The Ringo Kid debuted in Ringo Kid Western #1, cover dated August 1954.

Joe Maneely drew the Ringo Kid stories behind this cover, which he also drew:



Judging by the cover, the Ringo Kid’s drawn pistol is enough to intimidate ordinary men who might think of bringing in the man who, the poster on the wall indicates, is wanted by the authorities.
So, we’re in for another run-of-the-mill Atlas Western hero who’s considered an outlaw? Another Kid Colt, another Rawhide Kid (II)? Yes…but Ringo’s story has a few twists that elevate the feature, so let’s dig into his origin, the lead-off story.

After a pin-up splash characterizing Ringo as a “new star that blazed across the Western skies”, we go back to 1866, in an unspecified mid-Western town, where attorney Cory Rand is being disbarred due to “professional ethics”…a cover for the real reason: Rand is married to a full-blooded “Comanche princess” named Dawn Star.

Rand takes his wife’s advice and leaves the law behind, relocating to the plains, where he was considered a blood brother to the Indians, but an outcast to the white man. He proves to be a successful rancher, earning the respect of his hired hands. When sleazy Shad Rathburn proposes to buy the ranch, Rand refuses, shooting one of Rathburn’s men dead when he pulls a gun on the former lawyer.

That very night, Dawn Star gives birth to their son, amidst good omens:



Growing up, young Rand has the privilege to learn all the arts of the West from both his Indian extended family and the ranchers, earning a nickname of somewhat shaky justification:



But young Rand (who has not been identified by name so far?!) is raised apart from white boys, and when he does encounter them in town, the boys’ racist taunts result in a brawl. Rand has the advantage until the resentful Shad Rathburn breaks up the fight with a bullwhip against the lad’s back!

But Dad’s right there, and he doesn’t cotton to seeing his son whipped like that! What’s a father to do? Well, how about shoot ‘em all dead?



The elder Rand knows this will make him a hunted man, but then he hears the sounds of drums from his ranch—there’s trouble! He hands his guns off to Ringo, telling him to wait, and heads to the ranch, which is being torched. His wife dies, pinned beneath a burning beam and shot for good measure. Rand is arrested, and the next thing we see, he’s being lynched. “You murdered my wife and now you’re killing me! You’ve gained nothing, but you’ve lost your dignity as men! In my son, my wife and I will live!”

This time it’s the younger Rand to the rescue! He pulls the old “shooting the pistols out of the hand” routine on one, but then “began pumping his Winchester into the milling, screaming, stampeding throng!”



Father and son split up, both outlaws now, “and the star of the Ringo Kid took its place in the Western skies!”

See? Quite a bit more to hang a series concept on than we got with either Colt or Rawhide II! Racism and prejudice, two generations both on the run, separately, blood brother to the Comanche, trained in gunplay and Indian weapons. And some rich Joe Maneely art!

Like the Texas Kid, there’s a stronger hint of lethal violence than we’d come to expect from later Marvel Westerns. Ringo’s pa unhesitating dispatching of his son’s tormentors was shocking and abrupt. When Cory Rand discovers his wife’s body, the captions tell us he is unable to see the perpetrators, and his eyes are blackened when the lynching is depicted. I can’t figure out why this element was introduced; the reader sees that it’s the late Mr. Rathburn’s men taking out their vengeance, but surely Rand could have guessed that himself, without needing to see them. It’s almost as if the writer was on the verge of repeating a piece of the Texas Kid’s origin, with a blind father, before changing his mind and having the father, apparently no longer blinded, ride off on his own.

I do like the notion of Ringo having a father out there somewhere facing the same problems that Ringo himself is, but recognizing it’s too risky to reunite. But reunite they do at the commencing of the second story, which finds both Rands meeting up at Dawn Star’s grave. The dialog implies that quite some time has passed, but the townspeople haven’t forgotten; they show up and lasso the elder Rand, while Ringo makes an escape.

Ringo relies on his Comanche connections for assistance, recruiting Dull Knife, and using a young sapling to catapult the Indian over the jail walls where Ringo’s father is imprisoned. Dull Knife executes a choke hold (pre-Code, obviously!) and Ringo disrupts the drinking party where the bounty hunters are celebrating their catch:



With only one more page allotted, the three escape and part ways again, The End.

After a text story, Joe Sinnott illustrates a story featuring “Arrowhead”, an Indian character whose own series had been cancelled just prior to this issue’s publication. Sinnott’s pencils and inks evoke EC comics artists, particularly Jack Davis and Bill Elder, and doesn’t shy away from violence, concluding with Arrowhead killing the bad guys with arrows and a thrown knife to the chest.

Finally, one more Ringo Kid story, that opens with congressmen in DC allocating $50,000 for the Cherokee and Comanche tribes. Given some inside information, greedy Doc Stiles schemes to rob the money during the long trail to delivery.
The Ringo Kid is there when the Pony Express carrier is shot down, and he takes over the route, only to find the villains are ahead of him, lying in wait at each further station.

Ringo forces a showdown at Devil’s Gap, where he guns downs the owlhoots in a flaming ravine:


When he delivers the pouch, it contains not only the money for the tribes, but a ‘wanted’ poster from the government—a poster offering $1000 for the Ringo Kid! The colonel tears up the poster and sends Ringo on his way, recognizing the debt owed to this courageous fill-in for the much-respected Pony Express.

I’d say that was a pretty decent debut, hewing to the tropes but with some added interest. With its fifth issue, Atlas shortened the official title to Ringo Kid. It continued for a total of 21 issues, ending in September 1957. Joe Maneely handled the art on many of the Ringo Kid stories in this book, but John Severin and Fred Kida also did stints as the ongoing artist. Ringo also joined the cast of Wild Western with issue 38, November 1954, with solo stories behind the Kid Colt lead feature. Later, Ringo would sometimes get the lead position, as in issue 47, where artist John Severin temporarily took the reins from Maneely:



Other artists handling Ringo’s pages of Wild Western included Fred Kida and Werner Roth, but Maneely took over again for the final leg of the trail.

Wild Western and Ringo Kid were bimonthly, published on alternate months, so readers had a monthly dose of Ringo up until September 1947, when both series were cancelled as the Atlas line-up imploded. Their Western line was pared down to Gunsmoke Western, Kid Colt Outlaw, Two-Gun Kid, and Wyatt Earp.

In his final installment, Ringo helps a former outlaw turned schoolteacher against his old gang. It appears some changes occurred somewhere along the way, as Ringo seems to be treated as a respected member of the community, not an outlaw, and his father is hanging out peaceably in the hills with Dull Knife. The three ride off together in one final Joe Maneely panel (one rendered with less embellishment than Maneely was delivering in the early days of the feature).



Coming Attractions:

Ringo Kid in the 1970's!

I'm guessing that Marvel wanted to use the name Ringo because the original Johnny Ringo was a well established character in Western fact and legend. Thus they may have gone out of their way with that admittedly ridiculous part of his origin to establish that their Ringo's name was a nickname and not his surname, so that nobody would think he was literally Johnny Ringo, the outlaw who notably crossed paths with Wyatt Earp in Tombstone, and who appeared throughout the 50s in movies and on TV.

(In 1950's "The Gunfighter", a superb movie, the eponymous character was played by Gregory Peck and called Jimmy Ringo, but the name Ringo was cemented in people's minds as a kind of brand name for a notorious gunman.)

I doubt Atlas would have had too much to worry about where copyright laws and trademarks were concerned, but as there had also been a 1953 movie with Richard Boone ("City of Bad Men") playing him, maybe they were playing it safe just in case?

I haven't run across any in the Atlas era or the 60's and 70's, but in the 80's Night Rider backups (in THE ORIGINAL GHOST RIDER, which reprinted the early adventures of the skull-faced biker hero), they introduced El Aguila, an ancestor of the modern-day costumed character.

Marvel began its reprints of RINGO KID in late 1969, with the first issue cover dated January, 1970, under a cover that reprinted Joe Maneely’s cover from issue 18 of the first run (June 1957):



Although Ringo would be considered a second-tier Western hero, consider that at the time, Marvel’s Western lineup consisted of:

RAWHIDE KID—Rawhide was on issue 73, featuring new stories written and drawn by Larry Lieber

KID COLT OUTLAW—Marvel’s longest-running Western was at #142, but was reprinting issues from the late 50’s

MIGHTY MARVEL WESTERN—only 7 issues old, MMW was reprinting Rawide, Kid Colt Outlaw, and Two-Gun Kid

It’s a pretty meager sub-line, but Ringo figured prominently, leading the way for an expansion: TWO-GUN KID would return with issue 93 dated July ’70, followed by the all-reprint OUTLAW KID #1 and the mostly-new try-out giant WESTERN GUNFIGHTERS #1 in August. By the next year, WESTERN GUNFIGHTERS had dropped to a quarterly before going reprint, with THE WESTERN KID #1 returning in reprints as of December ’71.

For some reason, the next generation of Marvel writers arising from the superhero fans of the 70’s didn’t seem to cotton to Ringo, so, as we saw in the Western Team-Up thread, he cropped up very rarely when they would dig into the Western catalog, but Ringo’s reprints ran a respectable 30 issues, lasting until November 1976.

After a few issues, Marvel began to commission new cover art, presumably to make the books look more contemporary on the stands. Standouts include work by Herb Trimpe, John Severin, and Gil Kane:





Initially, the packaging formula was to lift reprinted stories all from the same issue, but not chronologically: issue 1 drew from issue 10 of the original run, issue 2 reprinted from issue 9, up until the 12th issue, when stories were thenceforth fished out from two to three different issues of the 1950’s run. Before the reprints ran out, readers were treated to some non-reprint “new” Ringo Kid stories; issues 18 and 19 recovered a couple of Joe Maneely-drawn unpublished tales retrieved from inventory.



Alan Weiss and Frank Giacoia’s cover for issue 19…



…illustrated the “new” story published inside:



At this point, the available reprint and inventory material evidently ran out, suggesting that, as in the case of OUTLAW KID, Marvel did not have useable materials from all of its old issues of the 1950’s run. So, what to do? Just like in Outlaw’s case, the intent was to shift to creating new material. Dick Ayers penciled the first issue from a script by Steve Englehart:



In MARVEL WESTERNS STARRING THE BLACK RIDER (reviewed in the Team-Up thread), Steve Englehart wrote on the text page: “…in those early Marvel months as a writer, I was assigned a RINGO KID story for a proposed relaunch back then. Dick Ayers did the pencils. But super heroes were selling so well that the Western relaunch was shelved.” On his web page, Englehart says “Every series I did took off so Marvel kept giving me more. I relaunched this classic Western – always my favorite of Marvel’s true cowboy heroes (as opposed to the Two-Gun Kid, whom I also liked but who was more a superhero) – with classic Western artist Dick Ayres (sic). But after this first issue was drawn and scripted, Marvel decided to do more superheroes and fewer cowboys, so it was set aside before inking.”

Dick Ayers' work did appear in print on this cover, a few issues before the planned revival, illustrating one of the interior stories (spoiling my theory that the guy on this cover was the same as the guy in the splash page from the aborted revival above):



So, like OUTLAW KID, which finished off its short run of new stories with issue 16, June 1973, RINGO KID went on a brief hiatus as of issue 19, March 1973, returning in September with reruns of reruns, starting over with the same material it had printed in issue 1. For a few issues before its end, readers got a few new covers for their 25-30 cents, from artists Ed Hannigan and Gil Kane.

For a reprint series, RINGO KID is not bad. The interior art is mostly from Fred Kida and Joe Maneely, all quite appealing if dated by 70's standards. It's unfortunate that the series didn't include the early installments, leaving the character essentially generic, but I assume it satisfied enough of the dwindling Marvel Western fans of the early 70's since it outlasted many others, and wasn't entirely "free" to create, given the new covers on most issues.