Western Team-Up #1, November 1973
“Ride the Lawless Land!”, 14 pages
Larry Lieber, script and art
Vince Colletta, inker
Jean Izzo, letterer
George Roussos, colorist
Roy Thomas, editor
Cover art by Larry Lieber
Summary:Cliff Morgan, a.k.a. the Dakota Kid, gets the drop on Rawhide who’s refreshing himself at a watering hole, having eluded a posse by fleeing into the Dakotas. Cliff recognizes Rawhide and challenges him to draw, but Rawhide refuses gunplay without good cause.
What Rawhide wants is a job, and Dakota escorts him to his Pa, the Colonel, who immediately dismisses the idea of hiring such “gunslingin’ trash!”
Cliff’s family weighs in before Rawhide is escorted out. Brother Wayde points out that reps can be exaggerated, and nothing’s ever been proven. The boys’ sister Rachel agrees, and Pa relents, reservedly. He trusts the “dependable, levelheaded, and hardworking” Wayde, who’s no gunslinger like brother Cliff. Rawhide heads off to meet “Ramrod” to get to work on the Colonel’s ranch.
True to Larry Lieber’s notes as shown above, Rachel pleads for fair treatment of the Dakota Kid, describing him as carefree and headstrong but fine and decent.
Out among the cattle, the foreman confides to his co-conspirators that Rawhide will make a good fall guy when they rustle their employer’s steers. Dakota shirks his chores to see a filly in town, and the ever-responsible Wayde volunteers to fill in for Dakota, prompting the Colonel to disparage the disfavored son: “But he’s no good! He never was and he never will be!”
Dakota’s date is with Lily Lamont, a “saloon girl” who wants Dakota to marry her. But rowdy customer Luke Thomson thinks he’s got a right to get handsy with Lily: “Yore a saloon girl, and I’m a payin’ customer!” Sounds like Lieber is suggesting Lily is a prostitute to me. Whatever her avocation, Dakota objects to her being manhandled, and Luke calls him out after Dakota calls him a “slob”.
In the tradition of western heroes being uncanny with a pistol, Dakota shoots Luke. As a bystander remarks, “Morgan let Thomson clear leather—then he drew and fired before Thomson could squeeze the trigger!”
But there’s none of the hokey “shooting guns out of the opponent’s hand” stuff here: Luke is plain dead on the barroom floor. Off to the hoosegow for Dakota, until the witnesses can back up his story at the inquest.
Pa is livid, and appears to wish they’d just keep him locked up, since he’ll go right back to sowing wild oats on his release.
Out on the range, the rustling gets underway. The cattle thieves expect Wayde (who’s guarding the herd in the absence of his brother) to turn tail and run, but even if Wayde is no gunslinger, he’s no coward either. He fires back but gets slaughtered. The gang then knocks out the foreman with the butt of a pistol, making him look like one of the victims when he reports to the Colonel that Wayde was gunned down. Pa blames the Dakota Kid, since Wayde was taking his place, before jumping to the intended conclusion that Rawhide must have tipped off the rustlers.
Rawhide escapes before he can be arrested. Dakota’s still in jail—the sheriff won’t let him out to assist in tracking down the killer rustlers. Through the cell’s outside window, Lily’s arrived to pass Dakota a six-shooter, in gratitude for his defense of her as well as for her love for him. Facing down the gun, the sheriff releases him, and Dakota rides off, now a fugitive from justice forever.
Meanwhile Rawhide escapes his pursuers thanks to his horse Nightwind’s agility in leaping chasms the posse dare not attempt.
Cliff returns home, where his Pa orders his disfavored son out of the house. Dakota did love his brother, though, and vows to track down Rawhide. In a compact sequence, Dakota earns a rep as a gunfighter as he pursues his prey, following a long trail along which he leaves some bodies, as overconfident cowboys challenge the youthful-looking Dakota to showdowns.
By the time he catches up, the Dakota Kid has a solid reputation that causes men to scatter on his arrival. Challenging Rawhide to slap leather, Rawhide instead pleads his innocence, showing Cliff that they have both now caught up with Wayde’s true killer, foreman Logan, arriving to join his rustlers far from the scene of the crime. Cliff overhears enough to know Rawhide’s being square with him, and together they ride on the rustlers, mowing them down.
Only Logan eludes them, and Logan is about to put a bullet in Dakota’s back, when Rawhide shoots him dead. The allies commiserate before parting: Dakota’s now a fugitive like Rawhide, destined to roam unsettled. Back home, Rachel finds her father unable to forgive his surviving son: “It’s too late! I’ve lost both my sons! One was killed…and the other does killin’!”
Comments:
I hope I hadn’t built up hopes that
Western Team-Up was going to be an underappreciated classic. The plot is heavy with clichés, and the action is so meager or underwhelmingly depicted that I had a difficult time selecting interesting panels to sample.
The issue is heavily focused on the Dakota Kid’s “origin”, with Rawhide more of a co-star, although the final assault is a genuine “team-up”, at least. Larry Lieber is running with the ideas that accompanied his concept sketches, setting up a soapy back-story that might have served as the framework for an ongoing series. But it seems to me that by turning the Dakota Kid into a retread of co-star Rawhide—a good-hearted gunslinger roaming the west with an outlaw’s rep—he’s neutralized the potential to capitalize on the dramatic conflict between father and son. An outlaw can’t stay in one place too long, especially not the vicinity of his father’s ranch, where he’s well known. Killing off brother Wayde seems like a mistake; maybe Lieber wanted Dakota to be haunted by a Spider-Man-like personal tragedy, but at least a living brother could have pursued Dakota as he roamed the west, keeping the family conflict in the forefront even across the wide wild west.
Lieber’s story is more of a throwback to Marvel’s generic western tales than the recently-cancelled
Gunhawks, but it does demonstrate a few contemporary touches, with pistols fired with intent to kill rather than to implausibly disarm, and the hint that Lily’s job as “saloon girl” might be salacious. Dakota’s potential marriage to such a woman would add to the conflict between him and his father the Colonel. As written, Pa’s disowning his son feels a bit forced, though if Lieber had been a little more forceful and explicit in establishing the nature of Dakota’s growing rep it might have been more convincing. Lieber, though, is clearly constrained by a meager page count that doesn’t accommodate the epic I assume he was imagining.
Lieber’s art is Kirbyesque, as always, and the often-maligned Vince Colletta does a creditable job on the inking. While not spectacular, there are some nicely done panels, as we’ll see in a future post looking at some of the original art.
I can't let the issue go without mentioning the logo. In my reviews of
Super-Villain Team-Up, I lamented that the leads didn't get their own distinctive logos on the cover, which I think was a big part of the visual appeal of
Brave & Bold,
MTU, and
MTIO covers.
WTU doesn't make this mistake, with Rawhide's and Dakota's own logos prominently plastered. Gotta say, though, Dakota Kid's logo looks just plain weird, and that struck me even back when I saw it on the racks. Maybe the broad bottoms and narrow tops are supposed to evoke mountains? Or was it supposed to look "hip"? Beats me--I can't recall seeing anything like it! Memorable, at least, I suppose...
There was no editorial column, sadly. Most Marvels of the era used the space where reader letters would eventually run to share some background on the concept of a newly-introduced series, with hints toward its future. No such luck, here. We’ll have to look elsewhere to get an idea of what may have been in mind for issues 2 and onward, and we will indeed be doing just that. But first,
Western Team-Up offers a reprint backup starring the Gunsmoke Kid:
Summary:
The Gunsmoke Kid intervenes in a conflict between a gold-mining old coot named Andrews and Benton, a white “blood brother” to his Piute companions who are threatening to kill the old-timer if he doesn’t accept Benton as a partner. Gunsmoke offers to stick around and protect the old man, but the geezer rejects his offer: he doesn’t trust a gunslinger like Gunsmoke any more than he does Benton. Besides, he’s got a pet wolf, King, to protect him.
The outcast Piute suddenly attack them, and Gunsmoke and Andrews awaken held in a teepee, observing the Indian’s medicine man in a ceremony that’s intended to end with the killing of an innocent Indian falsely accused of being a were-coyote. When he’s dead, Benton and the medicine man will split the victim’s belongings.
Threatened by Benton to being turned over to the tribe unless Andrews relents to putting Benton’s name alongside his on the registered claim, Andrews fights back, gaining a morally satisfying knockdown but ending with the pair still under restraint in the teepee.
Loyal King arrives, creeping under the bottom edge of the teepee. Taking the ounce of gold dust that Andrews still has on him, Gunsmoke makes some secretive preparations involving King, and Andrews orders the smart and obedient wolf to go after the tribe’s horses, triggering a stampede.
As the renegades take aim at King, Gunsmoke attacks from behind, steals a rifle, and escorts Benton away, toward “white man’s justice”. Why didn’t the Piute stop Gunsmoke and Andrews from taking their blood brother?
Gunsmoke had used the gold dust to paint King’s fangs gold. Benton had two gold teeth, and Gunsmoke was counting on the superstitious Piute to put two and two together, concluding that Benton was a werewolf!
Comments:
The backup, while less ambitious in scope, is much more satisfying than the lead. Jack Davis’ art is a treat, obviously. The ending was a surprise: I wondered why the story bothered introducing the seemingly irrelevant bit about the Indian being set up as a were-coyote to take the blame for a real coyote attack! Of course, it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny: who’s going to notice the color of a wolf’s teeth during a horse stampede?
Coming Attractions:
Original art!
Oh, and…
Western Team-Up #2!
Wait…
what?!
