Batman was a lot more relatable in 1940, but he was still capable of doing things no normal man can bring himself to do:

It's quite an honor, almost a difficult one to acknowledge given my modest nature. Thanks, and congratulations to all winners and nominees.

These past couple of years have been the most rewarding for me. You all were my primary social network during the pandemic, and have been inspirational in reinvigorating my interest in comics and encouraging my explorations of things like Hourman, Marvel Westerns, and jungle comics. I keep recalling a prophecy of doom made years ago, that despite this forum's generally genial, respectful, and positive tone, it would ultimately devolve into an unpleasant and bickering community. We've had conflicts now and then, and hurt feelings, but we're still maintaining some of the highest standards of online interaction that I've seen in any social media. Long may it remain so!

I think I'd have been very displeased at having those stupid numbers visible on my finished coloring job! I don't recall ever seeing that in coloring books. And thinking as a kid, I wonder how many youngsters concluded from that coloring guide that Batman's cape was supposed to literally be black and blue vertical strips? Plus I'd be annoyed that they didn't provide a guide for every area--how's a kid supposed to know what to do with those stripes on Robin's sleeves or the trim of his trunks?

I've got memories of a couple of coloring books from my pre-comics days, a "My Favorite Martian" and "Valley of the Gwangi". Sci-Fi comedy and dinosaurs for this lad!

I thought I'd get back to this thread and finish it off; following this look at a couple of Indian stars, there are only 5 to 7 topics to cover (I'll be addressing 3 characters in a single post, for reasons which shall be obvious).

So let's get back in the saddle...

Long before they published RED WOLF, Marvel—or Atlas, that is—had two other series with Native Americans as leads.

The first was RED WARRIOR, which ran from #1, January 1951, to #6, December 1951. This was one month after APACHE KID #1, but Apache Kid was half-native, and a big part of its premise was that the lead character could, in his “secret identity”, pass as a white man. This makes RED WARRIOR Atlas/Marvel’s first series starring a non-white lead character.



Red Warrior’s adventures were illustrated by Tom Gill, who followed his RED WARRIOR work with an impressive 107 issue, 11 year-long stint drawing THE LONE RANGER comics for Dell. Gill drew all the stories starring the cover character, and all of the covers, except for the final 6th issue, which sported a Joe Maneely cover. Gill’s art is clean, clear, and wholesome-looking, a little stiff, but pleasant to look at.

So, what’s Red Warrior’s story? He’s the son of Chief Grey Eagle of the Comanche, whose prayer to Manitou blessed him from birth with strength, wisdom, courage, and exemplary morals. He’s raised to learn all of the native skills, not just the hunting and fighting skills of the men, but the healing and mending skills of the women. Once he has surpassed the level of his teachers, Red Warrior continues to study from nature, learning the benefits of all the plants and the ways of all animals.

After eight drunken white men attack the village while Red Warrior is away, Red learns of the wicked ways of the palefaces, and he slaughters them in vengeance:



These are the last white people to appear in this issue of RED WARRIOR. In the second story, Red Warrior fights against a rival, Flaming Arrow, whom Red ultimately kills in combat:



A short tale of an Indian boy follows, drawn by George Tuska, and the final story sees the tribe suffering a drought, until Red Warrior discovers a hidden valley with game and fresh water, saving the tribe.

Following issues featured a blend of stories focusing entirely on the affairs of Red Warrior’s tribe and tales of his encounters with white men. Red Warrior has lots of bad experiences with evil white men, and even displays a hint of supernatural power by summoning lighting from the Great Spirit:



Over all, the stories mostly focus on Red Warrior’s tribe, not with the white men’s town. Red Warrior does have good relationships with the whites—at least the respectable ones—but delivers his share of Western justice to the badmen. His final story is “The Trail of the Marauder”, which sees Red Warrior’s best friend become mad with the delusion that he is a wolf. At the climax, Red Warrior gets through to his friend, who jumps off a cliff rather than subjecting his friend to the burden of killing him:



I liked RED WARRIOR a lot. I had become a Tom Gill fan by the time I got through a few issues, and it was refreshing to see most of the stories revolving around the Indians, not white settler. But after all, the covers all declare that these are “Tales from the Land of the Redmen!”

ARROWHEAD came along a few years later, with his own comic debuting with #1 in April 1954, but running only 4 issues, through November 1954.



All of Arrowhead’s adventures were penciled and inked by Joe Sinnott, whose work looks to me to be highly influenced by the team of Will Elder and John Severin; add a little “chicken fat” and funnier script and this panel could have come straight out of an issue of MAD:



But ARROWHEAD is serious business. Check out the grim vow on the introductory splash:



Arrowhead is the son of Chief Bear-That-Walks, leader of a tribe of Pawnee Indians, and is, as one would expect, exemplary over all others in fitness, looks, and the skills and weaponry of the Indians. He’s got dibs on the most coveted maiden in the village, but he also has the enmity of the tribe’s medicine man, Snake Fang, whose own son, Running Wolf, is rival to him in games and romance.

Later Arrowhead learns of the threat of the Palefaces, and is taught to despise them, even though he has never seen one. When Arrowhead goes to his ritual test of manhood, staying alone in a cave, he dreams of shooting a white man with his arrow, before waking and then nearly dying in a battle with a huge bear.

White trader Pete Frame finds the unconscious Arrowhead and returns him to be nursed back to health at the Pawnee village, hoping to earn the respect of the Indians. They are grateful, but not grateful enough to reveal where the tribe gets the gold to make the jewelry they wear!

Weeks later, Arrowhead’s family never returns after a trading trip and in response, Arrowhead—finally recovered--goes in search, only to find them all slaughtered, with evidence that the killers were a tribe of Crow Indians. He finds them, slaughters them, and gets arrested himself by white men who don’t care that he’s not one of the Crow who have been causing trouble.

A “good” white man, Andy Crockett, helps Arrowhead to escape from jail and returns to his tribe, only to find Snake Fang in charge, trading gold to Pete Frame for firearms. He kills Snake Fang when he learns that Snake Fang, not the Crow was behind his family’s death, but is then branded a renegade by both the Indians and the White Man.

It’s a gripping little origin tale, despite the cliché “perfect prince” trope, and despite the intrigues getting a little muddled, between the many attributions of guilt and varying implied motivations of Snake Fang, the Crow, and the white people. I’ll just accept the conclusion, that Arrowhead is left a man without a country, unloved by either of the races, and nursing a grudge against one more so than against the other.



To my surprise, Arrowhead did not temper his hatred for white men at all over the course of his four issue run. His arrows were uniformly lethal, and he tended to fire them directly into the chests of his white enemies every issue. It’s surprisingly discomforting to see this brutality in a genre that was in the process of being neutered with cowboys whose bullets would only bruise hands. I can’t quite decide whether it’s racist because Arrowhead hates white people, or whether it’s racist because it grants that Indian heroes are allowed to murder their enemies while white Western heroes are held to a higher moral standard, or whether it’s not racist but justifiable retribution for historically factual wrongs against Native Americans. I’d love to know what the readers of the time thought of this. How easy would it be for American kids familiar with conventional cowboy heroes to root for an Indian that unapologetically vowed to kill the white man?



When ARROWHEAD was canceled, Atlas was left holding at least one unpublished story, and Western stories are easy to drop in as a back-up story for another title, and thus did Arrowhead’s final published adventure appear in BLACK RIDER #25, the very same month that Arrowhead’s own comic saw its final issue hit the stands.

In this untitled story, Arrowhead sees a white man gesturing mysteriously toward the prairie, and then Arrowhead attempts to get news from back home from his old friend Little Otter and some other Pawnees he sees in the area. The group is loaded up with guns and drunk on firewater, all given to them by “a friend” who promised them the Pawnee would soon be able to reclaim their territory from the palefaces. When they turn their new guns on the renegade Arrowhead, he knocks out the drunken men, telling them to go back to their lodges and sleep it off.

Almost immediately, Arrowhead is under attack by white men on horses. Arrowhead takes care of them with a few arrows to the chest and returns to the Pawnees he’d tangled with before, only to find that they’ve been shot dead while in their drunken stupor (but then, maybe if Arrowhead hadn’t rendered them completely unconscious they could still have put up a fight).



A.H. finds a cabin burning, with the obvious intent of implicating the Indians, who are known to use flaming arrows, and is then captured by another group of white men, who plan to hang the Indian in town as “an example to the rest of your breed.” He breaks free, but is recaptured when the men threaten to shoot his horse, and Arrowhead ends up in the town jail.

On the final page, the white man from page one appears, offering a deal: rouse the Pawnees to kill local settlers and start a land war, so that he can mop up and take control after the mass slaughter. Arrowhead, quite reasonably, refuses the deal, and gets the villain in a chokehold through the jail bars.

He ties up the schemer with a rope attached to his horse, Eagle, intending to march him to the townspeople to confess, but the horse dashes off on his own, dragging the villain to his death. In his final panel, Arrowhead praises the lethal instincts of his steed:



That's some terrific pre-Code savagery there! Neither of these attempts succeeded for Atlas, but both of their American Indian-led comics were thrilling, well-done efforts. They demonstrate that there was some room for greater variety in the Westerns than the cowboy heroes and unjustly-branded outlaws that dominated the genre. 

Sorry for the delay, everyone. I've been overwhelmed by responsibilities and wasn't expecting a win this week! I guess we'll have an abbreviated cover contest, but it will be up soon!

I assume at least some Marvel fans thought that wearing your initials on your chest was too "DC" (although there really aren't that many--Superman Family, Robin, Wonder Woman...uh, Geo-Force...).

Wonder Man's original costume had the curly filigree on the abdomen, something that always suggested to me that Don Heck designed it. Heck had some very distinctive but not especially good design instincts, and that design is, at the very least, not in keeping with the usual super-hero aesthetic.