In 1948, Marvel Comics published the first issue of what would be one of their longest-running Westerns, TWO-GUN KID #1. After the first Two-Gun Kid story ever came a four pager under the banner logo that simply read: The Sheriff:



This nameless sheriff finds his checkers game interrupted by one Bat Miller, who is caught beating his horse. Humiliated, Bat works up a grudge and holds up the local bank, planning to escape over the border to show the Sheriff a little humiliation in return, but Bat Miller’s plans go awry when his horse, “the fastest hoss this side of the Rio Grande”, immediately tosses him!

The Sheriff returns in the next issue in the slightly longer “Killer’s Alibi!” This one is not anecdotal like the first, but tells a more traditional Western adventure, in which the still-unnamed Sheriff is out to stop some cattle rustlers one of whom, though masked, was identified as “Emerson” by a victim who died shortly after. That would be Dwight Emerson, the son of the highly respected town banker.

When the Sheriff calls on young Emerson the next day, the fellow’s father swears that Dwight had been playing checkers with him since 8:00 the previous night.

The newspaper publishes the accusation despite young Emerson’s alibi, which leads to masked men breaking up his printing press, and then the gang gets right back to rustling. This time the Sheriff and his posse are able to catch the gang in the act, and the truth comes out: the gang leader was the elder Emerson, not the son! The Sheriff had jumped to unjustified conclusions based on the dying victim’s fingering “Emerson” but not a specific one!

In August 1948, another Western character gets his own comic with the publication of TEX MORGAN #1, and The Sheriff is there to round out Tex’s debut with “Death Rides the Gun!” This one goes a page longer than his second appearance, with a big six pages that leads to a finale in which the Sheriff spares an old man’s memory of his son by denying that the now-dead boy was one of the outlaws he battled.

The Sheriff returns to TWO-GUN KID #3 as a back-up that ends with him reading a dime novel magazine instead of attending the hanging of the killer he just caught. Next he helps out yet another debuting Westerner doing back-up duty in KID COLT #1’s “The Killer of Timberline Strikes!” This one’s back down to 4 pages, and has the Sheriff resolving a dispute between young Dan Brewster and his father-in-law who has accused Dan of killing his calves. The Sheriff proves that the killer was in fact a cougar in the area, and the grateful old man reconciles with the younger man, who reveals that his father-in-law is soon to be a grandfather!

The Sheriff joins several of his fellow Marvel Western features in their anthology comic WILD WESTERN #3, with “Law Comes in Greased Holsters!” This six-pager is an emotional one, with the Sheriff having a conflict with the violent gunfighter Durango. The Sheriff allows himself to be humiliated by backing down to the owlhoot. The townspeople wonder why the Sheriff keeps complying with Durango, but the Sheriff loses it when Durango fires a slug through a precious photo that the Sheriff carries.



It turns out that Durango was married to the Sheriff’s sister, who made the Sheriff promise never to harm Durango before she died.

This story does finally give the Sheriff a name, when he’s called “Al” in a flashback to his sister Jane’s final hour.

With all these Western heroes getting their own comics, why’s the Sheriff limited to back-up duty? Well, Marvel rectifies that in September 1948 with BLAZE CARSON (subtitled The Fighting Sheriff!) #1.





This time, Tex Taylor backs up our newly (re-)named Sheriff, who gets four short stories and an informational one-pager:



Blaze continues appearing in his own title and WILD WESTERN 5-7. Along the way he dutifully fills pages in more issues of TEX TAYLOR, TEX MORGAN, TWO-GUN KID, and KID COLT OUTLAW. He picks up a Gabby Hayes-like sidekick, Deputy Tumbleweed. Carson’s comic concludes with issue 5 in June 1949, in a classically cramped cover with lots of text:



After that, Blaze continued to appear in back-ups for Tex Taylor and Two-Gun Kid, making his final appearance in TWO-GUN KID 9 (August 1949) in “When a Man Has Faith!”



Well, that was sort of his last appearance. In WHIP WILSON #11, September 1950, he appears one last time under the alias of “Speed Larson”. So why “Speed Larson”? Perhaps he was feeling embarrassed because Whip Wilson had claimed Blaze’s own comic, taking over its numbering with the 9th issue.



Sheriff Dan “Blaze” Carson never made it back to the stands among Marvel’s 1970’s reprints, which largely accounts for the character’s obscurity. The Sheriff started out as an interesting concept, a nameless lawman recounting short, interesting anecdotes gathered over a long career. It was a good idea for a convenient back-up when the Atlas Westerns depended on several short stories every issue. The character’s transition to headliner was not surprising—when Atlas decided to add a new solo title about a Western lawman—an obvious premise to try--The Sheriff was still enough of a blank slate that he could fit the bill. There were some adjustments: the character seemed younger, and talked more like a swaggering cowboy than a seasoned officer, but it wasn’t such a dramatic change as to lead one to doubt that this was indeed the same Sheriff.

The GCD has lots of question marks on many of the installments’ art attributions, but declares Pierce Rice the artist for BLAZE CARSON #3. In general, the art for all of the character’s appearances is on the crude side, which was probably a big factor that prevented Marvel from reprinting any of it.

So if BLAZE CARSON was cancelled with issue 5, and WHIP WILSON inherited the numbering beginning with issue 9, what about issues 6-8?



REX HART appeared in three issues of his own comic, numbered 6-8, running bimonthly dated from August 1948 to February 1950. The series had assumed the numbering of BLAZE CARSON, in the well-known technique of launching a new series by changing its title and contents, thus sparing the publisher additional business expenses involved and giving the sheen of an established magazine to a newly-introduced product.

A lot of the Atlas Western features struggled to find success on the stands. One approach that appeared to be working for other publishers was to get the rights to a famous star of Western film or television and cast them as the lead of your comic feature. Fawcett had the rights to publish the fictional Western adventures of Gabby Hayes, Lash Larue, Rocky Lane, Monte Hale, Tom Mix and Hopalong Cassidy, for example.

Atlas opted to publish the comic book adventures of "Your Famous Western Star" Rex Hart. Hart was not nearly so well known as the round-up of riders Fawcett had licensed, or any of those Atlas's competitors had managed to snap up, like Dell's Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, or Magazine Enterprise's Tim Holt. Hart was best known for his appearance in...

Hmm, hold on a second, let me do some research...

OK, turns out there's a good reason I wasn't familiar with this "famous" Western star: there was no such cowboy star. Atlas just used a few staged photo covers with the same model and tried to insinuate that he was a legitimate celebrity, rather than paying for rights to whatever bottom-tier cowboy actors were still available to make arrangements with.

The first issue has the usual multiple short stories, the second two feature longer 18-page stories, with a few text stories and disposable back-up shorts in all three.



Rex was a generic roaming cowboy cleaning up towns across the West, and his stories are run-of-the-mill, but Rex did have one significant advantage over his predecessor Blaze: Rex was blessed with art from the talented Russ Heath, which make the stories in the first two issues a pleasure to look at, at least. Other artists take over in the final issue, possibly including Syd Shores, and the art is still superior to what Blaze tended to get. The reliance on longer stories made Rex’s comic a little more fun, but it wasn’t enough. Or maybe the cover model dropped out of the business, preventing them from carrying on the pretense.

As mentioned before, Rex made way for WHIP WILSON, and Whip was a legitimate Western star, the screen name of Roland Charles Meyers.



Since Whip wasn’t one of Marvel’s own characters, he’s out of scope here, but I will note that he got the boon of artwork by Joe Maneely, so his comics, like Rex’s, look pretty danged good.

G.I. Combat #88

by Russ Heath

Wouldn't it be neat if Marvel published a pair of companion specials, one of them in the big old Treasury edition format, and one in a half-size "mini-comic" format, called...

GIANT-SIZE ANT-MAN and ANT-SIZE GIANT-MAN

Actually, now that I think about it, a Treasury format would probably be a more effective visual format for a tiny character like Ant-Man; his image could be big enough to be distinguishable but still dwarfed by the larger panel size. And just imagine the 2-page spreads that could be drawn "actual size" as they say on the grocery packaging, like maybe a desktop with Ant-Man on a full computer keyboard...

I doubt it would be nearly as rich in visual potential to have Giant-Man in a mini-comic but it'd be worth it just for the joke, right?

It's way down the list, but here's a preview:



As for B'Wana Beast, thanks for reminding me!

JUNGLE WAR STORIES #3, April-June 1963, Dell Comics




Hey, that's a nice cover, right? Enjoy it while you can...

“Laos – Landlocked and Lackadaisical” is the inside front cover 1-pager, nicely drawn and tentatively attributed to Maurice Whitman and Vince Colletta at the GCD. It’s a derisive mocking of the country: their roads are bad, they have a railroad station with no railroad, few telephones, and put license plates on elephants. Ha ha.



After that put-down of the nation, “Scorpion in the Haystack!” has American soldiers arriving to train the Royal Laotian Army. Yeah, three Americans ought to suffice. This story is possibly written by Carl Memling, but definitely drawn by Joe Sinnott penciling and Vince Colletta inking.

The chief advisor is Captain Duke Larsen. Sgt. Cactus Kane is called in from a jungle warfare training school “many miles away”, and G.I. Mike Williams is the third to board a chopper to go train the Laotians. Browsing the issues, it looks like all three of these guys had solo stories or appeared together throughout the run of JUNGLE WAR STORIES.

The boys are assigned to “Operation Meatgrinder” which, as has already been revealed, is in Laos. They are to raise the spirit of the Royal Laotian Army by helping them achieve “an immediate smashing success against the evil forces of the Pathet Lao!” I don’t know much about the Vietnam war, but I can determine that these guys were the Communist faction in Laos, who would eventually come to power, but in 1963, Americans surely had confidence that we’d defeat Communism in southeast Asia.

The Yanks are choppered in to a hotspot, where they are fired upon by the enemy, but are rescued by Laotian Royal Battalion-5, and are greeted by its leader Captain Tha Vong.

Back at headquarters, Duke is suspicious: how was the enemy alerted to their arrival, and why did Tha Vong’s men fir over the heads of the Pathet Lao? A scorpion in the haystack—that is, a traitor—is suspected in the ranks!



The next morning, the soldiers arrive at a bombed-out village, where Tha Vong reports an ambush. He insists that the group abandon their plans and instead strike at the Pathet Lao immediately. G.I. Mike has another idea…

Days later, as the squad is deploying to engage, Tha Vong is using a pocket mirror to signal the enemy—did you guess that he was the mole?

He had plenty of accomplices on the other side, but the soldiers find that when they try to blow up a village that they were supposed to protect, the detonator doesn’t work:



Off panel, the bad guys finish off the treacherous Tha Vong themselves:



The Americans had sniffed out the scorpion and cut the detonator wires, allowing the loyal Laotians to win the day with some violent warfare:



OK, whoever scripted this didn’t make this as easy to follow along with as the DC war comics I’m more familiar with. I’m not certain I had it all straight, and it’s not nearly engaging enough to be worth the bother to parse it out. That was one of the dullest war stories I’ve ever read.

Next is “Operation Mongrel!”, with more Sinnott and Colletta. We’ve got Duke flying a damaged plane into Phang Sai, Laos, to supply them for defense against the Pathet Lao:



There, they make friends with the Meo tribe, threatening primitives armed with bow and arrow who nonetheless are “friendly to the American flag!” Duke has a history with their kind, sharing a flashback to his making good with the similar Kachin tribe of Burma:



The savages prove a great help to defeating the Pathet Lao, and the story ends with Duke’s fellow civilized folk gaining respect for the savages:



You might have noticed my synopsis was pretty slim there. I just can’t focus enough to dig the plot out of this. Although it’s much more “jungle”, with its primitive hut-dwelling tribe, it’s just torture to try to get through this comic. The plot is plodding, the art is pedestrian, the dialog is excessive, the tone is pandering and jingoistic. I suppose readers of the time who were very interested in the Vietnam war may have brought background knowledge that made this somewhat more interesting than it is to me in 2022, but it’s just not good comics story-telling.

All three of our Americans are together again for “The Dance of Death!”, which opens with a splash showing Duke, Cactus, and Mike bound for a pending execution while native women dance around them:



This one’s got art by Maurice Whitman and Vince Colletta, and Whitman’s at least a more interesting penciler than Sinnott. The story again has the boys training the locals, this time separately: Larsen’s helping a new helicopter squad, Mike’s instructing parachuters, and Cactus is training the Laotian Woman’s Army Corps!

Duke and Mike tease Cactus, but I know which assignment I’d be volunteering for…

The ladies turn out to be surprisingly competent, and Mike’s not surprised, because he has a flashback to Korea where he was saved by a mere “girl”:



After all three finish their instructing, they get a furlough, but their chopper puts down in the women’s school and they find themselves captured by the enemy:



The women show up in traditional dress, and the Pathet Lao commander orders them to dance “the dance of death” before the execution. The women, though, have some hardware hidden underneath that garb:



“The Leader” is a text story, blessedly only a single page, and has a trio of injured soldiers escorted through the jungle to safety by a native who turns out to be blind.

Whitman pencils and inks the final story, G.I. Mike Williams in “The Reluctant Hero!” Forgive me, but all I can do is look at the relatively appealing artwork. Stuff like this:



Skipping to the end, it appears Mike helps the villagers set up a radio network while the Pathet Lao try to prevent it.

The inside back cover gives some portraits, courtesy of Whitman, of four Loatian leaders, including:



Well, that was painful. Not just Jungle Junk but War Waste as well.

Before this, the only thing I knew about JUNGLE WAR STORIES was that Joe Sinnott had complained about Vince Colletta taking shortcuts by turning many of his penciled figures into silhouettes. In this issue, Colletta appears to have been faithfully rendering Sinnott’s boring panels, and I can’t complain about his contributions to this garbage. On later issues, it does indeed appear that he resorted to some silhouetting to process the pages more quickly:



Quite honestly, in comparison with this issue, Colletta’s silhouettes improve the overall look of the pages, to my eye. The effect adds some visual drama, and if it saved Vince some time, all the better. I don’t blame him one whit; he probably knew this was a turkey of a series destined for the junk heap of comics history.

I figured I'd be discussing how this comic reflected American propaganda on the Vietnam war, contributed to the anti-Communist attitudes, all sorts of high-falutin' stuff, but not only do I not have it in me to do the research to show more than trivial knowledge on the subject, this comic just doesn't inspire me to make the effort. This one really pained me like few comics I've ever struggled to get through. It's a check-mark in the jungle genre, it's done, I read it and I'll try my best to forget it. 

Fortunately for me, none of the other southeast Asia-based war comics don’t appear to have used “Jungle” in the title, so I can comfortably neglect them in my little study here. I’m trying to keep the scope broad, and next time I’ll be getting into yet another variation on the jungle genre, one I’m sure I’ll enjoy a whole lot more than this.

JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #102:



(Y'know, the Sandman probably had to be breathing a sigh of relief when Superman explained that the one who died was going to have to fly up into space and spear the giant hand about to crush the Earth. "Kinda counts me out, guys. Good luck!")