On the other hand, occasionally having other MU characters cross over into the Western Genre via this title might have saved the genre and boosted sales of Marvels' other Western titles. Come on: Shang-Chi travels through time to fight side by side with The Rawhide Kid! Or a frail and aged Rawhide Kid needs the help of Ben Grimm when the offspring of an old rival swears revenge upon him in 1963. Lee and Kirby made such chronologically unlikely team-ups work with Sgt. Fury's Howling Commandos on occasion. In fact, the Frankenstein monster or The Inhumans wouldn't even have to travel through time to show up in the Old West.

Is There Any More?
Let's check the likely suspects.

Giant-Size Kid Colt #3, July 1975
“Death Duel with Dack Derringer”, 20 pages
Gary Friedrich, writer,
Dick Ayers, Penciller
Vince Colletta, inker
Jean Hipp, letterer
Len Wein, editor



Cover by Gil Kane

We know that the first issue of this Giant-Size series ran the story originally intended for Western Team-Up #2. The second issue of this series was a solo Kid Colt story, but with the third and final issue, we get another “western team-up”, with Kid Colt meeting Night-Rider (originally “Ghost Rider”). Might this be a never-published third WTU story, calling into contention my previous call that Rawhide Kid would be the ongoing headliner?

Considering the different creative team and difference in page count, it’s doubtful. If the story had been prepared back then, the new cycle-riding Ghost Rider was on his third issue of his solo title, and the idea of renaming the western character was about a year away, when his original series would begin appearing under the new name in Night Rider #1. Rawhide Kid letters pages in 1973 expressed an unwillingness to revive the western Ghost Rider, preferring to avoid superheroes and the supernatural in their western line. There is reason to assume response was positive to the first issue’s team-up, suggesting that perhaps the concept behind WTU had potential and merited another try with this spiritual successor.

Giant-Size Kid Colt would not continue, as the Giant-Size line fizzled out in the months to follow, but Kid Colt Outlaw would continue in this team-up spirit with its next non-reprint issue:

Kid Colt Outlaw #201, December 1975
“Death in the Devil’s Dungeon”
Written by Gary Friedrich
Penciled and inked by Dick Ayers
Artie Simek, letterer
Vic Mortellaro, colorist
edited by Marv Wolfman



Cover by Gil Kane

Could this have been an unused WTU story? I doubt that Marvel would have finished two Rawhide/Colt pairings right from the start, unless the two stories were constructed as a two-parter. It’s remotely possible that this was what was originally slotted for Rawhide Kid #121, but I doubt it, considering that that issue had coopted “western team-up” in its cover blurb. If this was originally slotted for anywhere other than Kid Colt Outlaw #201, I’d reckon it was for the never-published Giant-Size Kid Colt #4, since Kid Colt’s regular-size series had been on reprints up to now, including while the Giant-Size edition was publishing new stories. Kid Colt Outlaw would return to reprint status immediately following, so this all-new Rawhide team-up stands out as a possible leftover from the heyday of the Giant-Size line. And an echo of what we saw with the series this thread is reviewing: an unpublished issue finding a home elsewhere.

Finale:

I think that this is the end of the trail. Two issues  of Western Team-Up were completed, but the series was cancelled before the second issue could go to print. The second issue’s story was used elsewhere, and positive sales response, while not strong enough to merit a resurrection of the series itself, led to relying on team-ups in many of Marvel’s new western stories published in the following years, as the genre died out.

Neither of the two issues prepared were particularly strong, but I think Marvel’s instincts were right: this approach would have generated more attention and better sales for new offerings in their dying westerns. I regret that we didn’t see Reno Jones’ story finished up, as promised. I liked Red Wolf a lot; it’s too bad he didn’t get to have an encounter with Rawhide. It might have been fun to see another appearance of the handful of new creations from the early 70’s: the Renegades, the Man from Fort Rango, and a different Gunhawk from Western Gunfighters #1, August 1970. (All the men from Fort Rango were around for the western era of Red Wolf, at least.) I’d have appreciated seeing some of the characters who had only appeared in reprints in the 1970’s, like the Ringo Kid or the Black Rider. But none of those possibilities were to come to be.

Western Team-Up, a curiosity of the comic book team-up subgenre, flared briefly, lightly influenced its stablemates, and faded into neglect from an uninterested fandom. Adios, amigos…

Quite honestly, this occurred to me as almost a joke: doing a series review of a one-issue series (I am in fact an April Fool's Day baby). But as I started picking it apart, and was able to confirm my long-standing suspicion about the second issue, and started noticing things like the western team-ups that followed the series, as well as those that preceded it, and found a lot of the original art online, well, it expanded beyond my expectations. I reckon there's a lot of related books that might be rightly addressed hereabouts, so feel free to speak up! I'd especially like to see some discussion of other short-run series, like the above-mentioned Western Gunfighters #1 (that went to reprint after debuting several new features there), or Gunhawks, the rest of Giant-Size Kid Colt and the surprise new issue of Kid Colt Outlaw I mentioned. I recall someone proposed doing a Red Wolf retrospective; that'd be fine in its own thread, but it's welcome here as well. Then there's Caleb Hammer, the 1980's Rawhide Kid miniseries drawn by Herb Trimpe...we got us a wide horizon stretching before us if we wanna ride into it!

Rested and Ready to Ride:

Thanks to the favorable response, the dawn of a new day has inspired me to continue my journey westward. With a one-letter addition to the thread title, we're gonna head onward from where we left off, taking a closer look at the stories briefly mentioned earlier, the ones that took inspiration from Western Team-Up to treat the cowboy fans to more special issues pairing up its horse-ridin' heroes as the 1970's galloped onward. After that, I might be taking a look in the other direction at Marvel's previous stories where one western hero met up with another, but the current trail heads forward in time. That means picking up with Giant-Size Kid Colt...


Marvel was making a pretty big push at getting as much of their range as possible into the larger, more expensive and more potentially profitable and news-dealer-appealing "Giant-Size" format in the mid-70's. Their superhero line was well represented, with all of their most prominent superhero characters or teams getting at least one shot at the format, although many were all-reprint. The monster comics were represented by Dracula and the Werewolf (By Night) and Man-Thing, with the anthology Giant-Size Chillers standing for the non-series horror stuff that doing well for the competition, but never really took off at Marvel. They even had Giant-Size Doc Savage for some pulp adventure, Giant-Size Master of Kung Fu showing some martial arts mayhem, and even the reprint hero line had its share with Giant-Size Marvel Triple Action! For girl-oriented humor, Queen-Size Millie the Model hit the stands (and back then, "queen-size model" hadn't yet become a thing!). For some unknown reason, it was Kid Colt rather than the Rawhide Kid who was chosen to be Marvel’s western representative in the brief run of Giant-Size comics. We’ve already seen that the first issue utilized the unpublished WTU#2. The second issue featured April 1975’s “Showdown at Steer’s Skull”, a 10-page Friedrich/Ayers/Colletta tale with a Gil Kane cover….



…which was the first new Kid Colt solo story since Kid Colt Outlaw #140 back in November 1969, when Denny O’Neill, Werner Roth, and Vince Colletta did the 8-page “Fury at Farrow Gap!”:




The following issue had no new Kid Colt stories, but it did have a new Two-Gun Kid 8-page story by Linda Fite (the future wife of Herb Trimpe) and Ogden Whitney:



Marvel was evidently dumping remaining inventory after turning most of their western line to full reprint, with the exception of Rawhide Kid, which continued to run new stories as the 1970’s began.
With the third and final issue, Marvel returned to the western team-up well, offering up Colt with “Night Rider”.

“Night Rider” was the new name for the western hero previously known as “Ghost Rider”, who had headlined his own Marvel series from February 1967 to November 1967, and had returned in Marvel’s Western Gunfighters #1-2 before returning to limbo.


When the monicker was nicked by Marvel’s skull-headed cycle-riding superhero in Marvel Spotlight #5, August 1972, the fans who remembered the white-costumed semi-supernatural western hero probably despaired of ever seeing him again. Marvel had already thrown cold water on that idea in the letters pages of Rawhide Kid, expressing, as I said earlier in this thread, a preference for less superhero-tinged content in their westerns (although the masked mystery man Two-Gun Kid was still appearing in reprints).

But instead, the success of the new Ghost Rider evidently spurred new interest in his western predecessor, and six issues of the seven published were reprinted under the new name Night Rider in October 1974 through August 1975.



This positioned the character for a return to print in the pages of this Giant-Size comic, teaming with Kid Colt, again being drawn by Dick Ayers, who had not only illustrated the 60’s version, but had drawn quite a bit of Magazine Enterprise’s Ghost Rider of 1950, a nearly identical western character in visual appearance who Marvel had shamelessly resurrected without permission. Not that they necessarily needed to; the name and visual appearance were trademarks of Magazine Enterprises, but trademarks lapse upon lack of use, and Marvel weren’t using any of the copyrighted content of the first Ghost Rider comic.




And with that established, we can now get back on the team-up trail, pardners! Next time, we'll dive into that Kid Colt/Night Rider team-up!

...when the Artificial Intelligence in Michael Knight's car goes insane after being transferred into a subcompact Dodge, Knight and his time-traveling ally from the Old West are forced to team up against the threat of...
KITT Colt!