FEATURE COMICS #127 (Quality Comics, October 1948)
Dan Barry, artist

I'll try to join in. I could really use the diversion, because things have been really stressful around here lately!

The second version of the Two-Gun Kid appeared, in TWO-GUN KID #60, November 1962, about a year and a half after the original incarnation had been cancelled, with TWO-GUN KID #59, April 1961. Unlike the Rawhide Kid, who also returned in a 1960's resurrection of a cancelled RAWHIDE KID comic that had previously starred an entirely different character by the same name, scripter Stan Lee had the new Two-Gun acknowledge--sort of--his predecessor:



Stan doesn't appear to have gotten his story straight before committing the script to ink: if that Two-Gun was "fictitious", why is Matt Hawk wondering "what ever happened to him"?

And, while I'm criticizing, "It sure fits you, kid!"? Yep, two guns, you got 'em, it's like the name was meant for you. Absolutely perfect, kid. Wouldn't change a thing! 

I assume it's generally good marketing strategy to be one of the first options that consumers see, so it may have been not just wanting to have the book placed next to the main Avengers book, but also positioning it nearer the start of the new comics racks. There's an obvious argument against this strategy, though: most of the comic's potential readers were almost certain to browse the opposite end of an alphabetically arranged comics rack to look for Uncanny X-Men. X-Men readers would also quite possibly have some continuing fondness for John Byrne, making it seem like an even better strategy to me. It occurs to me, though, that given Byrne's notoriously mercurial personality, the true motivation behind the name change might have been to keep "his" comic as far away from the X-Men as possible. That seems quite petty, but not inconsistent with Byrne's reputation.

Dialog and first person narration. First person narration is, to me, an even less authentic storytelling construct than the thought balloon, especially in, say, a JLA story where different sections are narrated by different JLAers: 3 pages of Batman narrating, then 2 pages of Green Arrow, then a few Zatanna pages... It implies that sometime after the events of the story, each member sat down and recorded or related recreations of their remembered thoughts in those moments. In a novel, we can assume that the narrator is, well, writing out their memoirs or something, but it's not so easy to dream up a scenario where each participant is sharing detailed reconstructions that often include closely held secrets and private opinions. And of course, occasionally the narrator of a section will actually die, so how did this information ever get recorded?

I suppose the narrative technique allows writers to be more expressive, using more engaging language that would be inauthentic when rendered as the more immediate thought balloons. We've all seen absurdly expository use of thought balloons in older comics: "If only I had my Miraclo tablets! But they were proving dangerously addictive, so I had to invent the Miraclo ray instead, which allows me to gain superpowers for one hour, but only if I expose myself to them using the machine in my lab. Unfortunately, the lab is on the other side of town, and Dr. Glisten has locked me in this meat packing plant, where I will die from exposure to the cold before I can escape!" I can see how that same information could be better conveyed as a narrative contemplation of the situation after the fact.

I do wonder why writers would deprive themselves of the kind of scene-setting, art-augmenting text the likes of which enriched books like TOMB OF DRACULA, but maybe the editors just grew to impose new conventions as they went along with the trends. Arguably, the art should do the heavy lifting on establishing atmosphere, and the kind of stuff Wolfman did in TOD was sometimes--perhaps usually--superfluous over the likes of Gene Colan panels. But not every artist is a Gene Colan, right?

GAMERA #4, 1996:

Tantalizing Mystery from the Golden Age:



The (Big) Hand was a bizarre backup in Harvey's SPEED COMICS #12 and 13 from 1941. The Hand was an apparently disembodied hand (although sometimes it showed some arm) that could change size and fly and communicate by writing in flames in the air. I just love these insane concepts for ongoing features that could crop up in the early days of superheroes, but I'm frustrated that the secrets of The Hand (apparently intended to be "The Big Hand", but "Big" was erased from the first logo) remain untold. As we see in the panels above, the first installment revealed that The Hand was attached to The Whole Person, but everything except The Hand seems to have been intangible and unable to communicate vocally. I can only conclude that this is some agent acting from higher-dimensional space, and is only able to partially extend his hand into the ordinary space-time that we experience. It's a fascinating premise that seems way beyond the typical ideas one would find in this era. I have so many questions! Was it someone from our realm accidentally trapped outside of it? An alien (wearing a hat!) from another dimension? A mystic who could transfer himself at will into a higher-dimensional space from which he could access our more limited space in fantastic manners? And could he poke any other body parts through if he wanted to?