I've seen at least 4 instances where a "new" Marvel character was PUBLISHER-mandated (as if "editor" madates were soul-less enough). In each case, Martin Goodman ordered new characters so he could re-use ("STEAL!") names previously used by defunct publishers. In each case, some of the earliest stories with these "new" characters were among the worst-conceived, worst-written in all of 60s Marvel...

Daredevil (Lev Gleason)
Ghost Rider (Magazine Enterprises)
Captain Mar-Vell (Fawcett)
Ka-Zar (in this case, Marvel was rippng off themselves)

Magazine Enterprises publisher Vincent Sullivan threatened to sue Goodman over the new western "Ghost Rider", and what I noticed was, the magazine was cancelled ONE month after it went monthly! So it wasn't lack of sales that put it down.

However-- one month AFTER that... the new "Captain Marvel" debuted. Goodman just couldn't be stopped.

Marvel's western "Ghost Rider" (note quotation marks) was mostly a concoction of editor Roy Thomas. I can tell this by how he named the guy "Carter Slade" (gee, shades of Roy's favorite DC hero, Carter Hall), made him a SCHOOL-TEACHER (gee, as Roy had been before becoming a comics professional), and how you had a character who should have known better insisting that the masked hero was secretly a bad guy (gee-- SHADES OF FREAKIN' SPIDER-MAN), not to mention including a kid sidekick (something Marvel's editor would not have approved of), and a REALLY LAME soap-opera involving a woman who was already engaged who kept shoving herself in Carter's path, but then repeatedly pointing out that she wasn't available (so get the HELL out of his way, you stupid cow!). Basically, that cast was one of the most unlikable and infuriating of all of 60s Marvel.

On top of this, the dialogue by Gary Friedrich-- and sometimes Roy himself (filling in uncredited-- BUT I COULD TELL, there was no mistaking his intensely-annoying style) made the book just about unreadable.

So, recruiting the artist of the ORIGINAL character to WRITE THE STORIES and DRAW THE ART-- Dick Ayers-- didn't help much, because by the time Ayers was brought on board, Thomas had already destroyed any hope the series might have had.

Carter Slade was brought back in WESTERN GUNFIGHTERS so they could continue publishing leftover stories and new ones, while avoiding putting out a BOOK whose name AND character would be an obvious Copyright violation... and before long, Carter was KILLED OFF (a typical Thomas move) and replaced with a brother who was an actual... U.S. Marshal. Oy.

Goodman STILL wanted to reuse the name "Ghost Rider", which is why Gary Friedrich, whose big thing was motorcycles, eventually created JOHNNY BLAZE. I just wish that had been the name of the series.

While I don't have any issues of the actual ME Ghost Rider series, I do have a couple of issues of Tim Holt Western (also published by ME) with Ghost Rider stories-- after all, that's where he got his start before getting his own book. Don't have Tim Holt #11 though-- that's the Ghost Rider 1st appearance, and it's a wee bit beyond my pocketbook.

Giant-Size Kid Colt #3, July, 1975
“Death Duel with Dack Derringer”, 20 pgs
Written by Gary Friedrich
Drawn by Dick Ayers
Inked by Vince Colletta
Lettered by Jean Hipp
Colored by Petra Goldberg
Edited by Len Wein



Cover by Gil Kane

Summary:

We open with a shocking scene: gambler Dack Derringer shoots Kid Colt point blank in a dispute over a game of poker. Seem’s Dack’s holding four aces, but Colt had just discarded an ace to build his full house!

Dack backs away to the swinging saloon doors, holding his pistol on the onlookers who’ve objected to the “cold-blooded murder” they just witnessed, but Dack collides with school teacher Carter Slade, arriving on the other side of the doors, curious about the shot he heard. Both are knocked down, but Dack rides off, while Carter sees to Kid Colt, who’s not dead, after all, just gravely wounded. Since Doc Bentley’s out of town, Carter takes Colt home for recovery, and assigns the townsmen to round up a posse, since the sheriff’s out of town, too.
Seems Carter’s pretty good at doctoring, given that the bullet passed close to the Kid’s heart. He sends his young houseboy Jamie to fetch old Mrs. Benson to serve as Colt’s nurse, because as soon as the sun sets, Carter Slade’s gonna do some Night Riding!

Darkness falls, and we get a gander at the Night Rider’s set-up: a secret cave where he keeps his glow-in-the-dark Night Rider gear, complete with projection lantern and luminous rope. Still in his civilian garb, Slade hits the trail of Dack Derringer.



But by the time he catches up with the posse, he’s in the striking solid white costume of “He Who Rides the Night-Winds”, adopting an imperious, dramatic speech pattern as he scolds the posse who are abandoning the pursuit. He pulls his disappearing act, vowing that Dack Derringer will soon be imprisoned…or dead!
Back at Carter’s homestead, Kid Colt is recovering remarkably. Three days later, in another town miles away, Dack Derringer finds that his bad reputation precedes him, thanks to the Night Rider who has beaten him there. If Dack’s money isn’t good enough in this town to buy him a beer, he thinks his bullets will be good enough to take down a Night Rider.

To his shock, Dack’s bullets do no harm to the spectral cowboy taunting him from across the street, a spectral cowboy who vanishes before the astonished eyes of all observers. (Readers in 1975 know that Dack was shooting at an image projected from the Night Rider’s lantern!)

Dack flees in terror, but runs immediately into a more physically substantial Night Rider, who unseats Dack from his saddle with a lasso, forcing him to attempt an escape on foot. With no option but to resort to gunfire, Dack finds that this time, his shots do some damage (if only a flesh wound that sends him tumbling unconscious to the dirt)—the Night Rider is human after all!
He steals the Night Rider’s horse (discovering that the apparently solid white steed is a common chestnut brown beneath the luminous phosphorus dust the Night Rider covers his horse in). That horse is way beyond anything the townsmen’s mounts are capable of matching. Dack is gone with the wind, and the wounded Night Rider makes plans to head home, hoping Kid Colt is recovered enough to assist him.

Colt is indeed on the mend, and ready to leave the company of Jamie and Mrs. Benson to pursue the “two-bit card chisler” (sic) that shot him.
Night Rider, on a borrowed “worthless nag”, has managed to catch up with the posse, who have Dack Derringer boxed in against the walls of a closed-off canyon. Night Rider worries that if the posse catches Dack, they’ll discover that his horse was covered in phosphorus, spoiling the myth he’s built up around himself. He ponders aloud whether it’s worth letting Dack go free so that he can’t reveal what he’s learned, but Kid Colt, who’s also arrived on the scene in time to overhear, and to talk some sense into the ghostly gunslinger:



And finally it’s a Western Team-Up!

Derringer has discovered that this apparent trap provides him a position from which he can simply slaughter the posse from on high. The posse members give it a go, but back down for fear of losing one of their own. If only they could get a couple of men behind him…

Kid Colt’s a little leery of teaming with a spook, but Carter convinces him: “As with all things spiritual—you can only trust me! And trust me you should! After all, if I wanted to kill you, I could have easily done so long before now!”

One of the posse’s gotten tired of waiting Dack out, and makes a brave move, but it’s one that earns him a bullet in the chest. That’s enough to get this team-up into action, right? Well, after a bit more jaw-boning, maybe…




Night Rider attempts to spook Dack Derringer, but Dack’s no dummy, and takes aim at the haunted horseman he knows to be human. Oops! He fell for the projection again, operated from the rocks above by Kid Colt! Faced with a Night Rider every way he turns, Dack loses his composure and doubts his convictions—maybe the Night Rider’s a genuine spook after all?
Dack bows to the mystery man in a plea of repentance, and the Night Rider…prays?!




Before Dack can shoot the sermonizing spectre, Kid Colt takes him out with a shot from behind. Unnecessarily, according to the Night Rider, who had a back-up plan ready. He explains that his prayer was just an attempt to determine whether Dack’s remorse was sincere, and, alas, it was not.

With the story coming to a close, Night Rider feels obliged to attempt to arrest the fugitive Kid Colt, but allows him to depart with his claims of innocence. Warning the Kid to clear his name before venturing again into Night Rider territory, Colt departs with a claim to have seen through the Night Rider’s act all along.

Comments:

With a more generous page count, this is the most engaging of the team-ups we’ve looked at so far. First off, the lowered stakes provide an interesting contrast to the usual fare. This is no old-west supervillain with a fancy costume and nickname (which were standard threats in Marvel’s Ghost Rider series) or a gang of thugs threatening the safety of the town or rustling cattle from an innocent ranch-owner like we might see in a Kid Colt story. It’s just some guy, who’s shot another guy and gone on the lam.

For a series named after “Kid Colt”, the Kid himself does next to nothing in this story. He gets shot, he talks the Night Rider into doing the right thing, serves as the Night Rider’s technical assistant, and shoots his earlier assailant in the back, unnecessarily. It’s not much of a team-up; it’s a Night Rider story, with Kid Colt guest-starring, and no denying it. And the original crew of Marvel’s Ghost Rider, Friedrich and Ayers, were probably as happy focusing on their old friend as the readers who were more interested in superhero-style costumes and gimmicks than in typical western comics. Which, by 1975, were quite likely in the majority.

I’ve gotta admit, the prayer scene really threw me for a loop. Seeing the hero pause the action for a full page of prayer to the almighty was a surprise, and had me wondering whether Night Rider was supposed to be some kind of religious crusader. Revealing that it was a ruse was kind of a let-down, but there’s still the hint that Night Rider was more sincere than he was letting on in hoping that Derringer had genuinely had a change of heart. I also liked the bit where Dack was disappointed to discover that he wasn't welcome to do any gambling thanks to Night Rider spreading the word about his bad nature. Taken together, it does make the Night Rider out to be someone intent on taking his enemy down psychologically in order to get him to redeem himself under pressure. Not the most genuine of redemptions, no, but it's different enough to be notable. 

I do mightily appreciate Professor H’s giving us all the low-down on the original Ghost Rider. While I have more appreciation than he does for Marvel’s version (but I loved your takedown of it, profh0011 !), it has always rubbed me the wrong way that Marvel was so blatant about co-opting the defunct character without permission from Magazine Enterprises, without making the kinds of changes they did to distinguish Daredevil and Captain Marvel from their predecessors. But that all-white costume is irresistibly compelling. It surprises me that few publishers opted for that, as effective as it is. (I can recall Marvel’s own White Tiger, but that’s about it.)

While I'm not a big fan of Dick Ayers' work, I do have some nostalgic attraction to it, and I've gotta say he does some good "supporting actors". In this one, Dack Derringer is the stereotypical weasel with a slick look and a thin mustache, cliche but effective. I didn't have any trouble with Colletta's inks, entirely adequate for the job. 

Also of interest, among the reprints backing up the lead story is "Fury of Farrow Gap", as mentioned before, the most recent solo Kid Colt story prior to the previous issue's solo. Werner Roth does a pretty fine job, aided ably by Colletta, and we also get some reprints featuring the artwork of long-time Kid Colt artist Jack Keller, perhaps better known for the racing stories he did for years at Charlton. I'm quite fond of Keller's work. It's pleasant and has a lot of character, but still looked a little old-fashioned and simplistic in the 70's. 

And with that, Giant-Size Kid Colt came to an unsurprising end. It had played its part in the Marvel Western Team-Up micro-genre, picking up the banner from its cancelled precursor, using its inventoried material, and following the same trail while providing all-new content to accompany the then-running Night Rider reprint series. 

Thanks for noting the issue with credits, Prof. I very much appreciate that the role the artists actually played in writing the stories in those 60's Marvels is becoming more widely acknowledged. In those Daredevil and Ghost Rider issues, especially, you can sense "the editor" regretting his allowing readers to get a somewhat more accurate picture of the "writing" process and re-burying it with credits that, sometimes rather creatively, obscure the division of labor: in issue 3 of Ghost Rider, it's "written by Gary Friedrich" and "plotted and drawn by Dick Ayers", and in issue 4, it's "Gary Friedrich * Dick Ayers Scrutiny of Sepulchral Seances!" What the heck?! In issue 5, the credits are in the style of newspaper article with headlines "Gary Friedrich's seething scripting showcased!" and "Dick Ayers' artwork called awe-inspiring"...and even "Stan Lee Edits and Embellishes Another Frontier Fantasy!" (Wait, isn't "embellishing" usually a synonym for "inking" in this context? Talk about misleading credits! I assume Stan's saying he rewrote some dialogue.) Issue 6 is just a "Gary Friedrich and Dick Ayers Monument of Mysterious Mysticism" while issue 7 winds us all the way to the standard "Written by: Gary Friedrich Drawn by: Dick Ayers".
I'd missed out on Ayers' 90's Phantom Rider backups in the series reprinting the "Original Ghost Rider". It looks like there were quite a few of them, running from issues 3-20, culminating in a Western Team-Up between the Rider and El Aguila, a Mexican western adventurer! I think I might have to get around to that one here, somewhere down the line!

Most of those I never read, except where I found scans of the original art online. No, really! I've also read about a lot of this stuff, while doing research here and there. I forgot that just within the context of the marvel western GR series, they had 3 different people taking on the name.

To me, Marvel just totally disrespected the memory and legacy of someone else's character. I did read when Steve Englehart (no longer on top of his game) did an excessively-long time-travel story in WEST COAST AVENGERS, in which he did even worse things with Phantom Rider (or whatever he was being called at that point).

They really made it difficult to follow a lot of these obscure series in the 70s, often jumping from one book to another to another between appearances. I was thinking about this just yesterday with their ESSENTIAL MARVEL HORROR reprint collections, which really made it much easier to read some of those characters who kept jumping books between almsot every story.


I may be missing some of these, but Rex Fury appeared in GREAT AMERICAN WESTERN presents SUNSET CARSON #5 (?? / AC / 1991). "Ghost Town Gauntlet" (10 pages). Story & inks by Bill Black, pencils by DICK AYERS. Sunset Carson teams up with Haunted Horseman.



As far as I know, the last appearance of Rex Fury was in BEST OF THE WEST #31 (AC / 2002). "The Curse Of The Carpathians" (5 pages) Story by Bill Black, full art by DICK AYERS. (I would have preferred if Black had done the inks, but that's me.)  Now that I think about it, I really don't know if Ayers wrote the story himself, and Black only did the dialogue.  The thing is, unlike Marvel's editor, I'm pretty sure Bill Black did it all, depending on the story.



This one's IN STOCK at AC Comics!
link

So, if he's making a reference to the Lizzie Borden case, was this tale set in 1892 (the year the Borden murders occurred) or later? If its that late in the 19th century, it puts a different complexion on this western series, as it would seem the creators could have thought about moving it in the direction of some western serials where territories were still without plumbing and using horses, but early cars were used (for America, that would set the date at 1908 or later).



Agreed; after Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid at the movies and Alias Smith and Jones (the TV series inspired by it), western characters were a bit more modern in their characterizations, certainly beyond John Wayne's stiff-backed stroller-types and even "hipper" than an earlier character of that type, Steve McQueen's Josh Randall from Wanted: Dead or Alive TV series (1958-61). This was the direction Marvel western heroes needed to follow, as it made a far more interesting group of characters to invest in, not coming off as well...relics.