5, and WHIP WILSON inherited the numbering beginning with issue 9, what about issues 6-8?
REX HART appeared in three issues of his own comic, numbered 6-8, running bimonthly dated from August 1948 to February 1950. The series had assumed the numbering of BLAZE CARSON, in the well-known technique of launching a new series by changing its title and contents, thus sparing the publisher additional business expenses involved and giving the sheen of an established magazine to a newly-introduced product.
A lot of the Atlas Western features struggled to find success on the stands. One approach that appeared to be working for other publishers was to get the rights to a famous star of Western film or television and cast them as the lead of your comic feature. Fawcett had the rights to publish the fictional Western adventures of Gabby Hayes, Lash Larue, Rocky Lane, Monte Hale, Tom Mix and Hopalong Cassidy, for example.
Atlas opted to publish the comic book adventures of "Your Famous Western Star" Rex Hart. Hart was not nearly so well known as the round-up of riders Fawcett had licensed, or any of those Atlas's competitors had managed to snap up, like Dell's Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, or Magazine Enterprise's Tim Holt. Hart was best known for his appearance in...
Hmm, hold on a second, let me do some research...
OK, turns out there's a good reason I wasn't familiar with this "famous" Western star: there was no such cowboy star. Atlas just used a few staged photo covers with the same model and tried to insinuate that he was a legitimate celebrity, rather than paying for rights to whatever bottom-tier cowboy actors were still available to make arrangements with.
The first issue has the usual multiple short stories, the second two feature longer 18-page stories, with a few text stories and disposable back-up shorts in all three.
Rex was a generic roaming cowboy cleaning up towns across the West, and his stories are run-of-the-mill, but Rex did have one significant advantage over his predecessor Blaze: Rex was blessed with art from the talented Russ Heath, which make the stories in the first two issues a pleasure to look at, at least. Other artists take over in the final issue, possibly including Syd Shores, and the art is still superior to what Blaze tended to get. The reliance on longer stories made Rex’s comic a little more fun, but it wasn’t enough. Or maybe the cover model dropped out of the business, preventing them from carrying on the pretense.
As mentioned before, Rex made way for WHIP WILSON, and Whip was a legitimate Western star, the screen name of Roland Charles Meyers.
Since Whip wasn’t one of Marvel’s own characters, he’s out of scope here, but I will note that he got the boon of artwork by Joe Maneely, so his comics, like Rex’s, look pretty danged good.
This nameless sheriff finds his checkers game interrupted by one Bat Miller, who is caught beating his horse. Humiliated, Bat works up a grudge and holds up the local bank, planning to escape over the border to show the Sheriff a little humiliation in return, but Bat Miller’s plans go awry when his horse, “the fastest hoss this side of the Rio Grande”, immediately tosses him!
The Sheriff returns in the next issue in the slightly longer “Killer’s Alibi!” This one is not anecdotal like the first, but tells a more traditional Western adventure, in which the still-unnamed Sheriff is out to stop some cattle rustlers one of whom, though masked, was identified as “Emerson” by a victim who died shortly after. That would be Dwight Emerson, the son of the highly respected town banker.
When the Sheriff calls on young Emerson the next day, the fellow’s father swears that Dwight had been playing checkers with him since 8:00 the previous night.
The newspaper publishes the accusation despite young Emerson’s alibi, which leads to masked men breaking up his printing press, and then the gang gets right back to rustling. This time the Sheriff and his posse are able to catch the gang in the act, and the truth comes out: the gang leader was the elder Emerson, not the son! The Sheriff had jumped to unjustified conclusions based on the dying victim’s fingering “Emerson” but not a specific one!
In August 1948, another Western character gets his own comic with the publication of TEX MORGAN #1, and The Sheriff is there to round out Tex’s debut with “Death Rides the Gun!” This one goes a page longer than his second appearance, with a big six pages that leads to a finale in which the Sheriff spares an old man’s memory of his son by denying that the now-dead boy was one of the outlaws he battled.
The Sheriff returns to TWO-GUN KID #3 as a back-up that ends with him reading a dime novel magazine instead of attending the hanging of the killer he just caught. Next he helps out yet another debuting Westerner doing back-up duty in KID COLT #1’s “The Killer of Timberline Strikes!” This one’s back down to 4 pages, and has the Sheriff resolving a dispute between young Dan Brewster and his father-in-law who has accused Dan of killing his calves. The Sheriff proves that the killer was in fact a cougar in the area, and the grateful old man reconciles with the younger man, who reveals that his father-in-law is soon to be a grandfather!
The Sheriff joins several of his fellow Marvel Western features in their anthology comic WILD WESTERN #3, with “Law Comes in Greased Holsters!” This six-pager is an emotional one, with the Sheriff having a conflict with the violent gunfighter Durango. The Sheriff allows himself to be humiliated by backing down to the owlhoot. The townspeople wonder why the Sheriff keeps complying with Durango, but the Sheriff loses it when Durango fires a slug through a precious photo that the Sheriff carries.
It turns out that Durango was married to the Sheriff’s sister, who made the Sheriff promise never to harm Durango before she died.
This story does finally give the Sheriff a name, when he’s called “Al” in a flashback to his sister Jane’s final hour.
With all these Western heroes getting their own comics, why’s the Sheriff limited to back-up duty? Well, Marvel rectifies that in September 1948 with BLAZE CARSON (subtitled The Fighting Sheriff!) #1.
This time, Tex Taylor backs up our newly (re-)named Sheriff, who gets four short stories and an informational one-pager:
Blaze continues appearing in his own title and WILD WESTERN 5-7. Along the way he dutifully fills pages in more issues of TEX TAYLOR, TEX MORGAN, TWO-GUN KID, and KID COLT OUTLAW. He picks up a Gabby Hayes-like sidekick, Deputy Tumbleweed. Carson’s comic concludes with issue 5 in June 1949, in a classically cramped cover with lots of text:
After that, Blaze continued to appear in back-ups for Tex Taylor and Two-Gun Kid, making his final appearance in TWO-GUN KID 9 (August 1949) in “When a Man Has Faith!”
Well, that was sort of his last appearance. In WHIP WILSON #11, September 1950, he appears one last time under the alias of “Speed Larson”. So why “Speed Larson”? Perhaps he was feeling embarrassed because Whip Wilson had claimed Blaze’s own comic, taking over its numbering with the 9th issue.
Sheriff Dan “Blaze” Carson never made it back to the stands among Marvel’s 1970’s reprints, which largely accounts for the character’s obscurity. The Sheriff started out as an interesting concept, a nameless lawman recounting short, interesting anecdotes gathered over a long career. It was a good idea for a convenient back-up when the Atlas Westerns depended on several short stories every issue. The character’s transition to headliner was not surprising—when Atlas decided to add a new solo title about a Western lawman—an obvious premise to try--The Sheriff was still enough of a blank slate that he could fit the bill. There were some adjustments: the character seemed younger, and talked more like a swaggering cowboy than a seasoned officer, but it wasn’t such a dramatic change as to lead one to doubt that this was indeed the same Sheriff.
The GCD has lots of question marks on many of the installments’ art attributions, but declares Pierce Rice the artist for BLAZE CARSON #3. In general, the art for all of the character’s appearances is on the crude side, which was probably a big factor that prevented Marvel from reprinting any of it.
So if BLAZE CARSON was cancelled with issue 5, and WHIP WILSON inherited the numbering beginning with issue 9, what about issues 6-8?
REX HART appeared in three issues of his own comic, numbered 6-8, running bimonthly dated from August 1948 to February 1950. The series had assumed the numbering of BLAZE CARSON, in the well-known technique of launching a new series by changing its title and contents, thus sparing the publisher additional business expenses involved and giving the sheen of an established magazine to a newly-introduced product.
A lot of the Atlas Western features struggled to find success on the stands. One approach that appeared to be working for other publishers was to get the rights to a famous star of Western film or television and cast them as the lead of your comic feature. Fawcett had the rights to publish the fictional Western adventures of Gabby Hayes, Lash Larue, Rocky Lane, Monte Hale, Tom Mix and Hopalong Cassidy, for example.
Atlas opted to publish the comic book adventures of "Your Famous Western Star" Rex Hart. Hart was not nearly so well known as the round-up of riders Fawcett had licensed, or any of those Atlas's competitors had managed to snap up, like Dell's Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, or Magazine Enterprise's Tim Holt. Hart was best known for his appearance in...
Hmm, hold on a second, let me do some research...
OK, turns out there's a good reason I wasn't familiar with this "famous" Western star: there was no such cowboy star. Atlas just used a few staged photo covers with the same model and tried to insinuate that he was a legitimate celebrity, rather than paying for rights to whatever bottom-tier cowboy actors were still available to make arrangements with.
The first issue has the usual multiple short stories, the second two feature longer 18-page stories, with a few text stories and disposable back-up shorts in all three.
Rex was a generic roaming cowboy cleaning up towns across the West, and his stories are run-of-the-mill, but Rex did have one significant advantage over his predecessor Blaze: Rex was blessed with art from the talented Russ Heath, which make the stories in the first two issues a pleasure to look at, at least. Other artists take over in the final issue, possibly including Syd Shores, and the art is still superior to what Blaze tended to get. The reliance on longer stories made Rex’s comic a little more fun, but it wasn’t enough. Or maybe the cover model dropped out of the business, preventing them from carrying on the pretense.
As mentioned before, Rex made way for WHIP WILSON, and Whip was a legitimate Western star, the screen name of Roland Charles Meyers.
Since Whip wasn’t one of Marvel’s own characters, he’s out of scope here, but I will note that he got the boon of artwork by Joe Maneely, so his comics, like Rex’s, look pretty danged good.