Two Gun Kid in The Avengers:
Avengers #142-144, 147, 161, 162, 168, 172, 174, 175



Issue 142 opens with a Western Team-Up of Two-Gun Kid, Rawhide Kid, Night Rider, Kid Colt, and the Ringo Kid in 1873 against time-traveling Avengers.



They find Hawkeye, who tells them the story of how he had flown to Dr. Doom’s castle, after the most recent departure from the Avengers, and highjacked Doom’s time machine to pursue Kang the Conquerer. He ended up in the Old West, where Kang has taken over Two-Gun’s town of Tombstone, and made friends with Matt Hawk, Two-Gun’s civilian identity, to help him fight for freedom from the time-traveling villain.

Eventually, the combined forces of Western heroes and modern Avengers defeat the villains, and in issue 144, Two-Gun asks to be taken back to the future when the Avengers return to their own time. After all, he’s more of a costumed and masked adventurer than a lawman, and despite some reticence, they permit him to return under the guidance of his new friend Hawkeye, who announces he is leaving the Avengers.

After a two-issue fill-in, #147, the time-traveling Avengers plus one return to modern-day Arizona, and Two-Gun and Hawkeye head off to lasso some wild horses.

We check in again in issue 161, where Hawkeye and Two-Gun meets some women, and 162, where the pair are employed at Cheery-O’s Dude Ranch, where Two-Gun enjoy’s Jack Kirby’s rendition of his old pal Rawhide in the pages of a Marvel Comics reprint.

In issue 168, Two-Gun mysteriously vanishes as he and Hawkeye take a train ride. We don’t see either again until 172, when Hawkeye returns to Avengers mansion “after all those weeks of tromping around out west with Two-Gun!” At the end of the issue, we see that Two-Gun is held by a mysterious figure in a stasis tube alongside Quicksilver, Captain America, Moondragon, Vision, and Jocasta.

By issue 174, a total of 13 heroes have been captured by the mysterious figure, not so mysterious any more—it’s the Collector! By the end of the issue, Two-Gun and the rest have been freed.

In issue 175, Two-Gun returns to his own time.



West Coast Avengers #18-23

The West Coast Avengers are “Lost in Space-Time” in part 2 of an arc, and Dr. Doom’s time platform lands them in the Old West where they encounter the Western Team-Up of Rawhide Kid, Two-Gun Kid and Night Rider (“or whatever he’s called this week”, as Hawkeye remarks) coming to the rescue of a stage coach being robbed. The Western heroes have the situations under control quickly, and the robbers flee before the WCA reaches the trio enjoying an old-time Western Team-Up.

Two-Gun’s overjoyed to be reunited with his friend Hawkeye, Rawhide learns that he’ll be the subject of dime novels in the decades to follow, and Tigra doesn’t mention that Night Rider “looks just like the Ghost Rider in our time, but ours is supposed to be…this one’s ghost!”

It’s 1876 local time, and Two-Gun has been back two years, having returned to 1874 after his stint in the 20th century. He and his partners have been tangling with their own group of super-villains, a Western Team-Up of Iron Mask, Hurricane, Doctor Danger, and the Fat Man (all of whom we’ve discussed in previous installments) along with the Rattler (from Two-Gun Kid #88) and Red Raven (from Rawhide Kid #38).



Soon enough, it’s a mega-Western Team-Up with the Western stars joining with the WCA to take on the Old West villains and their army, with Iron Mask noting “the Kids admit they’re not enough for us, by bringing in pathetic imitations of ourselves!” (I guess Iron Man=Iron Man, Mockingbird=Rattler, Hawkeye=Fat Man, Tigra=Red Raven).

Of course, with the super-powered Avengers, the Westerners are not too hard to take down, until Iron Mask calls in his secret weapon: the Living Totem (from Rawhide Kid #22). Although he looks like a walking totem pole, he’s actually a stranded alien from another planet, but he’s a formidable opponent.



At the end of the adventure, the Avengers move on further into the past, but Night Rider absconds with Mockingbird as the other Avengers fade into the past. Seems the spook has the idea that Bobbi is some kind of goddess!?
In the following issue, Night Rider, Lincoln Slade rehashes the origin of Carter Slade, the original Ghost/Night Rider, as well as his one taking over the role upon his brother Carter’s death. He’s plying Mockingbird with love potions, which seem to work when she revives in love with the ghostly hero! Seems this Night Rider is convinced that “goddess” Bobbi Morse has the ability to bring his brother back from the dead?!
Two-Gun and Rawhide track the kidnapper to his secret cave hideout and start fighting, while Mocking bird joins Night Rider in battling his former allies—she’s fighting for her new man! They win and head off for their honeymoon! But while gathering supplies, Mockingbird picks up a trinket she has the impulse to hang onto—one of her true love Hawkeye’s trick arrowheads!

Next issue, Night Rider and Mockingbird settle down in Lordsburg, where Lincoln Slade serves as marshal. It’s his idea to ditch their costumes and start a new life together where Rawhide and Two-Gun can’t find them. They do just that, but Lincoln’s alarmed to see that Barbara has taken to wearing what appears to be Hawkeye’s arrowhead as a charm around her neck…but surely he’s mistaken! Hawkeye was never in his secret cave!
The subplot continues in issue 21, with Night Rider and Mockingbird again in costume, acting as a crimefighting team in the Old West. She’s beginning to have strange sensations of cold—perhaps an after-effect of the Commanche love potion? Little do they realize that Rawhide and Two-Gun are watching from the ridge, and Two-Gun felt the same sensation.

Later, Two-Gun dresses up as Hawkeye, and manages to bring Mockingbird back to her senses. She, Two-Gun, and Rawhide vow to settle up with the woman-stealing Night Rider!



They catch up to him at the cave in issue 22, and Mockingbird sees through all of his tricks. When he flees, she insists on pursuing him alone.

It all finishes up in issue 23, when Mockingbird confronts her abductor at the peak where the Night Rider’s origin tale began. Night Rider’s gone a little nuts, evidently, and is ok with her dying: “If I can’t have you, no one can! You’ll be better dead, my love, because you’ll be a ghost like me!”

After some fighting, Night Rider—no, he’s “Phantom Rider” this issue—is dangling from the edge of a cliff, from which Mockingbird coldly lets him fall, after which the storm around them clears and the sun shines through the clouds.

To her disgust, the Commanches later give Linc a hero’s burial, the West Coast Avengers return for her, and the 20th century heroes leave our surviving Western Team-Up stars behind in 1876.

Comments:

Well, it just wouldn't be right to ignore these issues, since they do feature a few team-ups taking place in the Old West, but as I promised, I didn't go through each issue in detail. As one of the two most superhero-ish of Marvel's Western stars, he's the most fitting to do a stint in the 20th century, but looking back, his sojourn in our times didn't amount to much at all. Of more interest are the installments in which the Avengers are in the Old West, where the parallels between the kind of team-ups we've been covering here and the standard modern-day superhero team-ups are the main point of the efforts. 
I suppose these issues served to give superhero fans who never looked at the Westerns a sampling of what they'd been missing, including Western super-villains and the supernatural leanings of the Ghost/Night/Phantom Rider. 

So it turns out that Ghost Rider #2, Lincoln Slade, got some follow-up after all, and it's not pleasant. It looks like the writer changed course, implying first that Lincoln thought Bobbi was some kind of goddess who could revive his brother, then dropping that for a distasteful exploration of non-consensual romance culminating in an unheroic death (and an uncharacteristically cold refusal of rescue by Mockingbird). None of that sit well at all. I don't have any idea what Tigra meant about his Ghost operating as the 20th century Ghost Rider. Maybe Tigra was aware of the events of Ghost Rider #50...I suppose I'll have to take a look at that one, too. 

What surprised me was what little was actually done with Two-Gun Kid in the 20th century. I wasn't reading Avengers at the time, but I was aware that he had been transported to modern times, and I always assumed they were using the character in the ongoing plots. Instead, we get a few single page installments of him and Hawkeye on vacation, then he disappears, only to be rescued in an issue where I had to re-read the whole thing to confirm that he didn't just materialize on the final page. Unless I missed something, he does zero heroic adventuring at all. He goofs off with his pal, gets zapped by the Collector, gets restored to mobility without saying a word, and then heads home. I gave it more attention than it deserved only because it was relevant to the team-ups between him and the other Western heroes in the 1870's that occurred on either side of his time travel.

Steve Englehart was my favorite writer at Marvel in the early 70s. He always struck me as one of the only writers who could be counted on to do good work no matter how bad the art might be (and sometimes, it was-- in a group interview, Jim Starlin once told Englehart he couldn't read his AVENGERS run, because the art was often so terrible). George Perez really seemed to me at the time to be learning on the job, slowly improving, sometimes with leaps and bounds. The difference in quality between when he joined Englehart to the point when Englehart abruptly left the company (THANK, YOU, GERRY CONWAY-- GRRR) was amazing. Sam Grainger, of course, was, in my view, one of George's best inkers early-on.

I'd have to guess it was Englehart's idea to bring Two-Gun to the 20th Century, and when he left, that sub-plot got terminally side-tracked. The big epic Jim Shooter & George Perez started (which Perez vanished from right in the middle), my guess is that Two-Gun's involvement was Perez' doing, as he (like so many other artists) always "contributed" heavily to the stories. As it happens, not long ago, I was commenting online that George Perez contributed SO MUCH that "he tended to make every writer he worked with LOOK LIKE THEY KNEW WHAT THEY WERE DOING". (Yes, I'm being very sarcastic there.  )  The exception to that would be Englehart, because he DID know what he was doing (most of the time), and Perez only made him better. Which is why, TO THIS DAY, Gerry Conway's basically running Steve off still pisses me off, decades later.

When Englehart came back to comics (after an attempt to become a novelist), he wasn't quite the same person. I don't know what to put it down to --although, my former comics-shop guy Fred once told a story that both Englehart & Marshall Rogers used "way too much L.S.D.", and while it had the ability to expland someone's creativity up to a point, beyond that point, it could genuinely fry someone's brain. In the 80s, Englehart became the first writer I knew of who worked regular for 3 publishers at the same time-- Marvel, DC and Eclipse (if memory serves). And the quality of his writing varied drasically. Some of it was just average, and while he could still do "brilliant" here and there, sadly, he was by then also capable of TOTAL DRECK. Sometimes, all 3 in one series.

Englehart's 3-year-long run of WEST COAST AVENGERS has gotten a bad reputation over the decades, partly due to the art (simpler and more cartoony than the main book, once John Buscema & Tom Palmer re-teamed on it), but also for his writing. I remember what he did with Night Rider... and could not believe what I was reading.

I also remember when right in the middle of his run, FANTASTIC FOUR became total gibberish seemingly aimed at 5-year-olds, and his SILVER SURFER went from brilliant to merely "readable" (apparently following an editorial edict ordering him to REMOVE one of the characters he was writing from any further episodes). Elsewhere on this board, there's an entire thread devoted to Englehart's GREEN LANTERN CORPS, and what he did there that apparently offended a multitude of readers (to this day).

It was a sad come-down for someone whose work I loved so much in my teens. Awhile back, I spent some time reading over his website, and the biggest impression I came away with was that Steve was engaging in huge amounts of revisionist history, when he was describing what went on back when.

Just realized that the first of these storylines was written by Steve Engelhart. tarkintino’s comment about Marvel’s knitting together its past with its present made me think of what Engelhart did with his story about the real secret origin of the JLA a couple of years later.

He set it in the 1950s and included a disparate group of heroes from the early Silver Age. When Gerry Conway Took over JLA, he teamed an even more disparate group of DC characters (Jonah Hex, Enemy Ace, Miss Liberty, Viking Prince and the Black Pirate) with the Leaguers and the JSA. I wonder if the Avengers team-up with past heroes was an influence on either one.

Ghost Rider #50, November 1980

“Manitou’s Anger…Tarantula’s Sting!”, 35 pgs
Michael Fleisher, writer
Don Perlin, artist
Robbie Carosella, colorist
Diana Albers, letterer
Dennis O’Neil, editor



Cover by Bob Budiansky and Joe Rubinstein

Summary:

In the previous issue, Johnny Blaze, the 20th century bike-riding, blazing-skull-headed supernatural superhero Ghost Rider, battled an Indian spirit called Manitou, and as this issue opens, he and his flaming motorcycle are being swept away by floodwaters engulfing an ancient Comanche burial ground.

He awakens, as Johnny Blaze, in a cavern where an old Indian woman reiterates the warning she first gave last issue: that if the burial ground was desecrated by the flood, the past would “rise up from its resting place to obliterate the white man’s evil works and to restore this great land…” As she speaks, she transforms from an old woman to a young woman, and Johnny gazes out on a very different scene, with a herd of buffalo grazing in a tall field. Sure enough, he has been transported back in time, and soon finds himself under attack from a band of Indians on horseback.

When the Indians’ arrow strike him, he is in too much pain to complete the transformation into his alter ego, but he revives his skills from his Hollywood stunt-man days and commandeers one of the Indians’ horses to attempt an escape. His route leads to a dead end canyon, where suddenly appears the Night Rider who forbids slaughter in his dominion.



The Indians, naturally, know of the “phantom spirit who rides the night winds”, but some of the band doubt the Night Rider’s supernatural nature. They become believers after he demonstrates some of his familiar tricks, vanishing, appearing headless while his head floats mysteriously behind them, and looking pretty awesome in the moonlight. His warnings hit home, and the Indians flee in fear.


We then get a recap of his origin. For all the times he’s shown up in this thread, I don’t think I’ve ever recounted it, so here’s the short version: schoolteacher Carter Slade is gunned down by outlaws on his way west from Ohio. He’s found by Indian medicine man Flaming Star, who brings him to his village to treat his wounds. Praying on the cliff (where we saw his successor die back in West Coast Avengers), Flaming Star is visited by the Great Spirit, who guides him to the site of a meteorite, where he finds a strange glowing dust with which he is to treat a cloak. The cloak is to be entrusted to the tribe’s champion, and Flaming Star picks Carter to be that champion. With that cloak, glowing outside and black inside, Carter Slade creates the garb of the GhostNight Rider, becoming a legend of the West.



Johnny Blaze is recovering from his arrow wounds at Carter’s home in Bison Bend, and he pretends that the glowing phantom Johnny remembers was a delusion. Carter tends to Johnny’s recovery, and days later, in the town’s café, work comes in that the Tarantula (the original Ghost Rider’s masked arch enemy and wizard with the bull whip) has blown up the bank! (This Tarantula appears to be speaking with a Spanish accent?!)
Although the townsmen want to follow, they spot little Timmy Jenkins trapped on the balcony of the burning bank. Johnny Blaze is the only one who dares to attempt a rescue, which he successfully completes with an impressive dive into a sack-stuffed wagon.

The posse now fails to catch Tarantula, and Carter Slade begs off to take on the case as Night Rider. Johnny Blaze, now that he has some privacy, does some scouting and finds the thieves. With quick transformation into his blazing alter ego, and the summoning of a hellfire motorcycle, and the Ghost Rider zooms into the midst of the terrified criminals! Some of them suffer in a blaze of GR’s hellfire and the rest attempt to flee but they are stopped by the Night Rider.

They can’t catch all the evildoers, and Tarantula himself is confident that neither of his enemies is so unearthly that a bundle of dynamite won’t do them in. Ghost Rider takes the brunt of the explosion, saving Carter, and then changes back to his mortal form, only to find the Night Rider seriously injured.

Recognizing the voice as Carter’s, Johnny follows instructions and takes his injured ally back to medicine man Flaming Star. With Carter in as safe company as Johnny can find, he now turns his attention to locating the burial ground, hoping to find a path back to his own time. He knows it’s a magical cavern, but he discovers the whole place is riddled with caverns—which one leads to 1980?
But Johnny’s trespassing on sacred grounds alerts Flaming Star’s daughter, who is guided by the Great Spirit. Her father instructs her to summon Manitou to dispel the evil demon her visions have shown her…that is, the skull-faced Ghost Rider!

A carefully recited prayer does indeed summon Manitou, in the form of a mounted Indian warrior.

Wandering the caverns, Johnny finds himself transformed against his will into the Ghost Rider in time to face the “fearsome Hobomokko, the dread winged serpent-monster of Indian myth!”



GR quickly defeats the creature, but then he’s on the receiving end of Manitou’s tomahawk, which changes him back into Johnny Blaze. And he can’t seem to change back!
Back at the cliff where Flaming Star’s daughter continues her ritual, Tarantula and his men spot her, and decide to kidnap her and ransom her to Flaming Star, making up for some of the loot they lost during battle with the heroes. As soon as they yank her from her prayers, Johnny sees Manitou vanish, and changes back into his hellish heroic identity in order to rescue the girl. He allows the thieves to turn themselves in, and he returns the girl (“Spotted Doe”) to her father.

Carter Slade, as the Night Rider, joins the three, thanking Johnny for saving him with his demonic powers, and grants Johnny the gift of a mystic amulet, and Flaming Star prepares to have Spotted Doe lead him to the path home.



But before he goes, Johnny warns that, in his day, the burial ground will be flooded by evil men. Flaming Star has faith that the Great Spirit will never desert his people, and that the scheme will not succeed.

The Great Spirit works this magic, because when Johnny journeys through the proper passage, he returns to 1980 ten minutes before he left it! This gives him time to grab the bomb that will blow up the dam that will flood the Little Thunderbird River that destroy the burial ground. As a parting gift, he blasts the culprits with hellfire, and rides away with the blessings of Flaming Star echoing from the sky.

Ghost Rider #51, December 1980
“Graveyard of the Plundered Dead”, 6 pgs
Michael Fleisher, writer
Carmine Infantino, penciler
Mike Esposito, inker
Harry B., letterer
Denny O’Neil, editor



Summary:

In an old West museum, Johnny Blaze admires a painting of the legendary Western hero he now regards as a personal friend, the Night Rider. Beside that painting is a portrait of frontier physician Robert Wentworth, a student of Carter Slade’s. Johnny supposes that Wentworth “had greatness written all over him” as a child, but as we flash back to Wentworth’s time as a student in Carter’s class, we learn otherwise. He’s a little brat, and some of the adults in town are trying to discourage him from getting an education, inviting him to join them in the graveyard to see an easier way of making money than becoming a doctor.

Their money-making secret? Grave-robbing! But Night Rider is there to spook the defilers of the dead, leaving them out cold for the sheriff to find as he rides off on his horse, Banshee.



The next day in school, young Wentworth is back in class, and more dedicated to learning than ever, having learned an important lesson the night before.

Comments:

This still doesn’t explain Tigra’s comments from West Coast Avengers about knowing a present day ghost version of the Night Rider, so maybe I’m missing out on something else, but I’m glad I was alerted to reading this, because it definitely qualifies as the kind of Western Team-Up I intended for this thread to cover.

This one is a different flavor than any of the other team-ups we’ve examined, featuring a Marvel headliner travelling to the past to team up with a Western star. Although they don’t say so, the informed reader understands that the reason for this team-up in the landmark 50th issue is that this “Night Rider” was Marvel’s “original” Ghost Rider (although a shameless steal of another company’s trademark).
Michael Fleisher goes the extra mile by including Carter Slade’s arch enemy Tarantula, but makes the curious choice to give him a Spanish accent in a few panels, presumably intended to throw off the townspeople into thinking he was Mexican, although readers of Western Gunfighters know his true identity as Carter’s friend from Bison Bend. When last we saw him, he had amnesia and no longer recalled being a costumed villain, but who can say at which point in Night Rider’s career this adventure occurred. But while he gets credit for doing a deep dive into the past of Ghost Rider’s Marvel predecessor, he doesn’t get credit for a great story, here. Fleisher’s going for a mythic feel, and perhaps a more flamboyant artist than Perlin could have sold that, but what we get seems a bit slapdash. I do like Perlin’s night-time rendition of most of the action; I’ve noticed that in most of the previous Westerns I’ve reviewed here, almost everything happens in daylight, and Ghost Rider really demands a night setting to be most effective, visually.

Tarantula’s men don’t seem quite as startled as I’d expect to see a contraption like Ghost Rider’s hellfire motorcycle. For as little as that’s played up, it might have been cooler to see him conjure his ride in the form of a fiery horse during his time travel trip.

The following issue is padded out with a trivial Night Rider solo, which barely qualifies for inclusion in the Western Team-Ups by starting out with the modern day Johnny Blaze reviewing history. Carmine Infantino’s art reminds me a bit of the Jerry Grandenetti stories in the later issues of DC’s Silver Age Spectre series—compare with the examples on display in chadwilliam ’s Spectre thread, now playing in this forum!

I was always kind of fond of Don Perlin's work, despite its lack of flare and often wooden feel, but I wasn't reading Ghost Rider by this point. He was an artist I consider to have been very much in Dick Ayer's league at that point in their respective careers, so this had a comfortably familiar look, as a Western Ghost Rider story.
Based on what I've sampled since, I'd have been disappointed with Fleisher, who I loved so much on the Spectre and Jonah Hex's features.