Talk about a hard ride! Saddening as it was for Colt and Two Gun riding into the eternal sunset it also was realistic in the sense that fast gun's usually lived a short, quick moment and their fame (or infamy) would outlive them. Kid Colt wasn't defeated by a faster gunslinger, instead shot in the back. Two Gun goes down guns blazing fighting for justice when law was truly coming to the west. 

The one thing missing in this series was a scarred bounty hunter in his uniform grey's. In my mind I replace Caleb Hammer with Jonah Hex just because Hex has the long history in DC as an alternate version of the Marvel western.

Yes,there were many other Marvel cowpokes missing in the story but they were are all lesser known, lesser selling and shorter series. This series was really focusing upon the "bigger name" western heroes of the 1970's comic scene. All the other missing cowboys were only seen in reprints of their 1950's stories while those in Blaze of Glory were starring in new stories in their series.

It would be interesting if Marvel should get a story for uniting all those other classic reprint cowpokes and indians!

Phantom Rider and El Aguila


Before continuing with the sequel to Blaze of Glory, let’s back up and look at another Western Team-Up that escaped the notice of many comics fans, one that teamed one of Marvel’s major Western characters with a newly-created masked adventurer of the 19th century.

As profh0011 has explained, Gary Friedrich, who was credited for scripting the stories Dick Ayers drew on Marvel’s first version of the Western Ghost Rider character, came up with a way to preserve Marvel’s trademark with a supernatural superhero of the same name, who debuted in Marvel Spotlight #5 in August 1972:



This version was a bigger hit than their Western character, and was awarded its own series, which ran until issue 81 in June 1983.

In May 1990, Marvel debuted another Ghost Rider in Danny Ketch, their fifth character to bear the name (after Carter Slade, his sidekick Jamie, his brother Lincoln, and Johnny Blaze). Danny Ketch was a direct successor to Johnny Blaze, cursed with the same blazing skull look and riding a hell-fire motorcycle. Ketch became a massive hit by the sales standards of that time, and his success inspired Marvel to publish The Original Ghost Rider in July 1992, which would reprint the Johnny Blaze stories from the beginning. Starting with issue 3, Marvel tried to increase the appeal of the book by adding a short backup series of new adventures of their first Western Ghost Rider, now going by the name “Phantom Rider”, having previously been known as “Night Rider”, as we have seen already.

The “Original” in the title was of course inaccurate, since the Phantom Rider, once Ghost Rider, was lifted from Magazine Enterprises’ then-defunct Western character of identical appearance. Dick Ayers, who had drawn both Magazine Enterprises’ and Marvel’s version of the Western Ghost Rider feature, was assigned to draw this backup feature, which ran in issues 3-13, and 15-20.

The Original Ghost Rider issues 15-20

“The Curse of Quetzalcoatl” 
Tom Brevoort, Mike Kanterovich, Dan Slott, plot and script
Dick Ayers (with Rich Ayers, I’m guessing Dick’s son), art
David Sharpe, letters
Mike Worley, colors

Summary:

Chapter 1: “Head First”
In Boca del Dios, the Phantom Rider’s horse-ride is interrupted by a bandito who tries to hold up the hero, fleeing in panic when his target’s head appears to vanish!

From the shadows of nearby foliage, someone else, a sword-wielding masked man whose assistance proved unneeded, is watching the robber flee the haunted horseman: El Aguila (“the eagle”):


But it’s Carter Slade, not his alter ego the Phantom Rider, who arrives at the destination, the base camp of Enrique Montoya, an archaeologist seeking the lost temple of Quetzalcoatal, the Aztec god of justice. Montoya is an old classmate of Carter’s, who has brought their professor’s notebooks, bequeathed to Carter rather than Montoya (who considers himself to have been the “star pupil”). Enrique’s cousin Paco Montoya rises late from his tent, still in his bedclothes, feigning laziness to cover his secret identity of El Aguila.

Enrique was forced to recruit a seedy crew of desperados to assist in the expedition, since the natives fear Quetzalcoatl’s curse. One of them has already seen evidence of the curse, reporting his encounter with a headless ghost, a ghost we know to have been Carter himself. The leader of the bandits quiets the frightened henchman, with a quiet reminder that they intend to kill the researchers and take the treasure for themselves as soon as it’s found.

Chapter 2: “Bad Company”

When we resume the story, everyone is already at the pyramid, ready to enter and seek the treasure, and the banditos are about to kill off the Montoyas and Slade, but Enrique’s mention of dangerous traps that only he can detect and evade gives the gangleader (a one-eyed man called El Ojo, “the eye”) second thoughts; he’ll be happy to follow them in!

Carter is suspicious of El Ojo, keeping an eye on him as the group enters the pyramid. Sure enough, death traps spring up around them, and after flames, spikes, and contracting walls begin to kill off the intruders, El Ojo shows his colors, openly ordering his men to grab what they can, kill Carter and the Montoyas, and flee for their lives!

The Montoyas and Carter put up a good defense, though, and Carter beats an exit to change into his Phantom Rider duds, but plunges through a trap door!

Chapter 3: “It’s Always Darkest…”

Carter exercises his acrobatic skills to avoid falling onto a spiked floor. He relies on his Indian training to avoid the various death traps…


…and returns in his glowing costume to save the Montoyas from the banditos’ pistolas, this time as a bodiless head rather than a headless body:

Phantom Rider spooks the bandits good, but El Ojo begins to see through his act, and Carter’s trick of appearing to float (by hanging from a barely visible rope tied to a tree) backfires when the men begin to beat him like a pinata!

Chapter 4: “Ghost of a Chance”

Paco and Enrique spy on the celebrating banditos. Carter is still missing and the killers get drunk and shoot into the air. El Ojo is looking forward to using the loot to finance an army with which he can take control over Boca del Dios. They’ll loot the temple (I figure now that the traps have been sprung, it will be easier to navigate), but first El Ojo needs to finish off the Phantom Rider.

Enrique wants to fight back, but Paco knocks him out, so that he can put on his El Aguila gear. Meanwhile, El Ojo taunts the Phantom Rider, splashing a bottle of tequila in his face as Carter regains consciousness.

It turns out El Ojo’s got a grudge against the Phantom Rider, or so he thinks, assuming that this masked avenger is the so-called “El Aguila”:

Facing the banditos’ firing squad, Carter’s last request is a smoke and a swig of tequila, both of which his executioners are willing to grant. Big mistake! Using his tattered mask, the lit cheroot, and the bottle of high-octane booze (labeled “Merde Tequila”—sneaky!), the Phantom Rider fashions a Molotov cocktail, hurls it directly at the firing squad, and vanishes once the smoke has cleared.

The Phantom Rider still has a job to do, but he doesn’t know how he’ll pull it off now that his enemies know he’s just a human with gimmicks. But he has something new…a partner:



Chapter 5: “Showdown”

El Ojo and company are now ready to loot the temple of Quetzalcoatl, since the gringos (wait, is that supposed to include the Montoyas?) have supposedly been dealt with. El Ojo seems to have called for his girlfriend, too. But defending the temple entrance, apparently returned from the grave, is the Phantom Rider:



El Ojo calls for gunfire—after all, they know this is just a man—but the Phantom Rider has a trick they haven’t seen, and it’s a pretty frightening one: the Phantom projector that casts a convincing image that can’t be shot down!

While he’s occupying the bandits, El Aguila is lighting some dynamite. While the Phantom Rider keeps his hands clean with the old trick of shooting the pistols out of their hands, El Aguila just tosses the dynamite into their midst:


The script tries to convince us that this has just “scattered” the thugs, but it’s gotta hurt…and El Aguila’s sword has got to be doing some serious damage, not to mention the Three Stooges eye-poke (“Splorp”).

El Ojo flees into the temple, still planning to loot the treasure, and the stars of this Western Team-Up follow, as behind them, Mount Diablo erupts as an active volcano!

Chapter 6: “The Final Curtain”

El Aguila has chased down El Ojo in the temple, while his cousin Enrique awakens to the eruption outside. The Phantom Rider stays to the shadows as he and Paco chase their opponent to a dead end. There, El Ojo turns to face the man he realizes was actually the one who killed his brother Christobal.
El Ojo gets the upper hand, but, as the temple crumbles around them, the Phantom Rider pulls his floating head trick. After being alive, then dead, then alive again, El Ojo’s starting to doubt his confidence that this is indeed just a man, after all! El Aguila feeds his fear by pretending he can’t see the “ghost”.

After a little more spooky talk, El Ojo loses it, and puts the gun to his head…



At the end, the ruins of the temple are buried in lava, ending the excavation. The treasure will remain safe, and the Western Team-Up comes to an end, with Carter claiming to have been out seeking help during the conflict. Off he rides: “Adios, mis amigos! Till we meet again!”

Comments:

Well, I don't know how much that back-up helped goose sales of this reprint series. One thing that gets me is how the relevance of this feature to the main feature relies on this character being the "first" Ghost Rider, and yet, they won't let readers in on that little fact, insisting on calling him, this time, the Phantom Rider. 

El Aguila is the ancestor of a modern-day character that had previously been introduced in Power Man and Iron Fist #58, August 1979:



Introducing a heroic version of the character in the Old West is an unexpected idea, but it seems a bit pointless, since this wasn't a venue that was likely to be a springboard for...well, for anything, really. It's just an oddball, unexpected surprise for alert readers who got a stealth Western Team-Up in their hell-biker reprint book. 

While I appreciate publishers throwing a bone to veteran artists, Dick Ayers was obviously way past his prime, even with the assistance of what I assume was his son. It's satisfying just to know that Dick Ayers got one more shot at one of the features that was "all his", not started by Kirby or anyone else, so I'm happy to forgive the weaknesses of an aging artist, and admit that I did enjoy this for its simple appeal. It's crude, a little awkward, and definitely old school by the standards of the time, but it had some modest ambition toward dramatic visuals, with volcanos, Aztec temples, and elaborate death traps. And it's the last of the Western Team-Ups in the classic vein, partnering two headline (or at least headline-wannabe) characters in an Old West setting. And an unusual one at that: no dusty Main Street shootouts or cattle rustling or bounty hunting, no saloons or ranches or Indian attacks, but an adventure in an ancient pyramid. 

I can't keep track of all these different characters with the same name (or 3 different names)...

I managed to read several of the 1967 stories and was so underwhelmed as to be bordering on deeply offended.

Let's clear up that B.S. Marvel terminology: The 1967 storie were WRITTEN by Dick Ayers. "All" Gary Friedrich (and Roy thomas, uncredited) did were write the dialogue.

Meanwhile, Magazine Enterprises may have been "defunct", but REX FURY continued to have occasional new stories done at Paragon Publications and AC Comics... in several cases, with Dick Ayers doing the art! Of course, he always looked better with someone else on the inks. I wish I'd have had a chance to ink some of his stuff. OI bet that would have been fun. When Marvel's lawyers bjected, Bill Black just thumbed his nose at them by changing the name of the REAL character to... "HAUNTED HORSEMAN". It amuses me that very late in his career, Ayers was doing stories about both versions (Marvel and AC).

I think part of that was unintended: some of the sequences that are colored brightly seem to have been meant to be twilight at least. Some of the scenes were supposed to be daylight, to emphasize that the Phantom Rider's mystique had been blown after he was discovered to be human, but it didn't have the impact that I think the writer and artist hoped it would. Good coloring would have made up for a lot of the weaknesses in the art, but good coloring was hard to come by in the early 90's.

Apache Skies #1, September 2002
“Chapter 1: Warpath”
John Ostrander, writer
Leonardo Manco, artist
Paul Tutrone, letterer



Summary:

The initially unidentified narrator begins the tale with some history: the forcing of Geronimo’s Apache tribe to a reservation in 1875, Geronimo’s escapes with his band into the Sierra Madres, and the life and death of the Apache Kid. The Apache Kid was, as mentioned earlier in this thread, a headliner of Western comics at Marvel in the 1950’s. The son of a white father and an Apache mother, Aloysius Kare, or Dazii, devoted his life to establishing peace between the races. In the original comics, his “Apache Kid” persona wore disguise and this “secret identity” was not known to the public. That aspect of the original feature is not acknowledged here, but he is established to have been an ally of the Rawhide Kid during the Railroad Wars:



(Evidently there were some Western Team-Ups that went untold in our universe!)

After the history lesson, we go to 1886, where Cole Williams is gunned down in a shoot-out with someone claiming to be the Apache Kid. Cole responds that the Apache Kid is dead, and the mysterious person who has just called him out accuses Cole of being one of the Kid’s murderers.
This new Apache Kid wins out in a three-page, silent showdown, then delivers a final, killing shot, before revealing herself:



Fifty miles away, a drunken man named McGee, ejected from the saloon finds himself on the wrong side of the Rawhide Kid’s six-shooter. Rawhide’s also out to avenge the Apache Kid, but he’s looking for the guy who set it up, Billy Tyler, son of a railroad tycoon who owns the company town of Sagoro, Texas. McGee says that’s where Tyler is hiding, so Rawhide lets McGee live and walks away. When McGee attempts to shoot the Rawhide Kid in the back, Rawhide turns and gets in a good shot himself, no more McGee.

Pa William Tyler is meeting with Colonel Richard Trask, who he’s hiring to protect his son Billy from people seeking retribution for the Apache Kid’s murder…including the widely known Rawhide Kid. Trask appears to welcome the chance to meet up with Rawhide, and takes Tyler’s train to Sagoro.

At that moment, Rawhide’s on another train arriving in Sagoro. He’s recognized by elderly black train porter Eustace Grimes, who knows and respects Rawhide from the Railroad Wars. Sheriff Miles Wilson is also on the train, quizzing potential assassins, looking for Rawhide or a woman dressed like a man. Rawhide gets a pass since he’s not planning on getting off in Sagoro…but Eustace tips him off that the “train slows down considerable for a curve about two miles outside of town. In case you want to know.”

Notice another Easter egg in Rawhide’s traveling alias:



Rosa, in fact, is already in town, avoiding attention. Billy’s feeling pretty safe in town, safe enough to engage in some nonconsensual contact with a little lady in the middle of Main Street, where he finds himself facing both Rawhide and Rosa. He shot the Apache Kid from behind, and now he’s going to pay.

But that plan falls apart when the sheriff and his men change the odds, putting Rawhide and Rosa at the disadvantage. Rawhide tries to gain control by positioning his gun at Billy’s head, but Rosa sees that as the perfect opportunity for vengeance, and Billy goes down for good. Which leaves Rawhide and Rosa in an awkward situation for next issue... 

Comments:

As a follow-up to Blaze of Glory, this one aims for a smaller cast and a smaller focus. It’s published under Marvel’s not-for-children “MAX” line, so there’s plenty of salty language and explicit violence. It’s like a low budget sequel where much of the original cast either died off in the first installment or else wasn’t willing to sign on for a second go-around.

Col. Trask doesn’t appear to be a previously established character in the Rawhide Kid’s canon; maybe he’s an ancestor of the Trasks who plagued the X-Men. This one’s evidently not going to be a Who’s Who of Marvel Western characters. It does center around the Apache Kid, even if he’s dead the entire series, and does introduce a successor to the name, so it qualifies as a Western Team-Up, and it gives some attention to a character who had some significant presence in the 1970's, but who didn’t get a chance to play a part in any of the team-ups so far (even the Ringo Kid got in on one of the Avengers team-ups).

Manco’s doing fully-painted art, so this has a different visual feel than its predecessor. It reminds me a lot of the work of Dan Brereton, who doesn’t happen to be one of my favorites, so it’s a notch down for me, but it’s still got plenty of grit and atmosphere. It’s strange to see the Rawhide Kid with dark hair instead of his long-established red. They don’t mention it, but I’ll chalk it up to a dye job to help Rawhide evade recognition on this quest for vengeance.

Thanks for the catch! I've swapped out the correct cover. These pin-up style covers make it really easy to dissociate a cover from a story, don't they?