PALGRAVE STUDIES in COMICS and GRAPHIC NOVELS Series Editor: Roger Sabin

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN COMICS AND GRAPHIC NOVELS Series Editor: Roger Sabin

LONE HEROES AND THE MYTH OF THE AMERICAN WEST IN COMIC BOOKS, 1945–1962

David Huxley Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels

Series Editor Roger Sabin University of the Arts London London, UK This series concerns Comics Studies—with a capital “c” and a capital “s.” It feels good to write it that way. From emerging as a fringe interest within Literature and Media/Cultural Studies departments, to becoming a minor field, to maturing into the fastest growing field in the Humanities, to becoming a nascent discipline, the journey has been a hard but spectacular one. Those capital letters have been earned. Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels covers all aspects of the comic strip, comic book, and graphic novel, explored through clear and informative texts offering expansive coverage and theoretical sophistica- tion. It is international in scope and provides a space in which scholars from all backgrounds can present new thinking about politics, history, aesthetics, production, distribution, and reception as well as the digital realm. Books appear in one of two forms: traditional monographs of 60,000 to 90,000 words and shorter works (Palgrave Pivots) of 20,000 to 50,000 words. All are rigorously peer-reviewed. Palgrave Pivots include new takes on theory, concise histories, and—not least—considered provo- cations. After all, Comics Studies may have come a long way, but it can’t progress without a little prodding. Series Editor Roger Sabin is Professor of Popular Culture at the University of the Arts London, UK. His books include Adult Comics: An Introduction andComics, Comix and Graphic Novels, and he is part of the team that put together the Marie Duval Archive. He serves on the boards of the main academic journals in the field and reviews graphic novels for the international media.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14643 David Huxley Lone Heroes and the Myth of the American West in Comic Books, 1945–1962 David Huxley Film and Media Studies Manchester Metropolitan University Manchester, UK

Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels ISBN 978-3-319-93084-8 ISBN 978-3-319-93085-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93085-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018945054

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer International Publishing AG part of Springer Nature. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Acknowledgments

Parts of Chap. 1 are based on the paper, “Inventing and Selling Buffalo Bill: The West Travels the World” that I presented at the Film and History Conference, University of Wisconsin, Madison, November 2015. Parts of Chap. 3 are based on the paper “Roping n’ Riding: Selling Western Stars, 1946–1962”, that I presented at the Film and History Conference, University of Wisconsin, Madison, November 2016.

v Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 Inventing and Selling “Buffalo Bill” in Comic Books, 1949–1957 9

3 Billy the Kid: The Outlaw as Lone Hero, 1952–1958 33

4 Roping n’ Riding: Selling Western Stars, 1946–1962 51

5 Conclusion 83

Index 87

vii List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 “The Emperor of America”, Buffalo Bill #8, 1951 12 Fig. 2.2 “War Drums of Doom”, Buffalo Bill #4, 1951 16 Fig. 2.3 “Highlights of a Dangerous Life”, Buffalo Bill Annual, 1953 21 Fig. 2.4 Cover, Buffalo Bill, Collection Hurrah, 1949 27 Fig. 2.5 Duel, Buffalo Bill, Collection Hurrah, 1949 30 Fig. 3.1 Billy the Kid, Toby/Minoan by Jack Sparling 35 Fig. 3.2 Billy the Kid, Toby/Minoan by Don Heck 35 Fig. 3.3 “The Water Poisoner”, Billy the Kid #26 Toby/Minoan, 1954 36 Fig. 3.4 Billy the Kid #24, Charlton, 1960 39 Fig. 3.5 “Billy the Kid”, Sun, 1952 46 Fig. 4.1 “The Treasure of Butterfly Rock”,Dale Evans #8, 1955 55 Fig. 4.2 “Tainted Justice”, Lash LaRue Western #41, 1953 60 Fig. 4.3 “Warriors of the West”, Indians: Picture Stories of the First Americans #13, 1952 70 Fig. 4.4 “The Bushwhacker”, Annie Oakley and Tagg #17, 1956 74 Fig. 4.5 “Crafty Woodcraft”, Gabby Hayes Western #42, 1952 78

ix CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract The nature and definition of the lone hero and the ways in which the West has generated various myths have a complex history. There are ways in which existing theories about the hero and myth in Western films can be applied to comics. Many of these comics feature Native American characters, which gives rise to problematic issues about the naming of the “Indian”.

Keywords Buffalo Bill Cody • Myth • Western comics • Western films • Lone heroes • Native Americans

The thousands of comics dealing with the American West are still a comparatively neglected area in comic studies. Yet the sheer number of these comics, their longevity, and their production in a range of countries, not just the USA, indicate that there is something very significant in their appeal. The main focus of this study is the postwar period when this production reaches its peak. The investigation will use various case studies of comics featuring historical figures, such as Buffalo Bill and Bill the Kid, as well as film and television stars, such as The Lone Ranger and Dale Evans. The majority of these case studies will fall within the main period of consideration, from 1945 to 1962, although the final sections will look at how Western comics began to change after 1962. This book will look in

© The Author(s) 2018 1 D. Huxley, Lone Heroes and the Myth of the American West in Comic Books, 1945–1962, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93085-5_1 2 D. HUXLEY

particular at a staple of these comics, the lone hero. This raises a series of issues concerning both the idea of the lone hero and the complications of the term “myth”. If we separate the idea of the lone hero into its constitu- ent parts, it can be seen as a little more transparent. “Lone” is perhaps the clearest part of this equation. This kind of Western hero must, by definition, to a large extent, “ride alone”. It might be that he will sometimes work with others, and even be accompanied by allies at times, but in the main he or she must rely on their own skills, both physical and mental, to succeed in their tasks. Close analysis of a series of stories will establish which of the comic characters under consideration qualify in this category. Some of the reasons for the appeal of this kind of hero, and the reasons for his isolation, will also be examined. The nomination of a character as a “hero” is more complicated. It should be pointed out, as well, that these definitions are not gender specific and apply equally to heroines as well as heroes. When Western heroines are examined, as we shall see later, there are perhaps some surprises in store. The overall idea of what constitutes a hero or heroine is more complex. J. Isen explains that the concept has changed quite dramatically since the early classical Hellenic version, and in a contemporary setting the hero can be defined as follows:

The qualities inherent within the word ‘hero’ in English are sharply defined. The modern western understanding of heroic characteristics has been shaped by the course of history and literature…In today’s world, a hero is more often than not lauded for heroic qualities due to their willingness to sacrifice themselves for the safety or benefit of others. This lack of concern for personal well-being and safety in sight of a great threat is deemed courageous and the essence of heroism…Another factor in the modern concept of heroism arrives from the medieval concept of chivalry and the knight errant of Arthurian mythology who displays qualities of bravery and magnanimity.1

Starting in 1859, Alfred Tennyson began publishing a highly successful series of poems, Idylls of the King, based on Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, and the idea of the chivalrous hero was a popular trope in the late nineteenth century. Dime novels often lift the idea of the hero’s quest and the saving of the innocent directly from this model. Even the language used reflects this. Fresh from his new-found dime novel fame Buffalo Bill Cody took to the stage in 1872 in Chicago. In 1873 he appeared with Wild Bill Hickok and Texas Jack Omohundro in the play Scouts of the Plains. Part of Hickok’s dialogue (although he had trouble sticking to the script) read, “Fear not, fair maid; by heaven you are safe at last with Wild Bill, who is ever ready INTRODUCTION 3 to risk his life and die if need be in defense of weak and defenseless wom- anhood.”2 This line could have been taken straight from an Arthurian story and sits uncomfortably in the dialogue of a Western hero. Nevertheless the general model of this kind of hero is taken up by writers of the Western. Although these earlier chivalrous definitions call for courage on behalf of the hero, it is worth noting that this does not specifically require bravery in terms of actual physical violence. It could equally mean the kind of bravery where the hero resists evil stoically, through non-violence. As we shall see the Western hero may display that kind of courage, but he is much more likely to use some kind of violence to achieve his aims. Some of the reasons for this and the Western hero’s relationship to violence will be discussed in a series of the case studies of comics featuring Buffalo Bill Cody, Billy the Kid, and film and television Western stars of the 1950s and 1960s. Again, this kind of violence and its association with traditional masculinity is not exclusively the province of the male hero. In discussing the writings of black cowboy Nat Love and adventurer (and later President of the USA) Theodore Roosevelt, Daniel Worden argues, “For Love and Roosevelt, especially in their accounts of Western adventure and military service, masculinity offers a way of constructing the self outside of birth-, class-, race-, even sex-based hierarchies.” Worden further argues that the egalitarian nature of the heroic figure and their “cowboy masculinity” is part of their strength and appeal. The extent to which “cowboy masculinity” can be applied to Western heroines will be examined in Chap. 4. Finally, the concept of myth. This will also be discussed throughout the book, but it is worth setting out some of the issues at stake. The American West and its attendant myths are often seen as being a uniquely American phenomenon, but in reality its appeal has always been more complex and widespread. Although central to ideas of both American nationhood and masculinity, the Western myth has had a wide and continuing appeal in all parts of the Americas, as well as Europe, and indeed, to a lesser or greater degree, most parts of the world. It is perhaps conventional wisdom to see the spread of the myth as being the result of the impact of Hollywood film (and later the so-called spaghetti western, a phenomenon which emphasizes the universality of the myth). Although these films have been central to the creation and perpetuation of the myth, I want to argue that the vast number of comic books (once again from many countries) have also been crucial in defining and popularizing the Western. Myth is a word that is used in many different ways, perhaps the simplest being myth as an untruth—a myth is simply something that is founded on a lie. Although 4 D. HUXLEY many different uses of the word draw on this idea of falsehood, here it is used in the popular cultural sense derived from the work of a series of writers, including Andre Bazin and Claude Levi Strauss. David Murdoch comments that, “Why societies generate myths and exactly what purpose they serve has been a matter of no small conflict among anthropologists, psy- chologists, sociologists and literary analysts.”3 Murdoch continues, “some of them do appear to derive from history, that is to say, myths take bits of history and turn them into legends which illustrate the force of the myths central ideas.”4 Janet Walker also comments on this appeal to history, “the film western (as with other cultural forms) is not historical in and of itself, it draws on historical material. But while history is argumentative and dis- cursive, westerns give narrative form to ideological beliefs and values.”5 Murdoch argues that this is not just true for the tribal myths examined by Levi Strauss, “If this is valid for primitive cultures, it is difficult to see why it should not be so for modern ones. Societies with a perfectly well-developed sense of history and an analytical approach to understanding the physical world seem to go on producing elaborate stories to explain away their conflicts.”6 Finally Murdoch likens the Western myth to the English Arthurian myth, and as we have seen, the Western hero often draws very directly on the knightly model already extant, which was extremely popular in nineteenth-century literature. The abiding myth of many Westerns concerns the march of civilization. White settlers, fighting the harshness of the wilderness, conquer both this wasteland and its native inhabitants to bring progress and peace, the myth suggests. However the concentration in this book will be on the status of the lone hero, who is often the mecha- nism by which this victory can be achieved. This normally has to be achieved by violence, either against the indigenous native tribes or the corrupt whites who threaten stability. Most of the writing about the Western has concentrated on film, so at this point it is necessary to look at some of these arguments to see to what extent can also be applied to comics. Will Wright, in Sixguns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western (1977), outlines four different types of Western film plot, which can certainly be applied to various Western comic book heroes.7 Christopher Frayling succinctly sums up the four plots in Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone (1981).

The ‘classical plot’ begins with the hero outside society, and shows his progressive integration into society; the ‘vengeance variation’ begins with the hero inside society, shows him going outside society for a ‘job’, and then returning to society (abandoning his ‘job’)…the ‘transition theme’ begins INTRODUCTION 5

with the hero inside society, and shows his progressive disillusionment with society; the ‘professional plot’ begins with a group of men outside society – where they stay throughout the film.8

There is a broad chronological thrust to these changing plots, and various famous Western films can be slotted into the different categories, though not without some controversy, as we shall see. But for many comics, in particular the film-related titles discussed in Chap. 3, the “vengeance variation” fits most comfortably. “Vengeance” is perhaps too strong a word for some of the comics that will be examined, but it is certainly the case that the hero is normally rooted in society in some way, and remains so after his act of violence, albeit a comparatively mild act of violence, particularly after the censorship restrictions of 1954. There is a debate about the status of these figures in relation to the civilization that they are protecting. For many this man of violence (and, particularly in film, it is nearly always a man), although he has saved civilization, can no longer be a part of it. This debate was crystalized in the 1970s with a dis- agreement centered on both Will Wright’s Sixguns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western (1977) and John Cawelti’s The Six-Gun Mystique (1971).9 Essentially the key difference in these texts can be sum- marized in their reading of the meaning of the end of the filmShane (George Stevens, 1953). Wright argued that the gunfighter Shane, having killed the villains, could be accepted into society and Cawelti argued that, as a man of violence, he cannot. The latter seems more plausible and this view was also accepted by Christopher Frayling when he related this interpretation to later European Westerns. Although many comics accept that the hero (a continuing character) will be part of society, an exception, as we shall see, is the outlaw figure, Billy the Kid, who, perhaps, must wander the West and can never join society. Westerns, it can be argued, provide an important message about heroism, society, and violence. Strauss, in his anthropological work, saw that the myths of many different societies per- formed a similar function, in that they provided comforting resolutions to the problems of that society. In contemporary societies the power of these myths can still be great, and in the words of a character at the end of John Ford’s famous Western film,The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, “This is the West, sir, when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” In the film it has just become evident that the “hero” who shot Valance did not actually do so. But a key myth that the Western perpetuates is the idea that a lone hero, normally through acts of violence, can solve a host of problems. In the increasingly complex society through the late nineteenth and 6 D. HUXLEY

twentieth centuries, the Western could provide the comforting myth that despite rampant crime and increasing industrialization, a brave lone figure can make a difference. Unlike the superhero, the Western hero achieves his aims through basically “realistic”, or at least plausible, methods, defeating villains with a gun or his fists. Arguably this myth eventually loses its potency or transfers to the more technologically adept heroes of the detec- tive or science fiction genres as the twentieth century progresses. It may be that the lone man with a gun as the savior of society simply becomes implausible as the century progresses, and therefore a hero with technological expertise takes his place. It is important to realize that the myth of the lone hero was formed even before the advent of film. Indeed, it was created virtually contempo- raneously to the actual events on which it is based. Crucial to this process is the figure of William “Buffalo Bill” Cody who was given his nickname in honor of his prowess in killing buffalo for the Kansas Pacific Railroad in 1867.10 His importance is that through dime novels, plays, and most famously his “Wild West” show, he was instrumental in, if not creating, the Western myth, then popularizing and honing it till he appeared to be the epitome of the Western hero. His image and his continuing afterlife in a plethora of comics are the subject of Chap. 2.

Notes 1. J. Isen, “The Heroes of Myth and Folklore: Part One – Defining a Hero”, accessed December 12, 2017, https://onceuponatimeinthedarkness. wordpress.com/.../the-heroes-of-myth-and-folklore 2. Quoted in Jeremy Agnew, The Creation of the Cowboy Hero: Fiction, Film and Fact (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2004), 49. 3. David H. Murdoch, The American West: The Invention of a Myth (Welsh Academic Press, 2001), 14. 4. Murdoch, The American West, 15. 5. Janet Walker, Westerns: Films through History (American Film Readers, New York: Routledge 2001), 5. 6. Murdoch, The American West, 15–16. 7. Will Wright, Sixguns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). 8. Christopher Frayling, Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone (London: Routledge, 1981), 43. Despite the fact that there have been comparatively few recent Western films, there is still a strong academic interest in the genre, as evidenced in works like Matthew INTRODUCTION 7

Carter’s Myth of the Western: New Perspectives on Hollywood’s Frontier Narrative (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014) and John Nelson’s Cowboy Politics: Myths and Discourses in Popular Westerns from the Virginian to Unforgiven and Deadwood (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). 9. John Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1971). 10. Buffalo were misnamed by settlers and, in fact, are American bison, but the name buffalo continues to be used in popular culture. CHAPTER 2

Inventing and Selling “Buffalo Bill” in Comic Books, 1949–1957

Abstract “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s fame moved from his “show” to dime novels and comics with a clear fixed image. He appeared in three comic series in the 1950s American Youthful magazines, British Buffalo Bill Annuals of Denis McLoughlin and Brantonne and Fronval’s French Buffalo Bill of 1949. All of these center on Cody’s relationship with Native Americans, combining both the motif of the “duel” with different levels of racism in the portrayals of Cody’s enemies.

Keywords Buffalo Bill • Denis McLoughlin • Brantonne

“Buffalo Bill” appeared with his “Wild West” in over 30 countries around the world between 1878 and 1916. His “show” appeared before eight crowned heads of Europe, and Cody and many of the Native Americans who toured with him were feted wherever they went.1 After Cody’s death, his image was kept alive in a number of films, but I argue that his continuing fame was also due to many comic book adaptations. His international fame meant that when he appeared in later films and comics, his image was so entrenched—large Stetson, flowing locks, and beard—that almost all representations of him conformed to this model. This chapter will examine how Cody is posited as a lone hero and the importance of the idea of

© The Author(s) 2018 9 D. Huxley, Lone Heroes and the Myth of the American West in Comic Books, 1945–1962, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93085-5_2 10 D. HUXLEY the “duel” in his mythical status. It will address the nature of the Western hero and how violence is integral to his persona, and how the “other”, his enemy, is often the Native American—in particular the Plains tribes. It will also begin a discussion—developed further in subsequent chapters—about the ways in which these figures’ actions are constructed as “heroic”. This chapter will look at three key versions of the character—the American 1950s comic by Youthful magazines, the 1950s British Buffalo Bill Annuals of Denis McLoughlin and Brantonne and Fronval’s French Buffalo Bill in the “Collection Hurrah” series of 1949. Although each version differs in its attempt to recreate Cody’s career, his visual image remains resolutely fixed, and heroic status is still reconfirmed. Cody achieved vast fame in his lifetime not only because of his personal appearances but also through hundreds of fictionalized adventures in cheap popular “dime novels”. These precursors of paperbacks and comic books featured bright-colored covers and text stories that drew on the tradition of noble European figures, with the Westerner presented as a modern knightly hero. Versions of the dime novels continued, and although Cody does undertake lone missions, some of his persona is predicated on his relationship with his companions, and as the series went on (with up to perhaps 1700 examples) the stories become more and more strange.2 It is perhaps not till the 1950s comic book versions that he is seen as more often as a lone hero. Maurice Horn summarizes Cody’s career in comics, “As mentioned earlier, Buffalo Bill is probably the most widely-known figure of the legendary West, and a number of features based on his fictional exploits were to see print in the United States, and even more frequently abroad. All of the American confections were of short duration, and all of them of little interest”.3 Horn is an important pioneer in the field of research into comic book history. However he is a little hard on the American versions of the character, and in having to cover the breadth of Western comics from 1906 to 1977, inevitably not every title, whatever its country of origin, can be covered in great detail in his book. Both the dime novels and the comics that follow often center on Cody’s relationship with Native Americans. There are clear problems of terminology here. As with any term used to describe a minority group, things are in a state of flux and the ground is continually shifting, so, for example, some have argued the term “Indian” could be reclaimed, and no longer be offensive. Michael Sheyahshe, as a Native American himself, prefers the term indigenous, “I use the term indigenous for a particular reason. In the past, outsiders working in various INVENTING AND SELLING “BUFFALO BILL” IN COMIC BOOKS, 1949–1957 11 media have provided many different manes for Native Americans: Indian, savage, redskin, and so forth. Here, I shall stick to my own descriptive preference: Indigenous.”4 These problems are effectively outlined by Martin Barker and Roger Sabin in their book The Lasting of the Mohicans: History of an American Myth. In the preface they comment,

In writing this book we have been very aware of the difficulty of ‘naming’ the original peoples of the North American continent. There is no wholly satisfactory solution to this problem, and therefore we have decided to use two expressions…talking of actual people, we have tried to use the expres- sion Native Americans, to distinguish from…when we are discussing images or representations…we have chosen to use the term Indian.5

This is broadly the approach I will take in this book, although the term Indian remains quite obviously an offensive and racist term for many and where possible indigenous tribal names (Cheyenne, Sioux, Mohawk, Haida, etc.) will also be used. His relationships with Native Americans dominated both Cody’s actual career as a scout for the US army and also his Wild West show, which featured an attack on the Deadwood stagecoach, and “Custer’s Last stand” with Cody claiming “the first scalp for Custer”. This, as we shall see, becomes a key element in the myth that surrounds Cody in many versions of his story.

Buffalo Bill Comics (USA, Youthful Magazines 1950–1951) As it was produced during the early years of the 1950s, it is perhaps not surprising that the Youthful Comics version of the character produced a highly questionable representation of its Native American characters. Almost all of its nine issues deal at least in part with Cody’s fighting and subduing an often unnamed Indian tribe. In issue 8, for example, from October 1951, the story, “The Emperor of America”, begins with a panel of Cody jumping from a cliff on his horse with five Indians firing at him from the cliff top. This image takes up all of the left side of the page, but the incident actually occurs later in the story. Cody, perhaps because his later Wild West show image may have still been in the American public consciousness, is shown throughout most of this series as a mature, if not old, man, with white hair and beard. The only time that a Buffalo Bill 12 D. HUXLEY comic radically changes the classic Cody image is Buffalo Bill Jr (Dell, 1956–1959). Based on the TV series of the same name, this in fact stars a character who is nicknamed “Buffalo Bill” and therefore has no real relation to the historical Cody. The narrative in Buffalo Bill Comics #8 actually opens with an attack on a town, “Near the Canadian border”. The Indians, who vaguely look like the Mohawk tribe, are driven away by soldiers. The figures of the Indians, as drawn by Ed Goldfarb and Bob Baer in this story, are particularly repulsive. At the top of the second page, one is shown in close-up, with staring eyes, his mouth drooling as they attack (Fig. 2.1). They are portrayed as almost subhuman and therefore presented as enemies who can, and must, be killed. Some of these stories were published in the UK by the London publisher Streamline. This story was reprinted with the crude images of Native Americans intact, but some censorship in the text, so that “bloody confusion” becomes “complete confusion” in this particular panel, and at the end an Indian’s threat “you die the death of a thousand cuts” becomes “you die”. This British issue is a joint war and Western comic. Many British comic publishers like Streamline repack- aged American material rather haphazardly. Still, they were wary of

Fig. 2.1 “The Emperor of America”, Buffalo Bill #8, 1951 INVENTING AND SELLING “BUFFALO BILL” IN COMIC BOOKS, 1949–1957 13

censorship concerns, and this comic carries the Comics Code approval seal, so this version, although not dates, must have been produced in 1954 or later. Fredric Wertham’s 1954 anti-comic polemic, The Seduction of the Innocent, had just as much, if not more, impact in the UK than it did in America. The code will be looked at in more detail later, but it is worth noting that it severely restricted all content and images in comic books, with particular emphasis on portrayals of violence, horror, and sex.6 Cody appears on the back cover of the comic, but in fact this is the cover from the original Youthful magazines issue 7. Not only does this illustrate a different story, but unlike the uncensored portrayals of Native Americans, this image has been censored for the British audience. Two evil green- colored Indians stand behind Cody, but the skull which adorns the pole he is attached to have disappeared from the image. Clearly publishers on both sides of the Atlantic were comfortable with the offensive images of Native Americans, but the skull, postcode in the UK, was deemed unacceptable. In “The Emperor of America” Cody enters the story when asked by the army to rescue a white woman from the Indians, who have fled to Canada. This device allows Cody to be presented as a lone hero because the American troops cannot cross the border and also gives him the classic hero task of rescuing a “damsel in distress”. Cody then performs his miraculous jump from the cliff, but is eventually captured and taken to the would-be “Emperor of America”, who turns out to be “Louis Beal…a half-breed” who is trying to control the Indians. Escaping again, Cody then pushes Beal into the pit of spikes that was intended for him. The denouement of what has been a largely formulaic story is rather unusual. The supposed damsel in distress is in fact Margaret O’Neill, who the Indians regard as a “white goddess”. The Indians are about to kill Cody when she forbids it and orders them to set him free. Despite this nod in the direction of female power, the story is relentless in its portrayal of the Native Americans as easily led by the (half-Indian) villain and at the same time naively believing O’Neill to be a goddess. Cody is seen killing Native Americans with no compunction, and although from his point of view this is essential to complete his task, there is no room for doubt or an attempt at the portrayal of the Native Americans as rounded human beings. In issue 6, Cody is given a sidekick, “Shortsleeves”. This development raises the question of whether a sidekick radically alters the status of the hero. No longer alone, the hero now has a close ally, both to help in his task and to look out for. “Shortsleeves” is a rotund figure somewhat reminiscent of Smiley Burnette, who was a comedic sidekick for both Roy 14 D. HUXLEY

Rogers and Gene Autry. In the story “The Twisted Monsters of Mutant Valley” the first page shows a splash panel of Cody and Shortsleeves punching two Indians beside a glamorous woman who is tied to a post. Already there is a key difference in that Cody has someone to watch his back and to directly help in his task. The text panel explains that the Meztoc Indians, “Pitted against them were Buffalo Bill, King of the Frontier Scouts and his sidekick Shortsleeves, who in their long and exit- ing careers had never met with a more weird and frightening adventure than their battle with the Twisted Monsters of Mutant Valley.” This is somewhat strange, in that this sidekick has appeared from nowhere and not featured in any of the previous adventures in the comic, and he just disappears again in subsequent issues. The story proper then starts with the kidnap of a man and his daughter, George and Lydia Summers. Cody and his sidekick are sent to rescue them by the army. There is another change, in that rather than Cody riding off, alone with his thoughts, Shortsleeves discusses the mission with Cody, as a true partner, explaining that “Ef’n we’re goin’ to find out, we better git movin”. The racist portrayal of Indians continues, as the Meztocs, as drawn by John Sink, are almost subhuman, and Lydia exclaims “Oh dad, they…they’re horrors, Look at them!” The tribe is entirely invented, and apparently located in, “the Dakota bad lands”. Cody and Shortsleeves are captured by the Meztoc, with Shortsleeves exclaiming “They ain’t takin’ Shortsleeves without a fight! I’ll bust every head wide…UNHH!” He is hit in the head by an Indian who shouts “Me fix fat one!”7 The implications of the language used by Shortsleeves and the Meztocs will be discussed in Chap. 4. All four whites now appear to be doomed to be sacrificed to the Meztoc flame god. But now it is Shortsleeves who saves the day. It turns out that his already rotund figure has been supplemented by some sticks of dynamite. He also overpowers their guards single-handedly, and he and Cody destroy the whole mountain with the dynamite. This story, perhaps similar in overall plot to other lone adventures, nevertheless changes the dynamic quite significantly. Arguably, without Shortsleeves’ dynamite, which Cody did not know about, Cody could have failed in his mission. Cody is no longer entirely dependent on his own skills, and a story that uses Shortsleeves as Cody’s sidekick completely undermines Cody as a lone hero. However, as with many other sidekicks, Shortsleeves is not a regular character, and when he disappears, Cody is reinvented as the lone fighter he was before. INVENTING AND SELLING “BUFFALO BILL” IN COMIC BOOKS, 1949–1957 15

Later issues do contain stories featuring a Native American hero, Grey Wolf, and in issue 2 (actually the first in the series) there is also a story featuring Annie Oakley as a central heroic figure. As we have seen earlier, David Murdoch claims that Westerns borrow from history, but in a very “creative” way. The historical Buffalo Bill knew Annie Oakley, of course, as a member of his Wild West troupe, but he had nothing to do with Calamity Jane in the West, let alone fought Indians with her there. Later comics in this book borrow the names of Geronimo, Annie Oakley, Wild Bill Hickok, and others with little or often no relation to the historical figures. Others use names that are close to actual figures, such as “Butch Cavendish” so presumably cannot be accused of playing fast and loose with history. Though, as we will see, “history” is ambiguous and a con- fused concept at best, and recovering any historical “reality” is a project fraught with numerous pitfalls. These complications are underlined in the section of this chapter on the British Buffalo Bill Annuals. “War Drums of Doom” (#4, February 1951) opens with, in retrospect, an unfortunately judged encounter between Cody and an African American. Cody steps off a river steamer with a parrot, and the laborer comments, “You sho can talk, bird.” Distracted by a fight between Calamity Jane and a gunrunner, Red Wilson, Cody shouts at the entirely innocent black laborer, “Get your silly face away from me, you African Indian!” and runs to help. Strangely, in all the casual and overt racism to be seen in some of these series, particularly those featuring Buffalo Bill, this seems particularly shocking. Later stories feature many Indian deaths, even scalping, but this throwaway line is disturbing, perhaps because, in a single phrase, it equates African Americans with Native Americans, with all the violent implications that imply. There is only one close image of the laborer, which is not particularly offensive in itself, but in the other two frames where he appears he is just a distant silhouette, almost symbolic of the invisibility of black characters in so many Western comics. In reality, as well as black cowboys, there were many “black Indians” in the American West. William Katz explains that they also remained largely invisible, “Black Indians? No-one remembers any such person in a school text, history book, or western novel. None ever appeared. Yet they lived and roamed all over the Americas.”8 Given this neglect it is unlikely that, in 1951, the phrase “African Indian” was meant to refer to this group, but was simply another example of casual racism. On the next page there is an unusual design, with the figure of Calamity Jane in trousers and a tight blouse displayed centrally across the first six 16 D. HUXLEY

Fig. 2.2 “War Drums of Doom”, Buffalo Bill #4, 1951 panels. This is a device often used by the publisher Fiction House in their jungle and science fiction comics. It is unusual in Western comics, and clearly designed to display the female body, even at the expense of narrative (Fig. 2.2). A few titles, including one version of Annie Oakley, and Firehair, a Fiction House title, do specialize in this kind of imagery. This Buffalo Bill story does raise some issues about the role of women in the Western comic. Later stories in this book do show women as wives and victims in other comics, but here Calamity Jane wears a gun and is clearly INVENTING AND SELLING “BUFFALO BILL” IN COMIC BOOKS, 1949–1957 17 capable, although she takes second place to Cody, who both knocks out Wilson and helps to rescue her from an Indian attack. Despite the posi- tioning of her in a sexualized way, there is no suggestion that she and Cody are in anything other than in a friendly, platonic relationship. Most of the heroes in this book vary from the obviously celibate to those who, through various circumstances, are unlikely to form any permanent relationship with the opposite sex. Some of this, of course, is due to the potential age of the target audience for these comics, but there is obviously a wider imperative that requires the lone hero to be free of any long- term relationships or entanglements. In this story, again the statements Cody makes are as disturbing as anything he actually does. After shooting one of the Sioux he exclaims, “Stick around fellers, and lets have a scalp party.” All the complexities of the issue of scalping will be dealt with in more detail later in this chapter, but here it seems enough to say that the idea that this version of Cody can see scalping as a party event is stagger- ing. Next Cody single-handedly rescues his friend Pawnee Bill from a Cheyenne chief, Burnt Hand. He also realizes that the Sioux and Cheyenne have combined to buy repeating rifles, and rides to warn Colonel Cuyler and his troop. As he arrives Cuyler is negotiating with the Indians, who have a flag of truce. Cody wields his rifle to bludgeon two Indians, exclaiming, “Sorry, Colonel, but it’s their lives or yours.” And it transpires that the braves had hidden guns. The cavalry now seem trapped, but as the Indians attack Cody foils them, simply by shining a magic lantern in their faces. Wilson is captured, and Cuyler assures Cody that, “We’ll hang this renegade today, Bill.” The whole story is remarkable—as well as all the overtly racist elements, Cody shows the Indians to be both untrustworthy with their fake flag of truce and highly gullible in the way he is able to defeat them. Finally the “justice” for Red Wilson, whatever his crimes, seems to be suspiciously swift. The strong point of this Calamity Jane story is that it a rare example of a powerful female heroine in American comics of the time, but as we shall see later, it is by no means unique. The Grey Wolf stories may have been seen by the publishers as a coun- terbalance to the other portrayals of Native Americans—introducing “the good Indian”, but this hardly outweighs all the other images in the comics. Cornel Pewewardy underlines the importance of the engagement with all these kinds of images; “America cannot truly understand the real issues of contemporary American Indian lifestyles and worldview without understanding the popular images of the past, present, and the future. Understanding the contemporary images and perceptions of American 18 D. HUXLEY

Indians in comic books is extremely important, not only for Indian people but also for the mainstream culture.”9 The British publisher L. Miller, a prolific publisher of reprint American Western titles, also produced a Buffalo Bill comic that looks somewhat like the Youthful version of the character and may have been an attempt to cash-in on the earlier title. In “The Mystery of the Lucky Kitty Mine” (#1, 1957) Cody helps prevent a swindle by villainous Julian Hacker. It is drawn in a clunky imitation of contemporary American comic book style by Harry Cunningham. The interior is a passable imitation, but only just. In fact the clumsiness of many scenes, particularly in backgrounds and landscapes, demonstrates how skillful some of the original American artists are. Cody and his friend, Jim Williams, are trapped in a mine by an explosion, but escape, and Cody is able to confront Hacker and his accomplice, Curly. Hacker is accidentally shot by Curly, and Cody shoots and kills him. Despite the apparent date of the comic, it does not carry the Comics Code seal of approval, and this is perhaps the reason that Cody is allowed to kill his enemy rather than just wounding him. In the second story Cody outwits a white renegade and warlike Cheyenne, in a rather better drawn adventure. The third story is both the most interesting and the best drawn. In it Cody rescues a white woman, Pat Brier, who has been tied to a tree by the Cheyenne. A Cheyenne warrior finds that Cody has freed their intended sacrifice, and Cody and the girl have to hide in long grass to avoid him. Cody and the Cheyenne begin to fight, and the comic, which is very text heavy, has a whole panel devoted to a description, part of which reads, “The superb strength and physique of the Comanche Indian forces Bill to fight for his life: gripping the redskin’s throat he squeezes his two hands together in a steel vice-like grip…grimly Bill uses every ounce of his muscle…it seems the Comanche will never lose consciousness.” Pat Brier then knocks out the Comanche with a large piece of wood. Cody then alerts a fort to these events and they are able to rescue her father from the Cheyenne. It is interesting to see a female character who rescues Cody, rather than the other way round, and she even tells Cody, “I couldn’t hang around like a dummy.” Her attitude is rather more proactive than many heroines you can find in Western films of the 1950s who stand and watch the male hero fight the villain no matter how perilous his plight might be. However there is something strange about this story. Whenever the words “Buffalo Bill” appear the lettering suddenly becomes very rushed and inaccurate. Part of the Buffalo Bill Cody title at the start of the story is obscured by INVENTING AND SELLING “BUFFALO BILL” IN COMIC BOOKS, 1949–1957 19 part of one panel and there appears to be a line behind part of it. The story is not about Cody at all. Given the beard and buckskins, it may be lifted from a British Kit Carson comic, but its inclusion is typical of the cavalier attitude of many British comic book publishers at the time.

Buffalo Bill Annuals (UK, Boardman 1949–1962) The British tradition of producing “annuals”—hardback books produced largely for the Christmas market—has meant that many of these comics, featuring both British original material and reprints of American comics, have survived in this more durable form. The tradition began in the nineteenth century with volumes often based on story papers, and this was continued into the comic book era. By the 1950s there were a large number of these annuals being produced—many of them with specifically Western material. As well as general compilations, Kit Carson, Buck Jones, Billy the Kid, and Buffalo Bill all had their own titles dedicated to them. The Kit Carson stories bear no relation to the historical character, and the Billy the Kid only a tangential one (as we will see in a later chapter) but the Buffalo Bill annuals attempt to do something rather different. Although produced at almost the same time as the American version, the British Buffalo Bill comics published by T. V. Boardman gradually took a very different approach to the character. First published in 1950, initially the annuals used purely fictional stories, but became much closer to the historical Cody under the aegis of Denis McLoughlin, one of the major artists of the period both in British comics and also paperback covers for the same publisher. After some early small comics from 1947 which featured the character in short fictional stories, McLoughlin worked on all the Buffalo Bill Annuals from 1949 to1962. The early approach in the first two annuals, written by Arthur Groom, is to use the rather clumsy device of time traveling children. They meet Cody and he recounts various tales of the old West, yet still with an attempt to address history, for example, with comic strips by McLoughlin entitled “Calamity Jane” and “Weapons of the West”. By the third annual, this time travel device, which does not fit very well with many other parts of the annual, is dropped. In the next two annuals, although Cody is always prominent on the cover, and often on the endpapers, he is sometimes absent from many of the interior stories. The fourth annual still features comic strips by McLoughlin, some of them labeled “A True Story”. McLoughlin and Groom are inevitably limited to the sources available at the time, but all these stories clearly make 20 D. HUXLEY use of the available historical material. Yet in this annual, combined with McLoughlin’s “Saga of Salt Lake City” and “The Great Cochise”, there are reprints of American strips “Bob Allen” and “The Whip”. The result is that the annual has a rather uneven feel, with some material being broad and clearly fictional, while others lay claim, at least, to be based on history. In some later annuals Cody can still be a little peripheral, but in numbers 5 and 6 there is the clearest delineation of this version of the character. In number 5 there is “A True Story, Highlights of a Dangerous Life”. Here McLoughlin uses three vertical panels on each page, with few word balloons, and numbered text sections alongside each panel. The effect is to distinguish the story from the more fictional ones in the annual, although of course, again, the version of events owes a lot to the “official” versions of Cody’s life. The opening page has a central large image of Cody sur- rounded by six other smaller versions of him in different costumes (Fig. 2.3). In every image Cody is shooting or drawing his gun. The panels actually feature some of the less-known events of his life. The first three panels show a young Cody being attacked by Indians and thrown from a raft when prospecting. The later panels deal with his exploits as a Pony Express rider, in the Civil War, fighting Indians and shooting buffalo. The layout of the pages, with vignettes of relevant equipment between each text panel, serves to emphasize that this is to be taken more seriously. As well as further “true” stories there are also three full-color McLoughlin fictional strips featuring Cody. Although elsewhere, as we shall see, there is a clear portrayal of Cody’s enemies as Native Americans, in each of these strips, “The Cherokee Strip”, “The Man from Texas”, and “The Ghost Riders”, the villains are white crooks. Although McLoughlin may not yet be at his height in color strip work, the stories contain some excellent dark, almost “noirish”, passages. In each story Cody overcomes a gang of crooks. In “The Man from Texas” he foils a stagecoach robbery, shooting an outlaw from his horse. Arriving in Abilene he is warned by Wild Bill Hickok that another villain is waiting to ambush him. Hickok only has a minor walk-on part, and interestingly he is shown as clean shaven, with no attempt to recreate the look of the historical figure, unlike the distinctive figure of Cody. Hickok leaves Cody to track down the chief villain, which he does in a gun duel, exclaiming “That’s rid the West of another no good killer!” The story emphasizes Cody’s individual prowess—Hickok has no qualms about leaving Cody to deal with the dangerous killer on his own. At the same time Cody dispenses violent justice, dispatching the “no good killer” without hesitation, but this killing is INVENTING AND SELLING “BUFFALO BILL” IN COMIC BOOKS, 1949–1957 21

Fig. 2.3 “Highlights of a Dangerous Life”, Buffalo Bill Annual, 1953 22 D. HUXLEY couched in terms of a duel—a “fair fight”. From this point on, however, there is an increasing attempt to draw on the “real”, or at least historical, Cody for any portrayals in the annuals. In the sixth annual from 1955 there is a striking cover with Cody standing at the front of a canoe paddled by Pacific Northwest Indians against a frozen background. There is a stark difference between this and the much more common portrayals of Plains Indians, and although there may be some artistic license, McLoughlin has clearly looked at tribal imagery, and the image draws on Haida iconography. Throughout this, and some of the other early annuals, there are numerous carefully researched color por- traits featuring, for example, a Mandan Chief, Seneca Brave, Pueblo Dancer, and Iroquois Shaman. On the back of frontispiece of Cody there is also a full-color map of Native American tribes with 26 accurate images of the relevant tribesmen. Nevertheless, as with the US version, there is a relentless portrayal of Native Americans in the narratives—particularly the Plains tribes—as violent savages without any clear motivation, a portrayal that cannot be seen as anything but racist. This volume also includes the major attempt to produce a strip that deals with the historical details of Cody’s life, though of course still with the proviso that in 1955 there would have been a limited amount of reli- able historical research available in the UK. Rupert Croft-Cooke and W. S. Meadmore’s Buffalo Bill: The Legend, Man of Action, The Showman was published in hardback in the UK in 1952 but not available in paperback until 1957. It is impossible to know if this was seen by McLoughlin, but although the book raises some questions about Cody’s version of his life, it is by no stretch of imagination a defamatory piece of work, and it largely maintains Cody’s status as a heroic figure. McLoughlin’s version, “Buffalo Bill, Indian Fighter”, is a 16-page story that broadly follows parts of the life story established in Cody’s 1879 The Life of Hon. William F. Cody Known as Buffalo Bill, the Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide.10 Although nowhere near the fantasy tales of Ned Buntline and others in dime novels, there is an element of self-aggrandizement and exaggeration in Cody’s text, which many other sources disseminated. McLoughlin opens the story with a full-length version of Cody which takes up the whole left-hand part of the page. He is drawing his gun and spinning round as an arrow flies past his head. The strip is enlivened by the addition of bold red color details, and McLoughlin, an experienced paperback cover designer, highlights the figure of Cody with dynamic patterning to his clothing. The opening sequence shows a young, clean shaven Cody, injured and at the INVENTING AND SELLING “BUFFALO BILL” IN COMIC BOOKS, 1949–1957 23 mercy of Indians, but spared by them. Strangely, because the Indians feed him some of his own food, Cody regards this as a slight worthy of revenge. On the fourth page the text explains “He had been treated in a callous nature by the redmen. His revenge was to come much later and many times…luckily for Buffalo Bill, but unluckily for the many Indians who were to die before Will Cody’s spitting six-shooters in the years that were to come.” Although elsewhere the annuals treat Native Americans much more sympathetically, in this and other stories, they are located as implacable enemies with little clear motivation other than their enduring hatred of the white man. The story briefly deals with Cody’s time as a pony express rider and further fights with Indians. It then moves to Cody’s work with the US army as a scout, under General Merritt. But the key element in the story is that of the individual “duel” between Cody and “Chief Yellow Hair” (given in some sources as “Chief Yellow Hand”). Interestingly in this version of the duel, the Indian is called a chief by Cody, but not named, perhaps indicating that McLoughlin or writer Arthur Groom was aware of the controversy surrounding the nature of this actual event, and the identity of the adversary involved. At the very end of the story General Merritt tells Cody that he has killed “Yellow Hand, son of Cutnose, leader of the Cheyennes”. In the story the currently unnamed Indian challenges Cody and they ride toward each other. When unseated they fire and the Indian is killed. We then see a large close-up of Cody exclaiming “See! The first scalp for Custer!” as he holds the Indian’s scalp aloft. The grisly act of scalping is not shown, nor is there any blood shown on the scalp, but the portrayal of the event is still shocking. The issue of scalping is a contentious one, but it is fair to say that it was normally carried out by Native Americans for ritual purposes, and by white men often for monetary gain. At many different periods various authorities paid bounties to whites for the delivery of Native American scalps, but here Cody is taking the scalp as a trophy, closer to the Native American’s motivation. This does not excuse the act or make it more acceptable to modern audiences. This image is problematic to say the least. Cody is a divisive figure for some, but it is interesting to look at the reaction of Jane Tompkins, Professor of English at Duke University. In her book, West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns, Tompkins describes her response to the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, which in fact houses several museums and contains artifacts relating to Cody, numerous animal heads and sections on the Plains Indians, and weaponry. In the Cody museum proper, the animal heads, mainly shot by people other than 24 D. HUXLEY

Cody, in particular haunt her. She comments, “That the man who gained fame first as a buffalo hunter should have been an advocate of the conser- vation of the buffalo is not an anomaly but typical of the period.”11 In the Winchester Arms Museum she looks at weapons and wonders “how many antlered animals each carbine had killed.”12 In the Plains Indian Museum she has difficulty connecting at all with the exhibits. Despite her initial horror at some of the exhibits, her reaction becomes much more complex. She explains, “When I left…I was full of moral outrage, an indignation so intense it made me almost sick”, but she concludes this section of the chapter, “when I got home I began to read about Buffalo Bill, and a whole new world opened up. I came to love Buffalo Bill.”13 At the end of the chapter Tompkins summarizes the problem of judging Cody, and I want to quote this at some length:

Must we throw out the wonderful qualities Cody had, the spirit of hope and emulation that he aroused in millions of people, because of the terrible judg- ment history has passed on the epoch of which he was part? The kind of things he stands for – courage, daring, strength, endurance, generosity, openness to other people, love of drama, love of life, the possibility of living a life that does not deny the body and the desires of the body – are these to be declared dangerous and delusional although he manifested some of them while fighting Indians and others while representing his victories to the world?14

This can, to a certain extent, be applied to the Boardman Buffalo Bill Annuals themselves. They reflect Cody’s view of himself, and for all the faults that they reveal, they also emphasize his bravery and his skill. There is, of course, potentially, a danger in judging historical figures by the mores of today. The historical figure of Cody presents modern audiences with a dichot- omy, as do the various comic book versions of Buffalo Bill, albeit in varying degrees. If Cody remains a (sometimes shadowy) heroic figure in the later annuals, some other historical figures receive less adulatory treatment. Elsewhere in the sixth Buffalo Bill Annual (1955) there is a nine-page strip, “The Boy General”, which recounts Custer’s life story. This is much more bal- anced, with Custer being described as “harsh” and “time and again before court martial”. In a two-page spread portraying the final battle, Custer is described as “foolhardy”. McLoughlin’s version of the fight also eschews INVENTING AND SELLING “BUFFALO BILL” IN COMIC BOOKS, 1949–1957 25 the traditional representations that always show Custer standing at the center of a pyramid, fighting to the last as his troops die around him. In McLoughlin’s panorama Custer can just be discovered, partially obscured, at the top rear of the right-hand page. If Cody’s status as the star of the annuals continues to be maintained, then many other Western figures are treated more even-handedly. Indeed the later annuals essentially become a visual representation of the American West that become increasingly wide, and for the period, accurate and fair minded, even if they never totally abandon the lone hero motif. In annual number 8 from 1957, which features Cody on the cover, there are a number of strips based on factual events. An 11-page strip “The Long Haired Sheriff” details the career of Commodore Perry Owen, and “Little Wolf Goes Home” is a sympathetic 12-page account of the Cheyenne Chief’s outwitting of the US army in 1878. An eight-page story “The Texas Killer” is the story of John Wesley Hardin’s life, and the subject of the ten-page strip “Frontier Forts” is self- evident. All these stories are written by McLoughlin’s brother, Colin, and are easy to believe that McLoughlin was having an increasing influence not only on the images he drew but also on the content of the scripts. In the end, the later Buffalo Bill annuals are steeped in research and convincing detail, and from this McLoughlin is able to create a West of the imagination. The dark saloons, windswept ghost towns, and dramatically lit Westerners of all types are an immaculately conceived version of the West. If it is not exactly the West as it was, it is the West as it should have been.

Buffalo Bill (France, Collection Hurrah, Les Editions Mondiales, 1949) In the period after the Second World War, French comics underwent something of a renaissance. Various pioneers such as Herge had established successful comic strips before this, of course, but the range of titles and genres increased as French culture as a whole re-established itself after the war. In 1949 Buffalo Bill was part of a large format comic series based around American film sources. The series format is fully 12 inches by 9 inches, with color covers and black and white interiors. Three titles make up the Buffalo Bill series: “Le Revolte des Cheyennes”, “Le Combat de War-Bonnet-Gorge”, and “Le Revanche de Buffalo Bill”. They were drawn by Rene Brantonne and written by Georges Fronval and based on the American 1944 filmBuffalo Bill, starring Joel McCrea as Cody. The 26 D. HUXLEY story of the film is told across three 16-page comics (issues 5, 6, and 16). McCrea is set in the classic Cody image, although he ages substantially in the film, and the comic, with Brantonne as a highly talented artist, follows the image of the star very faithfully. On the cover of the first issue, we see Cody, clearly resembling McCrea, staring off to the right of the page with a vignette of Cody stripped to the waist next to a threatening Indian brave. Below there are some charging Indians on horseback and a beautiful Indian maiden. Brantonne does not make a great effort to make the more minor characters look like their filmic counterparts (played by Anthony Quinn and Linda Darnell), but on the cover of the second issue there is a large portrait that is obviously Quinn. Under the title “Le Revolte des Cheyennes” at the bottom there is the legend “D’Apres le Film de la 20th Century Fox” (Fig. 2.4). Fronval’s adaptation also follows the film very closely across 42 pages, and so it presents a version of Cody’s life not far from his own autobiog- raphy and various perhaps glamorized accounts of his life. Although this means that Cody’s work with the US army is acknowledged, his status as a scout means that his individualism is also stressed. Although there are many dynamic frames, and Brantonne is a master of light and shade, unfortunately the comic does not take advantage of its particularly large format. Most pages use a very regular 13- to 16-frame layout, with 4 or 3 panels on each tier. On very rare occasions a panel will take up the whole width of the page, but that is all, and at times Brantonne’s bold artwork seems constrained by the small panels. Throughout the comic Cody has several interactions with the Cheyenne. In the opening sequence he rescues an army coach from a Cheyenne attack in a sequence typical of so many Western stories and films—there is no explanation, motivation, or characterization of the Indians. However his later meetings are rather more complex and center on the figure of the “Chief Oeil de Lynx” (literally “Eyes of the Lynx” “which might be very loosely translated as Sharp Eyes”, or “Eagle Eyes”). The name change is strange and appears to have been invented by Fronval, as in the film the character is called Yellow Hand. When the government wants to move the Cheyenne from their current land, Cody acts as intermediary with the chief, and there is clearly mutual respect between them, as Cody has once saved the Cheyenne’s life. When Cody is later captured by the Cheyenne, he is tied to a post and being tortured, it is Oeil de Lynx who arrives and spares Cody’s life. But after Cody is freed, Oeil de Lynx explains, “Et INVENTING AND SELLING “BUFFALO BILL” IN COMIC BOOKS, 1949–1957 27

Fig. 2.4 Cover, Buffalo Bill, Collection Hurrah, 1949 28 D. HUXLEY

Nous combattrons, Pa-Has-Ka. Ton scalp ornera mon wigwam” (“We will fight, Pa-Has-Ka. Your scalp will adorn my wigwam”my translation). A key episode in both the film and the comic is the point where Cody challenges Yellow Hand/Oeil de Lynx to a duel. In the comic the duel, where Cody makes the challenge while both men are on horseback, lasts for a full page of 13 frames and ends with the chief being drowned after a fist fight. Both men are stripped to the waist and the comic emphasizes the equal contest between two brave men, although of course Cody must win. The story has shown that his Native American enemy has his own code of honor, as he has earlier released Cody and explained that in the future they must meet as enemies. However the comic follows the film in questioning the validity of the myth of Cody and his heroism. An older Cody is seen having his story of the Indian war questioned, resulting in him being reduced to doing shooting tricks in a down-at-heel sideshow. He is redeemed by the intervention of his wife and the comic ends with a brief summary of his Wild West show, and an elderly Buffalo Bill’s retirement. In the end, however this questioning of the heroic myth only serves to emphasize Cody’s durability. The doubters are wrong, and Cody not only defeats his enemies on the battlefield but also in wider American culture as a whole. The message of the comic is that it is his vision of the West, through his show, that will endure. Having completed the adaptation of the film there are then two further comics under the series title “Les Vengeurs de Buffalo Bill” (#17 and #21, both 1949) and featuring Cody on the cover. In fact these are an adaptation of the 1936 serial, Custer’s Last Stand, and the interior stories feature “Kit Cardigan” as the hero, and Cody does not appear at all. It may be that it is simply the continuing fame of Cody, and perhaps good sales for the earlier issues, led the company to perpetrate this rather dubious sales device. When ten of the titles are gathered together in a bumper issue they even use this cover again, even when only three of the ten stories actually feature him. The overall series had begun with an adaptation of the 1938 Republic serial The Lone Ranger under the title Les Justiciers de la Far West, and also adapted Tom Mix films, indicating the power of the Western myth in France at this time. All these versions of Cody, to one extent or another, raise the issue of what it is to be a hero, and more specifically, how violence is used by the hero. It has to be admitted that, for some, there is simply an appeal in watching or reading fictional violence. There may even be guilt on the part of the viewer, as demonstrated by film director Paul Schrader’s reaction to INVENTING AND SELLING “BUFFALO BILL” IN COMIC BOOKS, 1949–1957 29

Sam Peckinpah’s violent 1969 Western film,The Wild Bunch, “I know it’s an anachronism. I know it’s fascist. I know it’s sexist. I know it’s evil and out of date. But God help me, I love it so.”15 But violence in the Western is often couched in very specific terms and with specific motivation. Jeremy Agnew points out that a particular pattern of violence is established in James Fenimore Cooper’s 1826 novel, The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757. He says, Cooper also promoted the American idea that it is acceptable for the hero to take action outside the law in the pursuit of justice. The notion was that good always triumphed over evil if the good had high civilized moral values. Leatherstocking, as the hero, is a man who stands outside civilization and retaliates against the agents of savagery with death and violence because of his own moral superiority. His violence is used to end their violence.16 This could easily be applied to the majority of the heroes and heroines under investigation in this book, although the level of the violence used varies markedly. Jane Tompkins has looked at the use of violence in relation to Western films and novels, although unfortunately, not comics. However, as we are seeing, the Western myths and tropes remain remarkably similar whatever the medium being used. Addressing the moment of violence in the Western, she comments, “The villains, whoever they may be, finally commit an act so atrocious that the hero must retaliate in kind.” She continues “Violence, by the time it arrives, feels biologically necessary…whatever the appropriate analogy is (and the most common one is sexual) the violence, by the time it arrives, fills a visceral need.”17 In some cases, such as the British story by McLoughlin and the French version, the pattern is replicated perfectly—Cody’s violence—indeed his scalping is, in the terms of the story and the mores of the times, justified retaliation for the massacre of Custer’s Seventh Cavalry. The fact that the actual events— both the Battle of the Little Big Horn and Cody’s “duel”—are hugely contentious is not evident in these retellings of the story. Although this form of violence, the scalping, is an anathema to a modern audience, it is couched in the form of a duel, where the two men have engaged in hand- to-hand combat. Cody’s persona is also predicated on the fact that he understands the ways of the Native American and that there is a grudging admiration between Cody and his Indian enemies. The duel is particularly important in the myth of Cody as a lone hero. In the French version the two combatants circle each other on horseback, like medieval knights, and essentially challenge each other to the duel. Cody finally announces, “Oeil 30 D. HUXLEY , Collection Hurrah, 1949 Buffalo Bill Duel,

Fig. 2.5 INVENTING AND SELLING “BUFFALO BILL” IN COMIC BOOKS, 1949–1957 31 de lynx! Un jour un Guerrier Cheyenne a pretend prendre mon scalp. Ou est il ce Guerrier?” (Sharp Eyes! Once a Cheyenne warrior said he would take my scalp. Where is that warrior? My translation). The two men then formally prepare by stripping to the waist, emphasizing both their masculinity and their closeness to nature. Cody kills his enemy purely with the strength of his hands, but in this version there is no scalping (Fig. 2.5). In the midst of a war Cody is able to emphasize his unique individual power, and he is still a lone hero, even in the midst of the general mayhem of the conflict. The British version also uses the form of the duel, although less elaborately. The Indian chief turns and addresses Cody, “I know you Pa-has-ka! Come and fight me!” So they engage in single combat, first on horseback, and then on foot. The calling of Cody by the Indian name Pa-has-ka (“Long Hair” in the Lakota language) also underlines the equal- ity between the combatants. In the end the duel gives the violence that ensues a veneer of chivalry and honor.

Notes 1. Although, for convenience, Cody’s Wild West is described as a “show” in some places in this text, that was not a term used by Cody himself. He believed his Wild West was a recreation of “the real thing”. Some of the vast amount of merchandise that was generated is shown in R. L. Wilson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: An American Legend, London: Greenhill Books, 1998. 2. Randolph Cox, The Dime Novel Companion: A Source Book (Westport: Greenwood Publishing, 2000), 43. After many adventures fighting more normal adversaries, Cody eventually also fights ghosts, skeletons, and giant spiders at some points. 3. Maurice Horn, Comics of the American West (South Hackensack: Stoeger, 1977), 50. 4. Michael A. Sheyahshe, Native Americans in Comic Books: A Critical Study (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2008), 9. 5. Martin Barker and Roger Sabin, The Lasting of the Mohicans (Jackson, University of Mississippi Press), X. 6. Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent was published in the UK in 1954 and its impact as part of a large anti-comic campaign there is explained in detail in Martin Barker’s A Haunt of Fears: The Strange History of the British Horror Comics Campaign (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1984). 32 D. HUXLEY

7. The text from word balloons can be difficult to transcribe. It is often over- heavy with exclamations, pauses, and bold emphasis. In the main an attempt has been made to follow the layout of any given text, but sometimes there has been a mild simplification to improve clarity. 8. William Katz, Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage (New York: Athenaeum, 1986), 1. 9. Pewewardy, Cornel. “From Subhuman to Superhuman: The Evolution of American Indian Images in Comic Books.” American Indian Stereotypes in the World of Children: A Reader and Bibliography. 2nd ed. Ed. Arlene Hirschfelder et al. (MD: Scarecrow Press, 1999), 198. 10. Cody’s book, The Life of Hon, William F Cody Known as Buffalo Bill, the Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide was originally published in 1879, but has been reprinted many times, including facsimile editions, such as William F Cody, The Life of Buffalo Bill (London: Senate, 1994). 11. Jane Tompkins, West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 186–7. 12. Tompkins, West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns, 193. 13. Tompkins, West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns, 195. 14. Tompkins, West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns, 201. 15. Quoted in Ray Merlock, “Preface”, Peter Rollins (ed) Hollywood’s West: The American Frontier in Film, Television, and History (University Press of Kentucky 2005), xi. 16. Jeremy Agnew, The Creation of the Cowboy Hero: Fiction, Film and Fact (Jefferson: McFarland and Company, 2015), 21. 17. Tompkins, West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns, 228–229. CHAPTER 3

Billy the Kid: The Outlaw as Lone Hero, 1952–1958

Abstract The trope of the lone hero is so entrenched by the 1950s that Billy the Kid regularly, and quite simply, is turned into a hero in three different versions—in the American Toby/Minoan series (1950–), Charlton comics (1957–), and the British comic The Sun (1952–). Although this is achieved in slightly different ways (e.g. he may be mistakenly believed to be an outlaw but is in reality a vigilante with his own code of honor), there is a remarkably similar trope where as a lone figure, partially outside society, he can right wrongs, often without any clear reward or approbation. Several key stories establish to what extent the reputation as an outlaw increases Bonney’s isolation and his relation to violence.

Keywords Billy the Kid • William Bonney • Toby comics • Charlton comics

Billy the Kid (USA, Toby/Minoan, 1950–1955) Billy the Kid is one of the most enduring figures of the American West. The extent of “William Bonney’s” wrongdoing, the number of people he killed, and many details of his life remain unknown (even his true name and place of birth are in doubt), but it is certain that he committed a number of murders and other crimes. Recent sources tend to give his original

© The Author(s) 2018 33 D. Huxley, Lone Heroes and the Myth of the American West in Comic Books, 1945–1962, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93085-5_3 34 D. HUXLEY name as Henry McCarty and his birth place as New York. Name changes from Antrim to Bonney may have followed, but it is not until his involve- ment in the “Lincoln County War” in the 1870s that there is at least some documentation on him. There are newspaper interviews and letters he sent to Governor Lew Wallace. He was certainly captured by Pat Garrett and imprisoned in Lincoln County jail in 1881, and then escaped, killing deputies Bob Olinger and James Bell. The detailed circumstances of this and his killing by Garrett later in the year are still ambiguous. What is certain is that the facts of Billy’s life could act as no more than a skeleton if he was to become a continuing character in 1950s comics.1 In the Toby/Minoan series, beginning in 1950, the title character is very much a “kid” at first. In the premiere issue he is drawn by Leon Wink and described by one character as, “a boy hardly outa his diapers”. After he is forced to kill several outlaws to save himself he decides no one will believe him, and on page 6 the comic declares, “And so Billy the Kid tasted the first bitter fruit of victory in this famous gun fight between the boy and the outlaws…soon after he was a hunted man…always dodging and hiding from the law…ever trying to regain his proper place in society as a law abiding citizen.” As we will see by the third story in the comic he has matured and acquired a sidekick, “Kansas”, and is already performing honorable deeds. The comic is inconsistent—his sidekick disappears and reappears for no apparent reason, at one point called “Tar”, but the Kid is mainly seen as a lone figure, righting wrongs wherever he finds them as he wanders the West. The series lasted for 29 issues and was drawn by a number of different artists. It is worth noting that these artists do subtly change the nature of the Kid. Jack Sparling, possibly the most accomplished of these artists, draws him as quite chunky, with an everyman quality, emphasized by his simple clothes—a plain green shirt and red bandana. Don Heck’s version is much lighter, perhaps more handsome, and makes the character much less ordinary (Figs. 3.1 and 3.2). If we take a Sparling story from late in the run, “The Water Poisoner” (#26, December 1954), it is possible to see the type of story the comic had established. The poisoner of the title is rancher Mort Stuart, and the story opens with the Kid shooting several of Stuart’s men near a waterhole they have been poison- ing. The Kid is intervening simply to right this wrong, and he has no compunction in killing the men—three of them at least (Fig. 3.3). Although produced at the end of 1954, the comic does not carry the comics code seal of approval, and as with the earlier parts of the run, the Kid shoots to kill—there is none of the “shooting guns out of hands” that BILLY THE KID: THE OUTLAW AS LONE HERO, 1952–1958 35

Fig. 3.1 Billy the Kid, Toby/Minoan by Jack Sparling

Fig. 3.2 Billy the Kid, Toby/Minoan by Don Heck

dominates postcode Westerns. Unusually the comic begins an internal narration by Stuart, as he tries to justify his actions in maintaining control of “his valley”. In an ironic ending Stuart is accidentally poisoned and a wounded Kid, in an almost superhuman feat, kills four more men. At the top of the final page of the story the text explains, “But even as he crum- ples, the Kid clears leather and Stuart’s gunhands began to fall like wheat under a whirring scythe!” In the next panel we see prone bodies and the text reads, “The brisk chatter of gun-fire slows down to a few wide-space 36 D. HUXLEY

Fig. 3.3 “The Water Poisoner”, Billy the Kid #26 Toby/Minoan, 1954 BILLY THE KID: THE OUTLAW AS LONE HERO, 1952–1958 37 shots…and then there is utter silence! A thick cloud sailing softly in front of the moon casts a shrouding shadow on the valley below…where all the gun-fighters lie motionless now.” The writer has obviously taken some care with this passage, but it is difficult to know who wrote many of the stories in 1950s comics—some comics scholars have identified a few in this series—artists are much easier to identify, even if the work is not signed, as many of their styles are very distinctive. In the final story of the first issue a sidekick, “Kansas”, appears. He is an old man with white hair and mustache, but he really has no impact on the status of the Kid as a lone hero. When the Kid has to go and try to retrieve a document for a supposed old friend (though this turns out to be a trap) he goes alone, and “Kansas” does not feature in the story after the introductory sequence. By the next issue Kansas has disappeared altogether, with no explanation. Another story that explains the Kids’ reasons for leaving society appears in Return of the Outlaw, a Minoan title that reprints many of the earlier Billy the Kid stories. “Two Gun Promise” (#1, February 1953, reprinting Youthful’s Buffalo Bill #1, 1950) starts with the opening splash panel where through bat-wing door, from a low angle we see the Kid, guns in hand, and three figures in the saloon beyond, all falling to the ground. Someone in the saloon shouts, “Put your guns down, Billy! You’re too nice a kid to turn outlaw!” It transpires that the “the notorious Bart Barton” is cheating ranchers out of their farms, and Billy the Kid returns to his mother’s farm. This is interesting in relation to the Kid’s place in society, as at this point he is welcomed by his mother and brother. Barton is an old army buddy of the Kid, and Bonney takes a job with him until he discovers Barton’s underhand methods. Despite a court case, Barton is then able to cheat Mrs. Bonney out of her farm. We then have a version of the splash scene from the start of the story, although nobody is shot, and instead the Kid takes all Barton’s forged papers. The Kid is declared an outlaw, but decides he must right the recent wrongs. His mother pleads with the Kid not to take on Barton and his gunmen, but he replies, “I’ve got to take this chance, Ma! It’s not just our home I’m fighting for…it’s the neighbors! All the poor folks who’ve worked hard…and are now being robbed by Barton!” In town the Kid is shot by one of the gunmen, but they run and the Kid kills Barton. When he recovers, his family and friends say they will defend him, but he says, “No. I won’t let you folks get into this fight! You all have families to look after…children! If you take up guns…you’ll only be declared outlaws! I’ll have to go… alone!” Ironically this is very close to Will Wright’s interpretation of the 38 D. HUXLEY end of the filmShane . Despite his violence, the town wants him to stay, but in the final text panel it states, “Alone, Billy the Kid rode away into the setting sun.” Many of this series were reprinted in the UK in both comic book and “annual” form, with the stories in some comics appearing to be extended with the use of less competent British artists. More strangely the 1953 Billy the Kid Annual (World Distributors, Manchester) has a black dressed unshaven Kid killing someone on the cover. The endpapers then give a potted (and exaggerated) version of the Kids’ career. In a series of vignettes, all showing him in black clothes, he is shown gambling, shooting his gun, being imprisoned, and being killed by Pat Garrett. Some of the small text panels are somewhat suspect. They claim, “To rescue a friend Billy rode 80 miles; The Kid’s colt accounted for many a redskin; Billy was the law in the Lincoln Co. cattle war and His 21st victim was Bob Olinger.” So before the annual itself is fully opened, the reader is informed not only that Billy was a killer, but also that he was killed in 1880 (although he was actually killed in 1881). The opening 15-page text story is another reasonably accurate account of his life, again illustrated with his black clothed persona. There are then five comic book stories where the Toby comics version, complete with green shirt, performs selfless acts, including, in one story, an attempt to save a little girl’s tortoise. What young readers were to make of these two juxtaposed “Billy the Kids”, one killer, one essentially a lone hero, is not clear.

Billy the Kid (USA, Charlton 1957–1983) When the Kid reappears in American comics in 1957 it is under the aegis of Charlton comics, often perceived as one of the poorest of American comic book companies. Paying the lowest rates to its creators, and often slapdash in its printing, the company nevertheless produced some interesting titles. In some of the earlier issues (it lasted until 1983, latterly with reprints) Charlton’s Billy the Kid does have the benefit of veteran artist John Severin, an expert in war and Western titles who had worked for EC comics in the earlier 1950s (Fig. 3.4). This series also locates the Kid in his actual habitat of the New Mexico border, and one story, for example, begins. “It was one of the battles that led to the bloody Lincoln County war.” This version of the Kid has a distinctive costume with blue trousers and an orange waistcoat which has large white circles or round ties—these are drawn differently by various artists. He has bright blond hair, but other BILLY THE KID: THE OUTLAW AS LONE HERO, 1952–1958 39

Fig. 3.4 Billy the Kid #24, Charlton, 1960 40 D. HUXLEY items, his hat, his bandana, and shirt sometimes change color, and he is nearly always left-handed.2 Continuity lapses aside, the overall effect is to create the image of a clean cut hero, and the comic’s narratives underline the heroic nature of the character. Unusually for a continuing character at this time the Kid is very much a drifter, and many of his adventures start when he rides into a new town or happen upon people in trouble. Although he is shown at times to have both Mexican and Native American friends, essentially he is a wanderer who exists outside mainstream society. In this he could be seen to fit into Cawelti’s idea of the man of violence who, for all his good intentions, is excluded from society because of that very violence. One difference between the film hero and the Kid as comic book hero is the level of the violence. The Kid, postcode, generally shoots the guns from the bad guys’ hands or defeats them without guns. There is some ambiguity here, as, at times, he may be forced to kill his enemies. In “The Last Fandango” (#149, August 1982, reprinting material from 1972) the Kid is escaping from a rich Mexican family he has offended, and on the final page of the story he leaps from his horse as he shoots two gunmen. They are shown in silhouette and are seen falling to the ground. We see a gun falling from one man, but there is a convention that when the ‘shooting the gun from the hand motif’ is used the artist shows a small ‘explosion’ as the gun is hit by a bullet. There is no such image here, and the implication is that the Kid has killed them both. In “Massacre Plan” (#59, January 1967) when attacked by two Apaches, one appears to be killed in a fall and the Kid then shoots the other, exclaiming “Too slow, Injun”. The Apache’s rifle remains in his hand, he is falling and disappears from the story, so we must assume the Kid has killed him. It appears that the comic, particularly in the later 1960s, was trying to push the boundaries of the Comics Code, as were other publishers, which led to some relax- ation of the code’s restrictions in 1971.3 Unlike Buffalo Bill and many other Western characters the Kid is not defined by his relationship to Native Americans. As we will see, there are occasional violent encounters, but these by no means a constant in his dealings with Native Americans, who in these stories are mainly Chiricahua Apaches, another accurate detail of the setting in the American Southwest. In #128 (April 1979, reprinting material from 1960) the story “Geronimo’s Revenge” opens with the explanation, “There were three Apache braves… and they meant to kill their prisoner! Billy the Kid usually got along with Geronimo’s men but this time he didn’t have time to make peace-talk…he had to shoot fast and keep moving or go down like an oversized BILLY THE KID: THE OUTLAW AS LONE HERO, 1952–1958 41

pin-cushion.” It transpires that the man the Kid has rescued is Carter Dawes, whose attempt to sell guns to the Apache has gone wrong, presumably through some double-dealing on his part, although he blames the Apaches. The Kid fights with Dawes but is then caught by the Apache. There is some moral confusion at the center of this story as Geronimo now says to the Kid, “Young Yellow-hair warrior, you have fought Apaches before but for an honorable cause! This time you deserve no mercy and you will get none! You run with coyotes!” When the Kid explains that he does not like Dawes, Geronimo announces that “Then your enemy is our enemy.” With the help of the Apaches the Kid captures the gang, shooting a gun from Dawes’ hand (with the requisite small explosion near the hand). In the next frame Geronimo says “You see, young Yellowhair? As allies we will always win! Come to Geronimo’s camp…become one of us!” The Kid does not accept this invitation, but they decide there is no point in fighting and the gang is handed over to him. In the final frame the Kid explains to an army officer that the Apache turned the gang over to him “’Cause they don’t want to scare other gun-runners away which they’d do if they killed this bunch!” So there is grudging respect between Geronimo and the Kid, but the fact remains that the Apache may yet obtain guns and start a war against the white man. Ironically the only society that is trying to welcome him is that of his enemy, the Apache. The ambivalent attitude of Charlton comics to Native Americans is also evident in another of their titles, The Cheyenne Kid. The titular character is a white man who has been brought up by The Cheyenne. He wanders the West righting wrongs much as their Billy the Kid character does. One difference is that due to his upbringing he is even more accepted by the Native Americans he meets. In the story “The Indian Fighters” (#24, September 1960) the Cheyenne Kid comes across a Blackfoot brave who has been wounded by some rogue mountain men. Giving the brave some water the Kid says, “Here, brother, drink this! Did you see the hombre who did this?” and the Indian replies, “You are the white Cheyenne…and truly a brother! No…I did not see the man!” The coloring in this panel shows the Kid as ‘white’ (with pale red dots for his skin) and the Indian as ‘red’ (with thin red lines making his skin darker). The Cheyenne Kid eventually captures the mountain men, but to do so he has to impersonate an Indian warrior, and when he does so his skin suddenly also becomes “red”. It is not clear if he has darkened his skin—if so this has happened “out of shot”, but with no clear explanation the comic seems to suggest that by donning Indian garb the Kid has actually become more red. Whatever the confusion in some 42 D. HUXLEY

Charlton comic stories that deal with Indian figures, overall there is a clear attempt to include sympathetic portrayals of some Native Americans, and their stories are, in this way, a definite improvement on some of the earlier comics of the 1950s. The Billy the Kid comics also give a rounded portrayal of Mexican characters in the scenes where the Kid comes closest to be accepted by society. Although by no means as common as the Native American as the villain in Western films, the Mexican bandit is often portrayed as evil in an overtly racist way in many films and other Western stories. Here there are villains, but also friends and allies in the Mexican community who help and protect the Kid. It is Mexican aristocrats who tend to be more villainous and it is the poor peasants who befriend the Kid, often referring to him by the nickname “Chivito”. But the Mexicans who do befriend the Kid are out- casts from mainstream society and there is no suggestion that the Kid will settle down with them. The Kid’s use of some Spanish words and some dialogue by both him and his Mexican friends might be considered to be “Spanglish”, but this does not need to be seen in a derogatory light. Carla Breidenbach, looking at the work of Spanish cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz, argues that, “This mixture of English and Spanish has often been referred to by the derogatory terms ‘pocho’ or ‘Spanglish’ (Fought 2003; Lipski 2008). In Alcaraz’s view, however, ‘pocho’ and ‘Spanglish’ are terms to be celebrated and reclaimed, reminders of a heritage of which Chicanos should be proud, not ashamed.”4 In the end, one of the strongest parts of the Charlton series is the sympathetic portrayal of Mexican characters. This version of the Kid is also unusual in that there are sometimes hints of romance, particularly with senoritas he meets on the Mexico borders. In “The Ranchero’s Daughter” (#59, January 1967) the Kid offends the locals by dancing with a nobleman’s fiancé. As the locals shout “The Gringo must die!”, the Kid holds the girl and says, “Por Favor, Senorita…a kiss before I flee for my life?” The Kid proves the nobleman to be a cow- ard, but the lovely senorita never appears again in the story. This and other stories emphasize the Kid’s attractiveness, but there is no suggestion that he will become involved with a woman on any serious level. This version of Billy the Kid is closest to the image of the tragic hero. Whatever happens, he will remain essentially a loner. Partially because of this, the Kid, and many other Western heroes tend not to have a continuing villain in their stories. This can be seen as a weak- ness compared to the genre that in many ways superseded them—the superhero comic. As well as many more minor enemies all superheroes BILLY THE KID: THE OUTLAW AS LONE HERO, 1952–1958 43 have at least one major nemesis. Superman has Lex Luthor, The Fantastic Four has Dr. Doom, Green Lantern has Sinestro, Spiderman has the Green Goblin, and Batman has…well, the list is almost endless. The villain can be almost as important as the hero, and the lack of an implacable enemy may have hindered some of these titles. The earlier Buffalo Bill comics can be seen as having the whole Indian nation as his continuing enemy, but this is different to facing an identifiable and recurring personi- fication of evil. Occasionally, in Charlton’s Billy the Kid, there is something closer to a spectacular villain. In “The Tormentor” (#57 September 1966) the cover of the issue features a vast ghostly figure behind the Kid. We only see his face and hands as he exclaims, “Hear me, Bill Bonney! You must do as I say! You must cut down all who stand in my way! You can do nothing but obey me!” In front of him, a dazed Billy responds, “I hear…and obey! I do as you command!” The villain of the story turns out to be “The Earl of Boothill”, an English entertainer who uses a gun hidden in his cane to shoot the gun from the Kid’s hand. Recovering his gun, the Kid shoots the cane in half and knocks the Earl into a water trough. We then see the Earl, wearing a magician’s hat, hypnotizing three gunmen. The Kid’s Southwestern roots are again emphasized as he is heading for a meal of, “Chile con carne with enchiladas and tacas (sic) with plenty of red pep- per.” The Kid is captured and he pretends to be hypnotized by the Earl, and fakes two murders and the robbery of an express office and a bank. The Kid has to undergo other humiliations before he can turn on the Earl, but when this happens the villain just disappears in cloud of smoke. Tracking down the Earl and his men, the Kid captures them all. The promise of the cover and its eerie portrayal of the villain are not really delivered, and despite the Earl’s evident intelligence and his stage skills, he is outwitted by the Kid quite easily (although it does take 20 pages). The villains desire to humiliate the Kid makes him a particularly reprehensible villain, but as visualized by, in different sections, artists Rocke Mastroserio and Jose Delbo, the Earl is not a striking figure. In a purple suit, top hat, and monocle he is a plausible dandy, but hardly threatening. There are no close-ups that might have dwelt on his evil features, and, overall, it is an opportunity missed. There is an advertisement in the issue for Go-Go comic (“Join the In-Crowd, we’re so in we’re out”) that features images of Ringo Starr and David McCallum and the character “Bikini Luv”. Sitting alongside an image of a horror title, Ghostly Haunts, and in the midst of a comparatively 44 D. HUXLEY lackluster Billy the Kid story, there is a strong sense that Charlton are looking for new areas to explore. Go-Go comic does not give the sense that it really understands its potential audience, even if it is partially parody (and it only lasted nine issues), but its horror titles were more successful and are part of the rise of rival genres that would replace the Western comic in readers’ affections. Many of the Charlton Billy the Kid stories were written by prolific comic book writer Joe Gill, who was vastly experienced and who worked for the company for over 30 years. But with the Kid’s continual wandering it is perhaps not surprising that some of the stories become a little bland and repetitive, or rather desperate in the attempt to produce something different. For example, in #31 (November, 1961) the cover shows the Kid, in a cave, menaced by a vast dinosaur figure. In the story “The Monster of the Mountain” he is captured by “the weird warriors of black valley”, who it transpires have brought him to be sacrificed to a terrifying giant gila monster that terrorizes their village. There are overtones of medieval legend here, and the monster is even described as a “dragon” at one point. It is also shown as being vast in size—assuming the Kid is at least 6 feet, then the monster is 20 feet in length or more. Of course he is able to defeat it—using cowboy skills to subdue it with a lasso.

Billy the Kid (UK, The Sun, Amalgamated Press, 1952–1959) The most extreme makeover of the Kid came with the British version in the 1950s. This version ran from 1952 to 1959 in the Sun comic and appeared in two annuals. The image of the Kid in the comics is clearly based on the 1941 filmBilly the Kid, starring Robert Taylor, often with detailed images based on his face, and sometimes with small introductory photographs of the star in character. This connection is made even more explicit in the annuals, which feature painted images of Taylor on their covers and photographs of him on the endpapers. There are even written stories using photographs from the film, but bent to the heroic version created in the strips. This is quite different to the film, which posits him as a brave outlaw, who must die at the end. The stills from the film are taken out of context and captioned to make them fit in with the annual’s text, and in some a mask is even painted onto Taylor to make him resemble the drawn character more closely. The 1958 annual begins with a comic strip BILLY THE KID: THE OUTLAW AS LONE HERO, 1952–1958 45 origin story which makes it clear that, despite the physical similarity, this is to be a very different character. The story opens with an account of the West after the civil war and the emergence of gunfighters like John Wesley Hardin. It then locates Bonney as being born in New York of Irish stock, and then changing his name to Antrim on the remarriage of his mother to an unpleasant stepfather. The young Antrim then sees a man who defended his mother and is about to be shot in the back. In attacking the villain the Kid kills him when the would-be assassin’s gun goes off accidentally. A mob chases the Kid out of town, and on the run he turns himself into a “lone avenger”, and adopts the black clothes and leather jacket of the film version. He also rides an all-black horse, Satan, completing his dark image, despite the fact that, “Billy fought only on the side of right.” Trying to avoid gunfighters who want to kill him he finds a desolate valley where Satan can be secreted, and reinvents himself as “happy-go-lucky” rancher Will Bonney. But the story ends with the warning that events “would force him once again to don the black clothes and gleaming guns of Billy the Kid, to remount Satan and gallop forth on the trail of justice”. So this Billy the Kid has become a cross between a superhero with a secret identity and the Lone Ranger. When he returns as Billy the Kid he wears a mask and even has his own catchphrase, ‘Yip-Yip-Yip! Hi-Yo!’ The 1958 Annual story is a rewritten version of an earlier origin story. This first origin story appears in the firstSun issue to feature the Kid (#184, 16th August 1952) and also a stablemate publication, the Kit Carson Annual of 1955. This is a rather more violent take on the story, with, on the first page, Bonney’s mother being trampled to death by a rampaging cowboy. There is no evil stepfather in this version, but when the Kid tries to take the cowboy to justice, he is forced to gun him down. This time he runs away from a crooked sheriff, and then the story of his reinvention of himself as Will Bonney, rancher, is very similar. The difference in the two stories may partially be explained by an increasing wariness by the publishers about the visualization of violence between 1955 and 1958, as the furore around comics censorship rolled on. The earlier story is not explicitly violent, but in the hands of experienced British artist Jeff Campion, who was the main artist on many of these Billy the Kid comics, it is very effective. In the two key frames we see the cowboy from the back, knocking his chair and glass away as he reaches for his guns. We then see the Kid firing his two guns, and in the foreground two guns fall from hands that are twisted in pain (Fig. 3.5). Even this suggestion of violence may have seemed too strong by 1958. Both versions show the Kid’s later use of violence as justified, 46 D. HUXLEY

Fig. 3.5 “Billy the Kid”, Sun, 1952 and he shoots the guns from outlaws hands rather than killing them. Both establish the Kid as very much a lone hero, and to emphasize this, he is even called “the lone avenger”. All the ambiguity of the 1941 film has disappeared from the comic, but the dramatic black clad figure remains. At this point the stories, which were written by Michael Butterworth, allow the Kid to enter society but only as his alter-ego, Will Bonney. “Happy go lucky” Will Bonney is presented as local rancher, in a checked shirt and white hat, a valued member of the local community. In this way the stories avoid the problem of the place of the man of violence in society. If the Kid were to remain in his outlaw persona he could find no rest, as he says when he hangs up his guns, “I’m sick of this life, it’s just gunplay and hard riding.” As Will Bonney he owns the Circle B Ranch and is very BILLY THE KID: THE OUTLAW AS LONE HERO, 1952–1958 47 much part of society, and as if to emphasize his status as a man of peace he does not even carry a gun. The Sun, as with many British comics of the period, features color on its front and back covers (and some center pages) with black and white artwork for the rest of the interior. Indeed the Sun comic and its stablemate the Comet only used a three-color process whereby blue is combined with one or both of the other colors (red and yellow) to create black tones. This gives the comics a distinctive and often very colorful appearance. Despite the fact that the character should clearly be in an all-black costume, it also leads to him strangely being portrayed in all red on many of these covers. Later stories in the comics abandon the device of the Kid’s secret identity, and Billy the Kid, without his mask, rather unconvincingly becomes the “unofficial deputy” to Wild Bill Hickok in Abilene. Otherwise his garb remains the same, and readers are presented with a rather uneasy hybrid figure, neither true outlaw nor official lawman. The overtones of the Lone Ranger are still there at some points. In #396 (September 8, 1956) the Kid rides into Dodge City to confront evil outlaw Zeke Allison and his gang who are holding the town to ransom. After much shooting guns from hands the Kid captures all the outlaws. As he leaves a barman shouts, “Hey Mister! Ain’t you forgetting something? You ain’t even told us who we gotta thank for cleanin’ up Zeke Allison and his gang. What’s your name, Mister? Cos it’s goin’ to be long-remembered in Dodge City!” There is then a final frame with the Kid, here drawn as rather more muscular by a European A.L.I. studio artist.5 Against an almost blank background the Kid is staring out of the frame, almost at the reader. In huge lettering, presumably indicating a sonorous tone, he declares, “I am Billy the Kid.” The citizens asking for his name is almost a direct lift from the ending of numerous Lone Ranger adventures, which were being shown on British television at this point in time. This version of the Kid also retains his strange catchphrase “Yip! Yip! Yip! Hi-Yo!” which he shouts during a fist fight with the outlaws. The Lone Ranger’s “Hi-Yo Silver!” is rather more logical, in that he shouts this as an encouragement to his horse as they ride into their adventures. Yet the prominent featuring of his name is perhaps part of the phenomenon of the power of the hero’s name and his reputation. The Kid, particularly in the Charlton and British versions, is the classic Western hero who is, to some extent, cursed by his name and reputation. It is a recurring trope in Westerns of all kinds that the outstanding gunman is doomed to be hounded by younger gunfighters who want to kill him and thereby secure their own reputation as “the 48 D. HUXLEY fastest gun”. Richard Slotkin identifies this trope, and although it has a long history, he sees its apotheosis in Andre De Toth’s The Gunfighter of 1950. The idea for the film came from Eugene Cunningham’s 1934 book, Triggernometry. Slotkin comments, “Cunningham’s book suggested that gunfighting was a profession like modern prize-fighting, a technical game or ‘gentle art’ with distinct rules; if followed that one could gain a reputation by defeating a higher-ranked opponent. To be a champion was therefore to become the mark of perpetual challenges, not only from fellow professionals but from the random and spiteful aggression of ambitious amateurs.”6 Ironically it is the Sun version of Billy the Kid that fits this pattern most closely. It is only by adopting his alter-ego, William Bonney, innocent rancher, that he avoids this fate. Even then, would-be gunfighters arrive in the town of Gunsight and he has to revert to his persona as Billy the Kid to defeat them by fist fight or humiliation. In one example, “The Hard Case” (#384, June 16, 1956) the gunfighter even turns out to be Annie Oakley, though when the Kid knocks her down the luxurious locks that are revealed make it odd that she could ever have passed as a man. Eventually they join forces to repel an Indian attack, and after they have revealed their true identities to each other, Wild Bill Hickok says she could always be his second unofficial deputy. These changes did little to extend the plausibility of the character, but the series continued in the Sun until the title folded in 1959.

Notes 1. There have been numerous books on Billy the Kid, and new research is always taking place, but a good source is Michael Wallis, Billy the Kid: The Endless Ride (New York: Norton & Company, 2007). 2. I have found one cover (#149, August 1982) where the Kid is shown as right-handed, which appears to be just an accidental reversal of an earlier cover (issue 96) where the Kid is correctly (in terms of the comic’s continuity) left-handed. Famously the real Bonney was right-handed, and mistakenly perceived as left-handed because of a reversed photograph. 3. The origins and development of the Comic Code are explained in detail in Amy Kiste Nyberg, Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998). 4. Carla Breidenbach, “Pocho Politics: Language, Identity, and Discourse in Lalo Alcaraz’s La Cucaracha”, Frank Bramlett, editor, Linguistics and the Study of Comics (Palgrave Macmillan) 2012, 211. BILLY THE KID: THE OUTLAW AS LONE HERO, 1952–1958 49

5. British comics expert Peter Hansen drew my attention to the work of many European artists working for Fleetway. The Spanish brothers, Alejandro, Adriano, and Jesus Blasco all drew this Billy the Kid strip at various points. In The Sun Collector’s Guide (Rotherham: C J Publications, 2003) Steve Holland and David Ashford identify this artist as Jesus Blasco. 6. Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America (New York, Harper Collins, 1993), 385. CHAPTER 4

Roping n’ Riding: Selling Western Stars, 1946–1962

Abstract The Hollywood studios of the 1950s and 1960s, in both film and television, used intense intertextual marketing. This applied not only to the major stars such as Roy Rogers and Gene Autry—even “sidekicks”, like Gabby Hayes, could feature in their own comics. Several key figures such as Dale Evans, Gene Autry, Lash LaRue, and the Lone Ranger dem- onstrate that there are different ways to be a Western hero. Television- based comics continue this trend with perhaps a more enlightened attitude toward Native Americans. The way in which the sidekick is woven into the narrative and how it affects the status of the hero is examined in several different cases. Dell’s Annie Oakley comic also demonstrates that the Western comic provided a space for a woman to be just as heroic as a man.

Keywords Western films • Dale Evans • Gene Autry • Annie Oakley • Dell comics • Lone Ranger • Lash LaRue

American Western Comics The genre of the superhero comic continues to dominate both the popular and academic debate on comics. Yet at different periods horror, com- edy and Western comics have been more numerous and equally successful. Nevertheless, in 1977 Maurice Horn was able to write, “Yet, despite the

© The Author(s) 2018 51 D. Huxley, Lone Heroes and the Myth of the American West in Comic Books, 1945–1962, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93085-5_4 52 D. HUXLEY growing acceptance of both the American West and American comic art as basic reflections of the American social and psychological fabric, no book on Western comics has ever appeared in print…this study, the first ever attempted on this vast and fascinating subject, will endeavour to bridge this regrettable gap.”1 Horn’s book, Comics of the American West, is a comprehensive history, and although it concentrates on American publications, one of the five chapters is dedicated to “Westerns around the World”. Compared to the amount of writing about superheroes, it can be argued that the situation is now still not markedly better. Bart Beaty and Benjamin Woo have argued for further academic engagement with the “typical” American comic book output, stating that, “This requires an entirely different approach to comics scholarship, for valuing the typical output of the American comic book industry, rather than its most unusual and unlikely products, represents not only a methodological but a funda- mental conceptual break with the traditions of humanities research.”2 The thousands of Western comic books are potentially a prime field of research for this project. This is not to say that exceptional and unusual comics should not be studied as well, but to ignore Western, romance, and humor comics is to obscure the true history of the comic book.

Western Film Tie-in Comics The Hollywood studios of the 1950s and 1960s, in both film and television, used intense intertextual marketing in order to maximize the impact (and revenue) of their Western stars. As well as all the magazine and newspaper publicity, it was possible for young fans to buy miniature versions of the stars’ outfits, toy figures, toy guns, lunch boxes, lamps, records, and much more. In order to appeal to their younger fans there was, as well as this wide range of artifacts, a vast number of comic books devoted to individual stars. No matter how simplistic some (though not all) of these comics were, their nostalgic power does not disappear. Ray Merlock, Professor of Communications at the University of South Carolina, introducing a book on Western films, comments that Westerns mean different things, “To some, it conjures a sense of nostalgia, memories of Saturday after- noons at the downtown picture show,…and cheer Gene, Roy, Hoppy, Durango, or any number of hard-riding heroes. For others, the Western brings to mind Sunday nights with the family, watching Bonanza (NBC, 1959–1973) on a new color TV.”3 This might equally be applied to the many comics featuring these stars, with bold color photographs of each ROPING N’ RIDING: SELLING WESTERN STARS, 1946–1962 53 star on their covers, which could be read and reread and passed from one fan to another. In the 1950s there were at least 20 major titles that starred Western film characters:Dale Evans Comics (DC, 1948–1952), Durango Kid (Magazine Enterprises, 1949–1955), Gabby Hayes Western (Fawcett/ Charlton, 1948–1957), Gene Autry (Dell, 1946–1955), Hopalong Cassidy (Fawcett/DC, 1946–1959), Jimmy Wakely (DC, 1949–1952), John Wayne Adventure Comics (Toby Press, 1949–1955), Lash LaRue Western (Fawcett/Charlton, 1949–1961), Monte Hale Western (Fawcett/ Charlton, 1948–1956), Rex Allen (Dell, 1951–1959), Rocky Lane Western (Fawcett/Charlton, 1949–1959), Rod Cameron Western (Fawcett, 1950–1953), Roy Rogers Comics (Dell, 1948–1961), Six-Gun Heroes (Fawcett/Charlton, 1950–1965), Tex Ritter Western (Fawcett/Charlton, 1950–1959), The Lone Ranger’s Companion Tonto (Dell, 1951–1958), Tim Holt (Magazine Enterprises, 1948–1954), Tom Mix Western (Fawcett, 1948–1953), Western Hero (Fawcett, 1948–1952), and Wild Bill Elliott (Dell, 1950–1955). A strange anomaly is the title Bob Colt (Fawcett/DC). With color photo covers it appears to the world as if it is another film tie-in comic. But in fact the “actor” on the cover is a male model, Steve Holland, who had not appeared in any Western films at all. Whether young per- plexed fans searched in vain for these nonexistent films is not clear. Another bizarre title is John Wayne Adventure Comics. Obviously Wayne was a major Western star, having appeared in many “poverty row” Westerns before his breakthrough in John Ford’s 1939 Western, Stagecoach. The comics have the banner headline, “The Greatest Cowboy Star of them All!” But in the comics Wayne and his sidekick Bonanza appear to simply travel the old West as if Wayne had actually lived in the late nineteenth century as a Western hero. It gradually becomes evident that this is meant to be the present day, and in #12 he even volunteers to fight in Korea, only to return to this ahistorical West in the next story. These anomalies are never really resolved—Wayne is billed as a cowboy star, yet solves crimes in some kind of fantasy West, but occasionally enters modern civilization, and several covers actually feature photographs of Wayne’s war films. It is also evident that in some cases the comics are being produced well after the heyday of the individual star. Lash LaRue, although he still played other roles on television in the late 1950s and 1960s, had stopped appearing as “LaRue” in the early 1950s. In the most extreme case the comics are posthumous; Tom Mix, for example, died in 1940, and all the Fawcett comics featuring him were published much later. Thus these comics were keeping the stars image alive in a way that films could not. It is true that 54 D. HUXLEY older films were available on TV—Hollywood feature films had begun to appear on US television from 1956 onwards. Screening of older films on US television might occasionally allow fans to see a fading star, but regular, monthly, or bi-monthly comics in full color could make them seem still contemporary and extend the “shelf life” of a star. Not only that, but the vast majority of the Western fans would only have seen their heroes in black and white, particularly in the cheaper serials made by companies like Republic. The nature of any comic book is such that it can be read and reread, so that fans can revisit a favorite story of their favorite character.

Dale Evans A particularly striking element of the list of comics is that it contains only one female star, Dale Evans. There is also a very short-lived minor series, Reno Browne, Hollywood’s Greatest Cowgirl published by Timely, which only ran for three issues in 1950. The Dale Evans series ran for 20 issues, starting in 1954 (these were preceded by DC comics version, which had less connection to the star character). The 1954 version features photo covers of Dale, but even then, although the comics clearly locate her as the star, and she acts independently, she is still in some senses “Mrs Roy Rogers” and billed as “Queen of the West”, whereas Rogers is “King of the Cowboys”. Despite this connection the series allows her to operate largely under her own volition, with help from a small number of friends. A typical story from Queen of the West Dale Evans #8 (July–September 1955) is “The Treasure of Butterfly Rock”. Just as with Roy Rogers’ comics these stories are set in the present day. Yet despite the use of modern vehicles at times, the plots tend to deal with problems that could easily have happened a hundred years earlier—rustlers, outlaws, or crooked businessmen are the kind of figures that need to be brought to justice. Because of the modern setting the one enemy that is largely absent is the Native American. In this story Dale, while out riding on her horse, “Buttermilk”, meets a professor and his daughter Ruth, who are investigating a local landmark, butterfly rock. On returning to town she finds that a posse is out trying to catch outlaws who have robbed a bus (rather than a stagecoach) of a payroll. Later, now in her jeep, named Nellybelle, with a friend, Pat, she warns the professor about the outlaws, unaware that they are already holding his daughter hostage. A smuggled message alerts Dale, but she is unable to rescue them at first. Later she discovers them in the caves of butterfly rock, and with the help of Ruth she overpowers one of them, but ROPING N’ RIDING: SELLING WESTERN STARS, 1946–1962 55

Fig. 4.1 “The Treasure of Butterfly Rock”, Dale Evans #8, 1955 the other outlaw captures them both and traps them in one of the caves (Fig. 4.1). There they find not only the outlaws’ loot, but also a treasure hidden by the local mission in the last century. Dale then writes a message in lipstick on a rock and throws it to where the posse finds it, and the outlaws are captured. The photo cover of the comic shows Dale holding a gun on an outlaw, and although she brandishes her gun in the story, there is no need for her to use it. Instead she outwits the outlaws, and it is even the use of lipstick that allows her to facilitate the rescue. Other photographs at the back of the comic show her in flamboyant Western cowgirl outfits, and the drawn version has a simplified costume, with culottes 56 D. HUXLEY allowing her to take part in the action. Although she retains this kind of traditional femininity and is clearly highly competent, she does not need to resort to outright violence to achieve her (honorable) aims.

Gene Autry The majority of the heroes in these comics are not involved in scouting for the army like Buffalo Bill, nor are they outcast in the sense that Billy the Kid was. Some are clear authority figures—Roy Rogers is a deputy in Panghorn, Tex Ritter is a “prairie ranger”, and Rocky Lane is a “secret marshal”. Others like Gene Autry and Tom Mix are ranchers—they are called onto action when a threat of some sort arises, but they do so as established members of the white society that is taming the West. With so many different male characters and titles, it is difficult to pick a small number of key, typical stories. Although Roy Rogers is the most famous of the screen cowboys, he is in some ways atypical. As with Dale Evans his adventures in comics are set in the present day, even if sometimes, as he rides his horse in the desert, he seems to be in a timeless West. When jeeps, planes, and other pieces of technology appear though, it challenges his status as a man alone with just his gun and his wits to depend on. Of course the revolver itself is part of the technological advances of the nineteenth century, but the Colt (and the many other makes of revolver) is still comparatively simple mechanical device, and this is nothing like the range of technology available in the Roy Rogers’ comics. Both Rogers and Gene Autry are “singing cowboys”, but this is essentially a feature of their films, and of course their record careers, not their comics. Although most of Autry’s films, and a few comic strip adaptations are, like Roy Rogers, set in the present day, his comics are not. So Gene Autry, as perhaps the second most famous of these cowboys, is closer to the archetypal figure at this period. As we shall see he was also instrumental in codifying the image of this kind of hero, and his production company was responsible for a number of Western film and television series. Autry also appeared in comics before Rogers, and his Dell series of comics was long-lived, running from 1946 to 1959. During this period Autry’s image changes somewhat, as his outfits become more flamboyant, with brighter colors and detailed embroidery. This image is similar to Roy Rogers, and also relates to Country and Western music, where both figures were major stars. In “Gene Autry and the Plot that Failed” (reprinted in Gene Autry and Champion the Wonder Horse #30, World Distributors, 1956) Autry discov- ROPING N’ RIDING: SELLING WESTERN STARS, 1946–1962 57 ers that a potentially stolen cow has actually been borrowed by Jim and Clara Eardley, a couple with an ill child. Both Jim Eardley and Autry are captured by two villains who are intent on robbing an army wagon of weapons. Champion gnaws through Autry’s bonds and he is able to thwart the robbery. The only violent act Autry commits in the story comes right at the end, when, to prevent one of the villains escaping, he shoots him in the shoulder. Autry is one of the more benign Western heroes, and a sidekick can soften his image even further. In the story “The Secret of Skeleton Mountain” (#16, June 1948, Dell) Autry, out riding the range as usual, finds a small girl, crying, and returns her to her home. Autry then finds out that her father, Adam Mills, has discovered a lead ore mine, but he finds Mills in jail on a murder charge. The chief suspect is Rod Dixon, who may have assayed the ore. Dixon is an archetypal Western evil business figure, with suit, tie, slicked back hair, and a pencil mustache. Autry acquires a sidekick, Flapjack, another archetypal figure, the grizzled, white-bearded prospector. Dixon’s accomplice, Herb, has framed Mills for murder but Flapjack prevents him from killing Autry. Autry asks Flapjack to help him further and they try to track down Herb. It transpires that the two villains have turned on each other, and Autry and Flapjack simply have to collect them with no need for overt violence. The story even ends with a comedic interlude when Flapjack has to run away to avoid a thank-you hug from the young girl. Concerning Autry’s status as a hero, Jon Tuska even goes so far as to say, “Prior to Autry’s arrival on the screen, Western heroes were customarily portrayed as strong, capable, occasionally austere men, believable frontier types who might actually have undertaken many of the heroic exploits attributed to them by the scenarios. In Autry’s case this was not so because, physically and dramatically, it could not be so.”4 However, although Autry was not either the most handsome or slimmest of Western stars, his comic book self, as drawn by Jesse March, was rather more streamlined and certainly appeared to be capable of “heroic exploits”. At the same time both the photographic covers and often back covers and inside front and back pages often contained full-page photographs of Autry. The comics are therefore left with clear reminders of Autry’s film stardom, but his drawn self is an idealized version. To give a clearer balance of the material available at this time it is necessary to look at some different heroes. If Autry is an example of the rancher as hero, Lash LaRue can provide an example of a representative of the law, and the Lone Ranger provides an example of a rather more ambiguous figure. 58 D. HUXLEY

Lash LaRue Although not the most famous of these Western heroes, Lash LaRue was extremely popular and his two comic series, published by Fawcett and then Charlton, ran from 1949 to 1961. He was also distinctive, not only for his bullwhip weaponry (hence the nick name “Lash”) but also in his all black outfit, which of course is more normally associated with the villain in traditional Westerns of the period. As a “roving marshal” his character is sent to various trouble spots, and he does not have to accidentally happen upon some kind of adventure as Autry does. His distinctive weapon is highlighted by being woven into his name in the logo on the first page of all the early stories, and beneath his name the whip curls to create a vignette with a portrait of the star in it. He nearly always has to use it to good effect at some point in each adventure. For example in the story “Ghost in the Hills” (#3, Fawcett, January 1950) LaRue is tied to an operating table and about to be murdered by a crooked doctor. His situation looks hopeless, but he tricks the doctor into trying to take the whip and he is able to send the doctor crashing to the ground, and then he is able to escape. At other times he disarms villains with his whip and even engages in duels with whip-wielding outlaws. The story, “The Two Killers” (#51, Charlton, November 1954), displays a more complex plot. Two villains dupe a hulking simpleton, Benny Dillon, into stealing a payroll so that one of them, Lenny, can inform marshal LaRue that he has witnessed the robbery. Meanwhile the other villain, Pate, persuades Dillon that he will look after the money and bury it so that there will be no evidence for the marshal. The whole atmosphere is quite dark. Dillon kills one of the guards, and when chased by LaRue he shoots at him rather than maintain his innocence, and is captured with the aid of LaRue’s whip. In jail, Dillon confesses that the money is buried, but when LaRue investi- gates he finds the dead body of Pate instead. He then fools Lenny into giving himself away and defeats him in a fist fight. The somber atmosphere is maintained—Lenny is shown bleeding and with a black eye in the final frame, and as well as the death of the guard and Pate both Dillon and Lenny will presumably be hanged. The major violent events take place outside the frames of the comic and are not directly pictured. Nevertheless the battered figure of Lenny in the final frame leaves the reader in no doubt about exactly how violent LaRue can be. It is as if the comic is trying to push the boundaries of the Comics Code, and by leaving some of the details of the violence to the reader’s imagination, still creating dis- ROPING N’ RIDING: SELLING WESTERN STARS, 1946–1962 59 turbing images in their minds. Some of the pre-Code stories in the Fawcett version of the comic are also quite long, allowing for more complex plotting. “Tainted Justice” (#41, June 1953) is 15 pages long. The story opens with an accused man, Tom Carson, pulling a gun on LaRue. He explains that he was an innocent bystander when a drunk, “Crusher” Moran shot three children in cold blood after one had accidentally tripped him. Moran immediately blamed the innocent Carson for the murders, and he fled as the only other witnesses were Moran’s gang. LaRue shoots the gun from Carson’s hand and tries to persuade him to rely on the law to prove him innocent. On route to state prison Carson knocks out LaRue, but then the dazed LaRue is captured by Moran’s gang and is about to be hanged when he escapes (Fig. 4.2). He is just in time to rescue Carson, who is about to be hanged by Moran. Being chased by the gang and with both men on one horse LaRue again rescues them with the aid of his trust- worthy bullwhip. First he wraps the whip round a branch, and after hiding in a tree he uses the whip to trip all the returning members of the gang. The implausibility of these feats is somewhat mitigated against by the care- ful and very effective way they are drawn, but the same cannot be said of a neat ending in which LaRue is going to gain a conviction because he can prove the murders were committed with Moran’s gun. The scenes of threatened hangings and the killing of three innocent children (even though the latter is not shown) maintain the dark tone and are taking advantage of their pre-Code status. In “The Road to Danger”, an 11-page story in the same issue LaRue is imprisoned by a crook who is impersonat- ing a sheriff. LaRue is imprisoned by the fake sheriff, alerted by the smell, and finds the real sheriff dead and rotting under the floorboards of his cell. As we see a close-up of LaRue’s horrified face, he exclaims, “A dead man he must have been here some time because his flesh is beginning to rot! No wonder there’s such an awful smell in here.” Then in the next frame he adds, “But what is left of the face looks a lot like Sheriff McVey.” Although we do not see the dead sheriff the atmosphere is closer to the horror comics of EC and their imitators than most Western comics of the period. It may be that the success of this title, largely without the support of major film appearances, lies in the serious, sometimes horrific, tone, combined with the dark figure of LaRue himself and the gimmick of his unusual weaponry. The move from Fawcett to Charlton can be seen as a step down in quality, but some later issues in this series have the benefit of another distinctive and talented Charlton artist, Pete Morisi. His style is 60 D. HUXLEY

Fig. 4.2 “Tainted Justice”, Lash LaRue Western #41, 1953 particularly neat and clean, and he is still able to produce a very effective likeness of LaRue.

The Lone Ranger If LaRue is clearly, and officially, on the side of the law, then the Lone Ranger, in some senses, is a little more ambiguous. Although he clearly travels the West doing good and defeating evil, his mask and hidden identity complicate matters, and of course he has no official status. His stories also raise serious issues about his status as a lone hero because of the continuing role of Tonto in his adventures. His name, repeated in various ROPING N’ RIDING: SELLING WESTERN STARS, 1946–1962 61 origin stories across radio, novels, and television, stems from him being the sole survivor of a massacre of Texas Rangers. In fact, apart from a few early radio programs, the Lone Ranger is at least partially defined by his relationship with his Native American companion, Tonto. Tonto as an individual will be discussed in more detail in a later section. Dell’s comic book origin story is reprinted in the British 1953 Lone Ranger Annual. In response to the outrages of Butch Cavendish and his gang six Texas Rangers are sent to capture them. Led into an ambush by one of the gang all the Rangers are shot. One survivor, the younger brother of the Rangers’ captain, Dan Reid, is nursed back to health by Tonto. Reid vows vengeance not only on Cavendish, but all criminals in the West. His famous mask does not appear until the 13th page. Before that, strangely, we never see the face of the younger Reid brother. When the Rangers appear he is seen from the back, and if part of his face is shown, his hat throws a shadow not unlike the mask itself. This continues at length, with Tonto or inanimate objects in the way, and in one extreme example the artist, Tom Gill, simply arranges the panel so that the figure of the Lone Ranger is cut in half and we only see his ear, hair, and bandana. This whole sequence, designed to maintain Reid’s ano- nymity, is rather bizarre, as there is really no point in keeping the visual identity of this drawn character secret. Clayton Moore was not meant to be seen without his mask when he played the Lone Ranger on television, but that made rather more sense. Now that the Lone Ranger has his mask, it transpires that Cavendish may also have killed Dan Reid’s wife and son in a raid on a wagon train. Here we have all the elements of what Jane Tompkins described as the point where “The villains, whoever they may be, finally commit an act so atrocious that the heromust retaliate in kind” (as quoted in Chap. 2). But the Lone Ranger is a different kind of hero to some earlier examples. Capturing some of the gang, and looking for Cavendish, he does grab one by the throat and tells him that, “You know and you will answer!” This implies possible violence on the part of the Lone Ranger, but we do not see anything after the threat, and it may be that just his powers of persuasion were enough to make the villain talk. The Lone Ranger also shoots the guns from other gang members’ hands and eventually he captures Cavendish after a fist fight, but he never retaliates “in kind”. The Lone Ranger is a pure hero in many senses—he clearly displays a willingness to sacrifice himself for the safety of others. He accepts no rewards and delivers all the outlaws into the hands of the law. He delivers Cavendish to the sheriff and as he rides away (crying “Hi – Yo, Silver! Away!” of course) the Sheriff sums up, “He won’t stop as long as there is 62 D. HUXLEY a single outlaw who menaces our freedom or our American heritage! The whole West’ll be singin’ his praise soon! He calls himself…The Lone Ranger!” John Cawelti sums up the character, “Children can accept a Lone Ranger, but, for most adults, such a character is too pure and superheroic to serve the purposes of effective moral fantasy.”5 The series of adventures that follow pit the Lone Ranger and Tonto against a series of crooks and outlaws, but perhaps their more interesting stories pit them against Native American foes. “The Long Bridge” (#67 Dell, January 1954) starts with a classic figure from many Western stories, the inexperienced army officer, Lieutenant Vernon, who declares, “This is my first trip into Indian terri- tory, I’d like to get a few notches on this new gun of mine!” At Fort Adams a soldier is killed trying to go for help but the soldiers are trapped in a fort by the Cheyenne. Meanwhile Tonto spies on the Cheyenne and learns that they plan to intercept Vernon’s relief column at the “long bridge”. Tonto and the Lone ranger survive an attack by the Cheyenne, during which they appear to kill several of the braves. They try to warn Vernon but he does not believe them. In order to save the troops the Lone Ranger borrows army supplies and manages to blow up the bridge despite Vernon trying to get his men to shoot their savior. Tonto then throws more explosives to break up a Cheyenne meeting, and he has to disarm one brave who is about to shoot the Lone Ranger. Chief Fierce Eagle is captured simply by the Lone Ranger holding a gun against his head. Interestingly, at the conclusion of the story there is an acceptance that the Cheyenne may have had some justification for being on the warpath and the Lone Ranger promises, “If you think injustice has been done, the government will remedy it!” The story continually demonstrates the Lone Ranger’s dependence on Tonto, or rather their interdependence. Tonto’s skills enable him to spy on the Cheyenne, and he saves the Lone Ranger’s life. Despite his very specific title the Lone Ranger is in fact very much one half of a partnership, and he is virtually never in the position of being left totally to his own devices, or alone with his thoughts. He exists in a strange limbo where he upholds the law, admired by many, but creating suspicion in others, but always with his completely loyal friend Tonto. He owns the silver mine that provides his silver bullets and presumably is able to forego rewards due to this wealth. In short the Lone Ranger is a simple fantasy figure, and when there have been attempts at reviving the character it has deemed necessary to add tongue-in-cheek elements to make the character acceptable to modern audiences. These hybrid versions have been unsuccessful (in financial terms, at least) so perhaps the formula should be left alone, with the Lone Ranger as a simple, straightforward hero. ROPING N’ RIDING: SELLING WESTERN STARS, 1946–1962 63

Television Westerns There is a shift in the late 1950s and 1960s when the comic book tie-ins are, for obvious reasons, almost all related to television programs. These are even more numerous than the earlier film star titles, and some, like Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, simply move from one medium to the other. There are simply too many Western television series and their comic tie-ins to list here, but these programs were some of the major titles to feature in comics: Annie Oakley, Bat Masterson, Bonanza, Bronco, Buffalo Bill Jr., Cheyenne, Cisco Kid, The Dakotas, Gene Autry, Gunsmoke, Have Gun Will Travel, Laramie, Lawman, Lone Ranger, Maverick, Range Rider, Rawhide, Restless Gun, The Rifleman, Roy Rogers Show, Sugarfoot, The Virginian, Wagon Train, Wanted: Dead or Alive, Tales of Wells Fargo, The Westerner, Wild Bill Hickok, and Wyatt Earp. It is evident that many of these comics are being sold on the title of the television programs rather than the stars featuring in the programs. Even where there is a named character, it is, apart from Roy Rogers, a character clearly played by an actor. Thus Hugh O’Brian plays Wyatt Earp, Gene Barry plays Bat Masterson, and Clayton Moore plays the Lone Ranger, and so on. The Lone Ranger character is slightly more complex, in that Moore, wearing the characters’ costume, did make public appearances. As the character was masked there could be some confusion for younger fans about whether this was the “real” Lone Ranger. But the age of the character who “lived the part” had really, apart from Rogers and Autry, disappeared. Yet again, it is also striking that there is only a single named female character star, although there are some important continuing female characters, such as “Miss Kitty” in Gunsmoke. Nevertheless the absence of key female characters, particularly those who can be seen in a heroic mode, is very evident. The nature of the one clear exception, the Annie Oakley comics, will be addressed later in this chapter. The main publisher of these comics which officially tied in either to film stars or television series was Dell. The vast majority of their titles used full color photographs of the relevant star on the cover, lending them an aura of authenticity, making the young readers feel that they were reading adventures of the “real thing”. Dell and the film or television companies were eager to ensure that the nature of these characters was consistent across different media, with nothing that might tarnish the image of the star. Dell, even after the introduction of the Comics Code, never submitted their comics for code 64 D. HUXLEY approval. Instead the inside cover of their comics would carry the “Dell Pledge” to parents. This read, in part, “The Dell Trademark is, and always has been, a positive guarantee that the comic magazine bearing it contains only clean and wholesome entertainment. The Dell code eliminates entirely, rather than regulates, objectionable material.” This, in effect, was an attack on the Comics Code for being too soft on “objectionable material”. As the publisher of Walt Disney comics Dell obviously felt that they could afford to take the moral high ground and appeal to middle-America and at the same time imply that they knew exactly what constituted what was clean and wholesome and what did not. What it certainly meant was that heroes might resort to violence where justified, but it was likely to be a good clean punch to the jaw or shooting the gun from an outlaw’s hand.

Fans There is the complication of what age group these comics were trying to attract, and to what extent they might need to be protected. Within some of the comics the implicit message of a “cowboy code” of strength, honor, and fair dealing was made explicit in letters supposedly written by the star to his young fans in each issue. In many comics there is a subtle shift in the nature of the hero’s violence, and in some titles the “other”, his enemy, is moved from Native Americans to corrupt business men or outlaws. A good clue to the nature of the fans is contained in the letters that appeared in many comics, which claimed to have been written by the star to his fans. A typical example comes from Charlton comics Tex Ritter Western #31 (October 1955). Under the heading “Riding the Range with Tex Ritter” there is a letter which begins, “Howdy Folks, It’s mighty nice to be riding your way once again. It’s always plumb pleasur- able to pass the time of day with good friends”. “Tex” then explains that he has been on a wild horse round-up for a week, and there he saw “white horses, buckskins, a lot of black stallions, dapple grays” and other horses all playing together. He ends by saying, “We two-legged critters can learn a powerful lot, even from a herd of wild horses, about getting along together”, and signs off, “Your pard, Tex Ritter.” While it is impossible to disagree with the sentiments expressed, the idea that Ritter wrote it, had just spent a week in a round-up, and seen this variety of horses suggests that the expectation of the comic is that it is being read by a younger audience. There are many of these missives, and it is not ROPING N’ RIDING: SELLING WESTERN STARS, 1946–1962 65 necessary to examine many of them, but if we examine one more, a pattern clearly reveals itself. One example, “Roping n’ Riding with Allan ‘Rocky’ Lane and Black Jack” appears in the British reprint of Rocky Lane Western (#82, Miller). Rocky is apparently “plumb bubbling over to tell you what I saw the other day in the mountains.” Rocky and his horse, Black jack, have seen a little humming bird outwitting a hawk. He explains, “The size of the hawk and its killer heart couldn’t match the courageous little humming bird’s speed and maneuverability and its will to meet odds and…win!” The letter draws a comparison between this event and the career of John Slaughter, a lawman of small stature. It ends, “So, pards, don’t go putting too much stock in how folks measure up by the yardstick. The true measure of anyone is what’s in his heart and spirit. Remember that, and you, Black Jack and I will always be close pals, Yours for more action and friends, Your pals, Allan ‘Rocky’ Lane and Black Jack.” These little moral tales vary in detail, but all have this same pattern and end with a similar homily. These letters are clearly rewritten for the audiences in different countries. Thus in the Roy Rogers Comics no. 52 (a British World Distributors reprint of a Dell comic) “Roy” even advises readers to join the Road Safety Quiz Competition being run by UK Road Safety officers. The age range for this competition is 11–14 years, which again indicates the British target audience. Maurice Horn is scathing about some of these comics and comments, “Roy Rogers Comics became Roy Rogers and Trigger in 1955, and the stories became more and more childish; by the time of its demise in 1961 the level of plotting and characterization was so low that it could only have been aimed at the nursery school set.”6 Gene Autry even produced the “Cowboy Code”, which again is clearly aimed at educating American youngsters:

1. The Cowboy must never shoot first, hit a smaller man, or take unfair advantage. 2. He must never go back on his word, or a trust confided in him. 3. He must always tell the truth. 4. He must be gentle with children, the elderly, and animals. 5. He must not advocate or possess racially or religiously intolerant ideas. 6. He must help people in distress. 7. He must be a good worker. 66 D. HUXLEY

8. He must keep himself clean in thought, speech, action, and personal habits. 9. He must respect women, parents, and his nation’s laws. 10. The Cowboy is a patriot.

These tenets, reading, not totally accidentally, like a Western ten com- mandments, immediately address the issue of violence. The cowboy may not shoot first, but he must clearly be prepared to do so when it is called for. He may hit people, but only if they are large enough, and presumably “fight fair”. Most of the other elements are about good citizenship and have a boy-scout atmosphere about them. At the same time the code echoes the idea of tolerance that might seem at odds with the more macho end of the Western hero spectrum. It is difficult to argue that some of the early manifestations of Buffalo Bill’s character do not “advocate or possess racially…intolerant ideas”. In the Youthful version Native Americans are described by racist epithets, variously as “varmints, redskins, scoundrels, red devils, injuns, etc”.

Indians: Picture Stories of the First Americans (Fiction House, 1950–1953) There is little space in most of these comics for the fans own voice. Letter pages are rare, unlike the later output of DC and in particular Marvel comics, where letter pages become an important part of the fans relationship to a given comic. In Fiction House’s Indians: Picture Stories of the First Americans (1950–1953) however, there are sporadic letter pages under the title “Pow Wow”, with a message from the editors, “The Pow Wow echoes the words of Black Kettle to General W S Hartney: Speak from your heart and we shall listen.” The answers to various queries are also very knowledgeable, so someone behind the comic was very aware of Native American culture.7 In issue 8, reader Jim Becker of Los Angeles asks if Indians worship idols. The editors reply, “No, the Indians in the United States did not worship idols. They addressed their prayers to the sun, to the winds, the thunders, to the earth as symbols of power. They made simple altars and crude forms upon which religious symbols were often painted, and they believed in supernatural ancestors of various species of animals and birds as sources of power to which they prayed.” Other replies are much more detailed and emphasize the differences between the traditions of different tribes. These pages do reveal some interesting readers’ views, ROPING N’ RIDING: SELLING WESTERN STARS, 1946–1962 67 but of course there is the proviso that there can be no guarantee that the letters involved are genuine. Nevertheless less they do, if doctored or fake, reveal the debate that the publishers wanted to take place. Some of the letters also do feel as if they may be genuine. Indians was a title that attempted to redress the balance in the portrayal of Native Americans in the comics of the time. The comic featured Manzar, a white man who “became” an Indian when trouble threatened, Red Fawn, an Indian maiden with a “warrior’s heart”, and Longbow, a young courageous Blackfoot brave. It also included a written series, “The First Americans”, which detailed the history of various tribes. In issue 2, which is possibly also a little early for letters to be appearing, the following and probably most suspect of the letters appears,

Gentlemen, By accident, and to my regret, I read your magazine, and I am very disgusted at your attempts to glorify the Indians, who were just rough savages. The Indians were cruel, uneducated and very uncultured and lived like animals. Only very stupid people could enjoy reading stories about them. I notice there will be more issues of your magazine, but I hope not. There ought be a law against such a magazine, and if people are uncivilized enough to read it, something ought to be done about them too, Gerald P Algerton, Washington DC.

Even in 1950 this is a set of extreme views, and the editors do not make any response, which tends to suggest that they have published the letter to elicit a response, and indeed they may have invented the whole thing. If the letter was intended to elicit a response, it was very successful. In issue 6 there is this reply,

Dear Sir, Much to my regret I read the letter by Gerald P Algerton of Washington in the second issue of your magazine. This show-off, who probably wants to feel superior to somebody, simply succeeds in proving that he is the stupid and uneducated one. He calls the Indians cruel and savage – but in these things they were actually innocents compared to the torturing, slaughtering, slave-keeping white men of their day who boasted of their so-called ‘civilization’. Has Mr Algerton read the great speech of John Logan on this subject, often called one of the world’s greatest speeches? Jean Brickman, Davenport, Iowa.

The editors then reprint part of the Mongo chief’s speech, of 1774, where he recounts his terrible treatment at the hands of the white man. Set 68 D. HUXLEY against other contemporary representations of Native Americans such as the Youthful magazines Buffalo Bill, this whole series is very progressive. The Fiction House covers do show images of violence, but mostly they show different tribes at war. Normally the style is very much in the bold and dynamic (and sometimes crude) house style, but issue 10 (February 1952) shows mounted warriors circling other braves in a village of tepees with a large portrait of Crazy Horse at the top. Although there is some perspective in the image, it is flattened, and the simplicity of all the figures gives the cover a vague resonance of Native American drawings of battle. In some of the letters there is even evidence about the background of the writers. The first letter in #2 is from Kenneth U. Nahquaddy, who announces he is a full-blooded Comanche of 13, before suggesting some details the comic may have got wrong. In issue 8 the following letter appears,

Dear Sir, I am a direct descendant of the great Sauk or Sac chief, Black hawk. Because of this fact, I am extremely fond of your great magazine, Also because of this fact, it is natural I would ask you to give us stories of my peoples greatest chiefs – Pontiac, Tecumseh, Black Hawk and Keokuk. I am always glad to see your magazine on the stands. For us, this recent interest in Indians as human beings rather than murderous madmen is a great bless- ing after all the years of historical silence concerning our fine qualities. Keep on publishing your wonderful magazines, JC Emerson (Young Hawk) Wichita, Kansas.

Another letter from issue 4 mixes praise with some further criticism and indicates that the comics have not been able to totally avoid stereotypes. The letter starts with some praise,

Greetings, or as the Pawnee would say, ‘Nowa’. Your publication is a very welcome addition among the magazines that our children are allowed to read. They especially like ‘Orphan of the Storm’ and ‘Long Bow’. ‘Starlight’ has been glamorized too much, however, to be anywhere near reality…true stories can be interesting as well as educational. The Indian has a wonderful culture and heritage. It’s just too bad that a person like Gerald P Algerton… is so blind to this culture and wisdom. He could learn much from them. As it is, he showed his own ignorance to write as he did – and also a lack of any religious feeling… The Bennings, Okmulgee, Okla. ROPING N’ RIDING: SELLING WESTERN STARS, 1946–1962 69

This seems to be a family that was going to welcome the Comics Code, but it is interesting that they do see the merits of this comic. They do, however, see the figure of Starlight as being “glamorized”, and this is not the only fiction house character that could be said to fall into the stereotype of the “beautiful Indian Maiden”. This image has a long history, going back to dime novels and beyond, and when it is adapted into film the “Indian maiden” is nearly always played by a white actress. Male Native American heroes can receive something of the same treatment, and although this can be seen as glamorizing these figures, it is still a welcome contrast to the demonizing of Native Americans in other comics. In the same issue as the Bennings’ letter, the Starlight story begins with the description, “Starlight of the Hurons called herself a warrior-maiden, viewed with scornful eye a woman’s work for could she not stalk the deer, wing her shafts as well as any fledgling brave?” This proto-feminist decla- ration is somewhat underlined by the image the letter has eluded to, as the very thin Starlight stands on a rock in a short blue shift, looking for all the world like a Hollywood star. In issue 11 (April 1952) there is a story in the “Warriors of the West” series that details the life of Pontiac. This does not prove that the letter from J. C. Emerson was genuine, but the detail given by the writer is convincing, and it does suggest that there were some comics available that could appeal to a Native American audience at this period. Unfortunately, when the title moves from 52 pages to 36, in issue 9, the letter columns disappear. Given the expertise that is brought to some of the letter page replies, some of the fictional stories do reveal some lapses, but in their factual sections the comic tends to quite accurate. A “Warriors of the West” story (#13, August 1952) deals with Sitting Bull. In four pages it attempts to cover his whole career, and it starts with text that declares, “seven years of promised peace broken by the quest for gold”. Sitting Bull has a vision of soldiers entering their camp, and we move to a panorama of Custer’s defeat. Further battles and Sitting Bull’s surrender follow. The story ends with Sitting Bull’s death (Fig. 4.3). The final text panel reads, “So ends the saga of the most courageous and picture fighters of the West…he chose to fight on in the hope of winning a fair treaty for his people.” Against the many offensive portrayals of Native Americans elsewhere, this comic, and some other notable examples, it is clear that some companies, at least, were trying to redress the balance. However it is an exaggeration to claim, as Maurice Horn does, “By and large it is fair to say that the red man has always gotten a better deal in comics than in the 70 D. HUXLEY

Fig. 4.3 “Warriors of the West”, Indians: Picture Stories of the First Americans #13, 1952 movies. While it is true to say that the Indians have sometimes been portrayed as murderous savages…they were even more often depicted with warmth and sympathy for their plight, and understanding for their cus- toms.”8 Both media do gradually change their attitude to Native Americans from the 1950s onwards, and representations do become more sympathetic, but it is extremely difficult to quantify this. Horn was writing in 1977, when things had certainly improved, but whether comics were better than film is a moot point. If some early silent film representations are taken into account, then films record is definitely changed for the better. Equally the balance of sympathetic portrayals in comics is very difficult to assess—there are just too many comics to investigate. Although there are many images of Native Americans in Horn’s book, as a theme they are only specifically discussed on three pages, and in the attempt to cover vast ground he does not mention Fiction House comics at all.

Language: The Indian and the White Man There is also the issue of language and the phonetic spelling of words and the implications of this kind of colloquial and “slang” language. I would argue that there is a clear difference between the implications for white characters and Native Americans. For white characters the poor English and slang may indicate a lack of education, but at the same time it empha- ROPING N’ RIDING: SELLING WESTERN STARS, 1946–1962 71 sizes that they are not upper class and may indeed be more at home in the dangerous West than a well-spoken character. A typical example of this is the language used by “Shortsleeves”, the sidekick to the Youthful magazines version of Buffalo Bill which was discussed in Chap. 2. Bankers, lawyers and businessmen—who may be very well-spoken—on the other hand tend to be villains in many Western stories. For the Native Americans, however, their inability to master the English language is more an indica- tor of their supposed lack of intelligence. In the Youthful Buffalo Bill series, there is a story “Buffalo Bill and the Thieving Sioux”, where the main chief, Yellow Dog, always speaks in pidgin, or broken, English (#3, December 1950). When encouraged to attack by a renegade white man, he replies, “Sioux not fight at night. Is evil” and “No do. My scouts watch.” Educated Native Americans who speak good English are, in contrast, often seen as part of the “good Indian” device, or even as untrustworthy. The attempt by comics publishers to improve the way in which Native Americans were perceived and portrayed in the media has to be applauded, and in the main there is certainly less offensive material in these film and TV tie-in comics. The comics were also following a more general easing of racist portrayals of Native Americans in wider media, particularly in films like Delmer Daves’Broken Arrow (1950) and Robert Aldrich’s Apache (1954). There has been speculation that this kind of new Western was in fact trying to address wider concerns in 1950s American society. According to this interpretation these films actually dealt with the burgeoning civil rights movement, and the Indian was therefore a surro- gate black figure. Steve Kneale summarizes the position as follows, “Lenihan, Slotkin and Cripps all argue that this preoccupation was moti- vated by the struggles over black civil rights in the late 40s, the 50s and early 60s, and thus the whole cycle should be interpreted allegorically… Native Americans – should be treated, in Cripps’ term, as a ‘stand-in’ for African Americans.”9 Thus the poor treatment of the Indian and the sympathetic portrayal of their plight could be seen as a metaphor for black Americans, without Hollywood having to directly confront the more contentious contemporary problem. This may hold up for some of the more enlightened Billy the Kid stories, and if so, for similar reasons of avoiding controversy. What it does highlight is the lack of black characters in the vast majority of Western comics during the main period covered in this book. Sadly, this observation can be widened to all American comics of the time, given the exception of some supporting characters, often portrayed in “comic” and 72 D. HUXLEY racially offensive stereotypes. For Western comics there is no excuse for the lack of serious black characters, for although Western films also eschewed the portrayal of black characters, in reality there were large numbers of black cowboys in the post-Civil war period.10 Later Western comics did little to improve the situation. Rare black Western heroes such as Dell’s Lobo were not successful in the mid-1960s, and where there have been black heroes of any kind in comics they have not been numerous and have certainly not appeared in the comparatively moribund genre of Westerns.11 The situation is complex, as Dwain Pruitt points out in his consideration of the work of the pioneering black comic artist Matt Baker, “Baker’s early work adopted his era’s racial shorthand, representing bug- eyed, literally yellow Japanese soldiers and primitive African savages.”12 Offensive stereotypes have appeared in many kinds of comics, and although there have been improvements, it has been a very slow process.

Annie Oakley Remarkably, there were more comics featuring the cowboys’ horses (Silver/Lone Ranger, Trigger/Rogers, Champion/Autry) and also “sidekicks” of various types (Gabby Hayes, Smiley Burnette, Tonto) than there were featuring female stars. This seems to underline the way in which women have so often been marginalized in the Western mythos. But when female Western stars do appear in comics there are some very interesting characteristics on display in relation to other portrayals of women in the wider media of the time. Whatever the reality of women’s lives during the 1950s, there is no doubt that the vast majority of media portrayed an “ideal” woman whose interests centered on family and the home. Jennifer Holt comments, “Women were considered domestic caregivers, with sole responsibility for home and child rearing…the quintessential white, mid- dleclass housewives who stayed at home to rear children, clean house and bake cookies. The creation of the ‘ideal woman’ gave a clear picture to women of what they were supposed to emulate as their proper gender role in society.”13 If some of the television and print advertising aimed at women in the 1950s is shown to twenty-first-century students, the reaction tends to be a combination of amusement and disbelief and, on occasion, outrage.14 The presentation of fridges and cookers and other household goods as objects of desire in a fantasy world of an ideal family seems to them, not just dated, but from a different world. Many romance comics could be ROPING N’ RIDING: SELLING WESTERN STARS, 1946–1962 73 added to this media onslaught. The Comic Book Plus website lists 200 out of copyright romance comics, the vast majority of which are from the 1950s. When the output of some major publishers (which are still in copyright) is added to this, the scale of production of this kind of comic becomes evident. The aim of the heroines in nearly all these titles is true romance and then marriage, with little attention paid to life after marriage, although it is possible to find short stories advising on the duties of a good wife and housewife. Some titles also give an idea of the target age group for these comics—Boy Meets Girl, First Love, Teen Confidential, Teen Romances, and Youthful Romances. Even when the titles are less specific, such as True Romance, the age of the characters on each cover emphasizes the intended appeal. There are even some cross-generic titles such as Real West Romances, but in the main they follow a similar pattern, apart from a few notable exceptions.15 Of course there were strong female characters in superhero comics, but Western heroines also provided a different, perhaps more relatable role model. In fact there was a model for the strong inde- pendent woman as early as Cody’s Wild West show. Annie Oakley—“Little Sure Shot”—was a, if not the, major star of the show in the 1880s. She was not even unique—her great rival was Lillian Smith, and there were also other less famous female sharpshooters at that time. Lillian Smith also appeared on Buffalo Bill Cody’s “Wild West” in the 1880s, but she did not have either the charisma or striking image of Oakley, or indeed the absolute consummate shooting skill. But with the popularity of Western television programs in the 1950s, Gene Autry’s “Flying A” production company thought it was worthwhile producing a series starring a female character, and the character they chose was Annie Oakley. The series ran from 1954 to 1957, and the only real connection to the historical figure was the fact that this Annie was an incredible shot—as good, or better, than any man. The Dell tie-in comics, Annie Oakley and Tagg ran from 1955 to 1959, a total of 15 issues. The title of the comic appears to indicate that this Annie is not strictly a lone hero, as Tagg was her younger brother, and their uncle, Sheriff Luke MacTavish, also features. However the narrative of the stories both in the television series and in the comic tends to construct circumstances whereby Annie must rescue the situation, often on her own. Her appearance, as played by Gail Davis, and faithfully copied in the comic, underlines the tenuous link with the historical Annie Oakley. She wears classic 1950s “fancy Western” outfits—brightly colored designer outfits with fringes and lavish decoration. But this does not detract from her abilities as an action heroine. In a typical story from 74 D. HUXLEY

#7 (April–June 1956) “The Bushwhacker” Annie begins by riding her horse into a gunman who she wrongly believes is threatening Tagg. This turns out to be an innocent game, but the gunman does display his prowess by shooting three wooden ornaments from a distant building. Unwillingly, but to back up Tagg’s claims about her prowess, she proceeds to shoot the three remaining stumps on the building, declaring, “I’m not a show-off ” and “There seems to be only one thing that your kind respects…” (Fig. 4.4). The artist for the story is Dan Spiegle, who worked on many of these kinds of titles and is able to produce effective likenesses of Gail Davis, obviously taking some care, particularly in close-ups, to emphasize that this is the Annie Oakley of the television series. His style is

Fig. 4.4 “The Bushwhacker”, Annie Oakley and Tagg #17, 1956 ROPING N’ RIDING: SELLING WESTERN STARS, 1946–1962 75 deceptively simple, but with economic use of line he is able to suggest both the nature of the characters and the setting in the dusty Western town. It then appears that the gunman, Hatfield, is going to work for crooked rancher John Hinton. At one point she has to disarm Hatfield, but she is not convinced that he is the culprit when a local businessman is “bush- whacked”. Indeed she proves his innocence by comparing a bullet from the crime with a bullet from Hatfield’s gun, but she rebuts the advances of the now enamored gunman. Not surprisingly it is rancher John Hinton who is the villain, but when he wounds Hatfield and is about to escape it is Annie who is able to shoot a tin can in his horse’s path and thwarts his escape. The story allows Annie to prove she is a better shot than a professional gunfighter, yet she is modest about her abilities, more intelligent than any man in in the story by solving the crime, and cool and calm under pressure in stopping the fleeing villain. She has all this outstanding ability, and the gunman has also fallen for her. Nobody dies in the story (although the fate of the bushwhacking victim is left ambiguous) and Annie captures the villain by trick shooting, rather than wounding him. The inside cover of this issue declares, “Another Outstanding Award for Dell Comics” and details an award from the Civil Air Patrol for Dell’s role in encouraging young people’s interest in that organization. All Dell’s publicity and the “Dell Pledge” serve to emphasize that their comics are so wholesome that parents do not need to be concerned that the stories will ever be too violent. In other stories Annie performs shooting feats that the real Annie Oakley did—shooting with the aid of a mirror, and in “On with the Show” (#9 Dell, April 1956) she even temporarily joins a medicine show and displays her skills by shooting playing cards tossed in the air. In “The Ambushers” (#8 Dell, July 1956) Annie stops at a deserted mission with Tagg and Deputy Sherriff Lofty Craig. She sees a rifle being pointed at them from a window and shoots the gun from the hand of a suspicious character, Ross. It becomes evident that Ross has been involved in robbing on old prospector of his gold and Annie tracks him back to the mission. She confronts him alone and shoots his gun from his hand, and then shoots it from his reach. When Ross’ partner, Daly, comes to town to try and kill both Ross and the prospector, Annie sees him and fires at him to warn him off. Finally Annie and Lofty track Daly to the mission and Annie realizes he is hiding in a bell tower. She shoots at the bell to try and make him move, but the bullet ricochets and wounds him. Again the plot is constructed so that Annie has to face the first villain totally alone, and she defeats 76 D. HUXLEY him with her expert shooting. She also affects the capture of the second outlaw, and once again her intelligence shows through, as at the end she realizes that the bell did not ring properly because the gold is hidden in it. She is, in many ways, the epitome of the lone hero who operates from a base in society and depends on both her incredible skill with guns and her sharp intelligence to outwit her male opponents. There are other manifestations of the Annie Oakley character, some notably different, some remarkably similar in tone. For example, Charlton Comics Six Gun Heroes features Annie Oakley as a regular character from issue 46 (1957) to 83 (1965), with Annie often featuring on the cover, although rarely as the major character. Although this title has no connection to the television series, this Annie demonstrates the same self-reliance and skill with guns. In issue 81 (November 1964) Annie shoots a gunman who shouts, “Ya busted my shootin’ arm!” to which she replies, “You’re lucky that’s all I busted!” She is unaware she is being watched by a character who muses, “Now that’s the girl for me!...Lots of spirit!...She may be tough to handle, but it’d be worth it!” He kidnaps her, but she easily outwits him and his accomplice, stating in the last panel, “The one thing you two sneaks didn’t count on is the underhanded wiles of a woman!” A very different version of the character was produced by Atlas comics from 1948 to 1956, where, although still skillful, the emphasis is on her glamor with so-called good girl art by Christopher Rule. Despite this, the other two versions show a strong, capable woman, who unlike Wonder Woman/Diana Prince does not have to pretend to be quiet and unassum- ing in her “civilian” identity. As a role model Annie Oakley also does not need to resort to fantasy powers, she is a strong woman with practical abilities within the reach of any determined girl, and a definite contrast to the ideals of many (although not all) romance comics. To this extent these versions of Annie draw on the stance of the real Annie Oakley, who used her fame to help to espouse the abilities of women. She said that she was the equal of any man except in the area of “heavy lifting”. In the First World War she proposed the idea of a women’s regiment to Theodore Roosevelt, who turned down the idea. It is perhaps too strong to call her a feminist, as she disliked bifurcated garments for women and worried about universal suffrage (something Cody himself supported).16 Nevertheless it is remarkable that it is this image of the strong and capable woman that should appear in the neglected field of comics. Or perhaps it is the fact that comics were neglected (apart from the concerns about crime and horror) that allowed this representation to appear. The television ROPING N’ RIDING: SELLING WESTERN STARS, 1946–1962 77 program also allows Annie to display her exceptional shooting skills in every episode, but interestingly she is rarely shown as an individual figure. Lofty the deputy is nearly always with her at moments of peril. Also, because of the longer format, Annie is shown in more domestic situations such as cooking and looking after Tagg. The program was sponsored by the Carnation Company (Fresh milk and ice cream division) and sponsor- ship adverts also show her in the domestic sphere, praising the qualities of “homogenized vitamin D Carnation milk”. These are minor changes but they definitely take the edge off the strong individuality of the comic book Annie.

The Sidekicks There remains the issue of what function the sidekick serves when he is isolated in his own comic title. On the one hand some of these characters were popular enough in their own right to carry a title under their own name, but on the other hand they would appear not to be, by definition, a lone hero. Indeed, although, as we have seen their function may vary, at times the sidekick is basically there as comic relief. If we examine the case of probably the most famous sidekick of them all, Gabby Hayes, we can glean some key characteristics. In issue 42 of Gabby Hayes Western (Fawcett comics, May 1952) Gabby’s adventures, although they involve the thwart- ing of some bad guys and some violence, are markedly different to the heroes he sometimes supports. To begin with, Gabby is rarely totally alone and clearly lives in a community with regular friends and neighbors. Then his villains tend to be low key bullies or braggarts rather than outlaws or gunmen. In this issue, in the story “Crafty Woodcraft” Gabby boasts to “Pickle Puss Dill” that he can survive alone in the wilderness and they settle on a hundred-dollar bet that Gabby cannot survive three days in the wilderness with nothing but a knife. They do have a fist fight at this point, but Gabby wins largely by tickling “Pickle Puss Dill” with his fulsome white beard (Fig. 4.5). The naming of characters, the nature of the fight, and the physiognomy of Pickle Puss Dill locate the comic as being much closer, generically, to the humor comic rather than a Western. This is emphasized in the rest of the adventure, where Pickle Puss steals Gabby’s clothes while he is swimming, and Gabby, dressed in a costume of leaves, fails miserably in his attempts to set up camp or light a fire. He then happens upon Pickle Puss’ camp, moves in, and inadvertently catches Dill in a bear trap he has set up. The slapstick of the story and Gabby’s success 78 D. HUXLEY

Fig. 4.5 “Crafty Woodcraft”, Gabby Hayes Western #42, 1952 purely through accident, despite his own incompetence, are totally opposed to the rules that a Western hero must follow. In another story Gabby becomes a tax collector, and if he ever has to confront a more serious threat he will defeat it by incompetence and luck. Another rather short-lived sidekick comic, Andy Devine Western (Fawcett, 1951), makes it clear that his stories will be in a similar comedic vein, as the front cover of issue 2 declares, “Our hero’s a zero, that’s why he’s the jest of the West.”

Tonto A rather different sort of sidekick is the Lone Ranger’s companion, Tonto—indeed companion seems a more appropriate term to describe his relationship with the Lone Ranger. Admittedly the title of his comic was The Lone Ranger’s Companion Tonto, which stressed his lower status in relation to the Lone Ranger himself, but in the comic stories Tonto is clearly a lone and individual figure. Also, when he is conversing with other Native Americans Tonto is able to speak perfect English, presumably as he is actually meant to be speaking in his own language. Unfortunately he is ROPING N’ RIDING: SELLING WESTERN STARS, 1946–1962 79 reduced to pidgin, or broken, English when speaking to white men, but some stories do at least allow him the dignity of expressing himself clearly. The covers of the comics, many very capably painted by Don Spaulding, also portray Tonto in a noble and sympathetic light, although there seems to be little effort to make him look like Jay Silverheels, who played Tonto in the television series for eight years. In issue 25 (Dell, November/ January 1957) the story “The Outcast” Tonto is alone, “in his tribal tent” when another Indian, Cunning Hand, tries to steal his carbine. Cunning Hand is banished, and then he tries to impress some white gunfighters by attacking Tonto. Tonto shoots the gun out of his hand and knocks him down. He then admonishes Cunning Hand, “No, Cunning Hand, do not look to them for help! They know your tribe banished you! If a man fails to win the respect of his people…he will not gain that of strangers!” Here Tonto gives sage advice, intelligently and cogently expressed in perfect “English”. Michael Sheyahshe points out that this is also true of Tonto’s inner thoughts, as expressed in thought balloons, “Take Tonto’s problem with ESL (English as a second language). When he speaks, Tonto still uses the broken English we are accustomed to hearing from indigenous people, complete with the ‘ums’ and ‘ughs’. However, when reading his thought-bubbles…Tonto is very coherent and highly articulate – his thoughts stand very much in contrast to his verbal skills.”17 Tonto’s language is a recurring factor in more recent discussions of Native Americans in popular culture. Sheyahshe also discusses the attitude of Alvin Schwartz, scriptwriter of Dc’s Tomahawk comic in the 1950s. “Here, Schwartz refers to the Tonto-talk prevalent in comics of the time. While replete with ‘ughs’ and ‘make-ums’, these comics did little but further the stereotype of the stupid Indian.”18 Overall Sheyahshe is not overly impressed with the character and the so-called Tonto talk, and Tonto is still hated by many contemporary Native Americans. Yet, in the comics in particular, Tonto is shown to be a much more complex and intelligent character than his received popular culture image might suggest. In the conclusion of the story Tonto is delivering silver to buy food for his tribe when he fakes illness to give Cunning Hand the chance to take over and thereby redeem himself. Tonto follows Cunning Hand and rescues him from the gunfighters who try to steal the silver. As the gunfighters fire on Cunning Hand, Tonto wounds or shoots the guns from the hands of all three. After delivering them to the sheriff, Tonto explains to Cunning Hand, “You had a second chance…you used it wisely!” Unfortunately, as he rides away Tonto is returned to his usual broken 80 D. HUXLEY

English as he shouts to his horse, “Get-um up, Scout!” Despite these lin- guistic anomalies, overall Tonto is clearly posited as a lone hero. He is brave and self-sufficient; he undertakes the mission to buy food for his tribe and defeats the gunfighters on his own. His device to allow Cunning Hand to redeem himself also underlines both his humanity and his intelligence. Tonto is not unique in the wider field of Western comics. There is not the space to cover them here, but there were many other lone Indian heroes, created with varying degrees of success, including Longbow, Grey Wolf, White Eagle, and Pow-Wow Smith.

Silver Horses are so important to the cowboy hero that it is also worth looking at their lone adventures. All the major figures have a named horse, Roy Roger’s Trigger, the Lone Ranger’s Silver, Gene Autry’s Champion, Rocky Lane’s Blackjack, and so on. There is even a competition in John Wayne Adventure Comics for readers to name his horse, as if the lack of a named horse somehow detracts from his status as a hero. The horses tend not only to look fantastic, they are also normally highly intelligent and brave. In The Lone Ranger’s Famous Horse, Hi-Yo Silver, to give the comic its full title, Silver undergoes a series of adventures with his herd, before he and the Lone Ranger met. The series lasted for 36 issues, which is a long run for a comic with a central character who cannot speak. In the story “Silver and the Sliding Rocks” (#35, Dell, July–September 1960) the Lone Ranger introduces the story. He appears to be leading a wagon train when Silver pulls back from a dangerous track. The Lone Ranger explains to two children who, strangely, are accompanying him on this dangerous mission that Silver is wary because of a previous event in his life. The Lone Ranger then recounts a story to the children about Silver and his herd being tracked by Keenay, an Apache horse hunter. Silver and his horses fall into a canyon, but are helped to escape by an Apache boy, Chato. Although the Lone Ranger may have heard some of this story from the boy, but there are parts of the events that happen to the horses that he could not possibly have known. The comic is more successful when the stories are simply related by an omniscient narrator. For example, in the same issue, in the story “The Black Bandit Returns” Silver “and his wild horse band” are unaware that they are being watched by a horse that is Silver’s enemy, “The Black Bandit”. While Silver is away investigating the shots of some ROPING N’ RIDING: SELLING WESTERN STARS, 1946–1962 81 buffalo hunters, Black Bandit drives Silver’s herd away. When Silver returns he find them gone, and in a word balloon he “says”, “Whuh – Huh – Huh?” He then chases after Black Bandit, trying to avoid the horses being caught in a buffalo stampede, and we are able to see into Silver’s mind, in a flashback frame explains, “But the great stallion’s memory pictures one island of hope – a high outcropping of rock which rises from the plain, just a little way this side of the deadly bluffs! If his band could just reach that….” Of course Silver saves all the horses, and in the final frame Silver exclaims, “Wha ha haw!” and the text panel explains, “With Silver’s taunt still ringing in his ears, he heads for the horizon’s peace!” Silver’s “language” and the level of intelligence attributed to the horses seem to indicate that the comic, like some others, is aimed at a younger age group. There is also, however, a sense that the Silver comics, with their untouched landscapes and the freedom of the horses, are to some extent at least con- servationist. Where human beings appear, they are mainly agents for evil and destruction. If they are simple and basic in the way they deliver that message, it is still a worthy cause.

Notes 1. Maurice Horn, M. Comics of the American West (South Hackensack: Stoeger, 1977), 9. 2. Bart Beaty and Benjamin Woo, The Greatest Comic Book of All Time: Symbolical Capital of the Field of American Comic Books (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 95. 3. Ray Merlock, Preface in Peter Rollins (ed) Hollywood’s West: The American Frontier in Film, Television, and History (University Press of Kentucky 2005), ix. 4. Tuska finds Autry, overall, to be a less than convincing hero. Jon Tuska, The Vanishing Legion; a History of Mascot Pictures 1927–35 (Oxford University Press 1982), 162. 5. John Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture, University of Chicago Press, 1976, 38. 6. Horn, Comics of the American West, 80. 7. I came across these letter pages rather by accident. The core of my research was undertaken with American original copies and UK reprints, and in a Gene Autry British reprint #4 (Cartoon Art Productions) there was the ”Pow Wow” letter page from Fiction House’s Indians title #6. UK reprints could always be slap-dash, and these letters clearly had nothing whatsoever to do with Autry, but sit there talking about a totally different comic. 82 D. HUXLEY

Nevertheless they led to the original comic’s letter pages and a rare insight into contemporary reader responses. 8. Horn, Comics of the American West, 187. 9. Steve Kneale, Vanishing Americans: Racial and Ethnic Issues in the Interpretation and Context of Post-war ‘Pro-Indian’ Westerns in Back in the Saddle again: New Essays on the Western (British Film Institute Publishing 1998), 8. 10. It is estimated that a quarter of American cowboys in the second half of the nineteenth century were African American. The history of black cowboys has been recuperated in a number of books, such as Tricia Martineau Wagner, Black Cowboys of the Old West: True, Sensational, and Little-Known Stories from History (Guilford: Morris Book Publishing, 2011). 11. Black superheroes such as Black Panther and Luke Cage have been comparatively successful, but the major American Western character of the 1970s (as sales of most Western comics declined) was white—Jonah Hex, a scarred bounty hunter reminiscent of Clint Eastwood. 12. Dwain Carlton Pruitt, “It rhymes with lust? Matt Baker and the ironic politics of race, sex and gender in the golden age”, The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Volume 7, number 2, June 2016, 203. 13. Jennifer Holt, The Ideal Woman, accessed 27 November 2017, https:// pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d53f/7b503540f490d395a3ca148895843d33 7a2a.pdf 14. I have shown this kind of material to students on many occasions, both in print and television adverts, and it never fails to elicit a range of responses, but a combination of laughter and disbelief is the most common. 15. Just as with Westerns comics themselves the situation is quite complex. Romance comics often feature excellent artwork, and some have more sophisticated or comedic plots. The romance comics of St John are particularly noteworthy, and some of the best examples have been collected by John Benson in Romance without Tears: 50s Love Comics with a Twist, Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2004. 16. There are not as many books about Oakley as some of her contemporaries, but Shirl Kasper’s Annie Oakley, University of Oklahoma Press, 2000, recounts her career in detail. A good account of her relationship with Cody is given in Larry McMurtry, The Colonel and Little Missie: Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley and the Beginnings of Superstardom in America, Simon and Schuster, 2005. Further information on her career, and her rivalry with Lillian Smith, can be found in R. L. Wilson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: An American Legend, Greenhill Books, 1998. 17. Michael A. Sheyahshe, Native Americans in Comic Books: A Critical Study (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2008), 44. 18. Sheyahshe, Native Americans in Comic Books: A Critical Study, 41. CHAPTER 5

Conclusion

Abstract Comics have been important in perpetuating and informing the myth of the lone Western hero. The comic book can bring specific qualities to the creation of the hero and they can fix the visual image of given characters. Historical figures are retrospectively imagined as heroes in the traditional mold in comic book recreation of figures such as Billy the Kid. The figure of the lone hero, the nature of his actions, and how these change in different tiles and across time are examined. The comics under consideration led to a simplification and slow decline of the figure that lead, in later decades, to a new kind of more ambiguous Western hero.

Keywords Have Gun Will Travel • Jonah Hex • Violence

The comics discussed in this book reveal a number of things. Some dem- onstrate characteristics that those ignorant of the field might expect: child- ishness, banality, and racism. Others reveal something quite different: invention, evocative drawing, and an interesting engagement with Western history. The three areas under consideration have shown that a whole range of figures, some based on historical figures, some not, have been portrayed as lone heroes. To what extent does it matter that some of these figures are clearly lone, self-sufficient men (or women)? Is the lone hero to

© The Author(s) 2018 83 D. Huxley, Lone Heroes and the Myth of the American West in Comic Books, 1945–1962, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93085-5_5 84 D. HUXLEY be more admired than a hero who works with other people? Perhaps there is something that is more romantic, more impressive in the lonely figure who adheres to his own code of honor. The enforced exile and loneliness makes the figure of Billy the Kid, in particular, a figure to be pitied as well as admired. As that kind of figure became more unlikely and out of date, perhaps some of the myth of the West was weakened. The terrible treatment of so many Native Americans and the complexities of the “Indian Wars” made the march of civilization seem both less inevitable and less admirable. The exclusion of other ethnic groups from the vast majority of comics, particularly the lack of sympathetic or fair portrayals of black characters, no matter that this was just a reflection of the period when they were created, cannot be defended. The decline of the traditional Western comic may have been the result of a series of factors. The reasons for the decline may be as important as the reasons for the rise, and of course they must, to an extent, be interrelated. The later heroes are more ambiguous and perhaps fit better into a more cynical world. The character of Paladin in Have Gun Will Travel appeared in a comic series that reflected the nature of “a gun for hire”, although in both the television series and the comics, he has a clear sense of honor. The only major comic title to succeed while so many other Westerns had been canceled was DC’s Jonah Hex. He was the first true bounty hunter/anti-hero to have a long-running series as the central character in US comics. There had been a slow change in Hollywood films, prefiguring and following European Westerns, but normally with a group of “heroes”. These tended to follow Wright’s professional plot, and included films like The Magnificent Seven (1960) and The Professionals (1966), and although Hex can certainly be seen as very much a lone figure, his persona is much closer to the European Western “anti-hero” than any previous comic book hero. There have been other less successful attempts to revive the Western comic, but none have approached the success of the 1950s and 1960s titles. Some attempts were quite radical, for example, in 2003, Marvel comics produced a mini-series, “Slap Leather”, which reimagined the Rawhide Kid as a gay character, but this was not well received.1 The levels of violence in the 1950s and 1960s, and the extent to which these characters are true individuals, vary from one title to another. In all the American comics produced before, the Comics Code characters are regularly killed, normally by being shot. Sometimes this can be seen as a kind of retribution for villainous outlaws, but when the victims are Native Americans the situation can be more complex. In the earlier Buffalo Bill CONCLUSION 85 comics there is no reason for this violence; it is simply there, an apparent inevitable fact of life, part of what is presented as a necessary fight for sur- vival. Part of the lessening violence in American comics from 1954 onwards can be simply explained by the introduction of the Comics Code. The 1954 version of the Code was actually not extremely proscriptive on violence. There was only one clause that dealt with the subject: General Standards Part A, point 7 stated: “Scenes of excessive violence shall be prohibited. Scenes of brutal torture, excessive and unnecessary knife and gunplay, physical agony, gory and gruesome crime shall be eliminated.” This did not have to lead to guns being shot from hands—“unnecessary gunplay” is quite ambiguous. Presumably outlaws could have been shown being killed in a fair gunfight without necessarily breaching the Code. But what appears to have happened is that in fear of their businesses being damaged, publishers simply erred on the cautious side. Scripts and artwork had to be submitted for approval before publication, and any altera- tions would cost money. Simpler to submit material that you knew would be approved without any problems. Of course less violence does not necessarily mean less quality. In some cases perhaps some comics became bland, but there is the counterargument that any set of restrictions can make the writers and artists become more creative. The apparent exclusions from the central core of the Western comic, both as the gender and ethnic “other”, are actually treated rather differently. There are, of course, many representations of Native Americans, but with a few notable exceptions, the vast majority of these appearances vary from the mildly to the extremely racist. This, however, only serves to make those comics that were swimming against the tide even more impressive. Mexican characters are less prominent and are treated both as villains and sometimes more sympathetically. Black characters are, by contrast, largely absent, but where they do appear, racist stereotypes are often employed. For women, who in many Western films represent civilization, but are peripheral to most key actions, the situation is rather different. They do not appear in many comics as the central character, but when they do, particularly in the shape of Dale Evans and Annie Oakley, they are equal, or superior, to their male heroic counterparts. The comics I have examined are the proverbial tip of the iceberg. All of this vast number of comics are worthy of examination, whether they are simplistic and juvenile or innovative and challenging. The success of so many of them indicates that they meant a great deal to a great many people for many years. 86 D. HUXLEY

Note 1. This revamp was, perhaps unsurprisingly, controversial, and although many critics were hostile, there is a defense of the series by Frank Bramlett in ImageTexT, Vol. 5, no. 1, (2010) http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/ archives/v5_1/bramlett/ Index1

A and Mexicans, 40, 42 Advertising, 72 and Native Americans, 40–42 1950s, 72 Sun comic, 44, 47 African Americans, 15, 71, 82n10 Black cowboys, 3, 15, 72, 82n10 Amalgamated Press, 44–48 Black Jack, 65 Andy Devine Western, 78 Boardman books, 19–25 Annie Oakley and Tagg, 73, 74 Bonney, William, see Billy the Kid Apache, 40, 41, 80 Bramlett, Frank, 48n4, 86n1 Apache (film), 71 Brantonne, Rene, 10, 25, 26 Arthurian legend, 2–4 Breidenbach, Carla, 42, 48n4 Autry, Gene, 14, 56–58, 63, 65, 72, Broken Arrow (film), 71 73, 80, 81n4, 81n7 Buffalo Bill and the Cowboy code, 65 appearance, 10 Boardman annuals, 19–25 historical figure, 1, 24 B and Indians, 10–15, 17, 18, Baker, Matt, 72, 82n12 20, 22–24, 26, 28, 29, Barker, Martin, 11, 31n5, 31n6 31, 43 Beaty, Bart, 52, 81n2 racism in, 15 Billy the Kid Buffalo Bill Annuals, 10, 15, 19–25 attractiveness of, 42 Buffalo Bill Historical Center, 23 Charlton comics, 38, 41 Buffalo Bill Jr., 12, 63 historical figure, 1 Butterworth, Michael, 46

1 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

© The Author(s) 2018 87 D. Huxley, Lone Heroes and the Myth of the American West in Comic Books, 1945–1962, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93085-5 88 INDEX

C G Calamity Jane, 15–17, 19 Gene Autry and Champion the Wonder Campion, Jeff, 45 Horse, 56 Canary, Martha Jane, see Calamity Jane Geronimo, 15, 40, 41 Cawelti, John, 5, 7n9, 40, 62, 81n5 Ghostly Haunts, 43 Censorship, 5, 12, 13, 45 Gill, Tom, 61 See also Comics Code Grey Wolf, 15, 17, 80 Charlton comics, 38, 41, 64, 76 Groom, Arthur, 19, 23 Cheyenne Kid, The, 41 Gunfighter, The (film), 48 Cochise, 20 Gunsmoke, 63 Cody, William, see Buffalo Bill Comanches, 18, 68 Comet, 47 H Comic Book Plus, 73 Have Gun Will Travel, 63, 84 Comics Code, 13, 18, 34, 40, 58, 63, Hayes, Gabby, 72, 77 64, 69, 84, 85 Heck, Don, 34, 35 Cowboy code, 64, 65 Hero Croft-Cooke, Rupert, 22 and society, 4–6, 40, 76 Custer, George Armstrong, 11, 24, and violence, 3–5, 10, 25, 28, 29, 69 28, 29, 40, 45, 61, 64, 77 Heroine, 2, 3, 17, 18, 29, 73 D Heroism, 2, 5, 28 DC comics, 54 Hex, Jonah, 82n11, 84 Dell comics, 75 Hickok, Wild Bill, 2, 15, 20, Dell Pledge, 64 47, 48 Dime novels, 2, 6, 10, 22, 69 Horn, Maurice, 10, 31n3, 51, Duels, 10, 20, 22, 23, 28–31, 58 52, 65, 69, 70, 81n1, 81n6, 82n8

E Evans, Dale, 1, 54–56, 85 I Idylls of the King, 2 Indians, 10–15, 17, 18, 20, 22–24, F 26, 28, 29, 31, 41–43, 48, 62, Fans 66–72, 79, 80 letters from, 66 Indians: Picture Stories of the First letters to, 64, 65 Americans, 66–70 Fawcett comics, 53, 77 Indigenous peoples Fiction House comics, 70 Indians, 10, 11, 79 Frayling, Christopher, 4, 5, 6n8 Native Americans, 10, 11, 79 Fronval, Georges, 10, 25, 26 See also African Americans INDEX 89

J Mexico, 42 John Wayne Adventure comics, 53, 80 Miller & Co, 18, 65 Jonah Hex, 84 Mix, Tom, 28, 53, 56 Moore, Clayton, 61, 63 Morisi, Pete, 59 K Morte d’Arthur, 2 Kit Carson Annual, 45 Murdoch, David, 4, 6n3, 6n4, 6n6, 15 Kneale, Steve, 71, 82n9 Myth, 2–6, 11, 28, 29, 84

L N Lane, Rocky, 56, 65, 80 Native Americans, 9–13, 15, 20, 22, Language, 2, 14, 31, 70–72, 78, 23, 28, 29, 40–42, 54, 61, 62, 79, 81 64, 66, 68–71, 78, 79, 84, 85 LaRue, Lash, 53, 57–60 changing portrayals, 13, 17, 20, 22, Last of the Mohicans, 29 42, 67, 69, 71 Letter columns, 69 See also Indians Levi Strauss, Claude, 4 Life of Hon William Cody, The, 22, 32n10 O Lincoln County war, 34, 38 Oakley, Annie, 15, 16, 48, 63, 72–77, Lobo, 72 82n16, 85 Logan, John, 67 Lone hero, 2, 4–6, 9, 10, 13, 14, 17, 25, 29, 31, 33–48, 60, 73, 76, P 77, 80, 83 Peckinpah, Sam, 29 Lone Ranger, 1, 28, 45, 47, 57, Pewewardy, Cornel, 17, 32n9 60–63, 72, 78, 80 Pontiac (chief), 68, 69 Lone Ranger’s Famous Horse Silver, 80 Pruitt, Dwain, 72, 82n12 Longbow, 67, 80 Love, Nat, 3 Q Queen of the West Dale Evans, 54 M McCarty, Henry, see Billy the Kid McCrea, Joel, 25, 26 R McLoughlin, Denis, 10, 19, 20, Racism, 15, 83 22–25, 29 Rawhide Kid, 84 Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Real West Romances, 73 (film), 5 Reno Browne, 54 Manzar, 67 Ritter, Tex, 56, 64 Marvel comics, 66, 84 Rogers, Roy, 13, 54, 56, 63, 65, 72 Masculinity, 3, 31 Romance comics, 72, 73, 76, 82n15 Merchandising, 31n1 Roosevelt, Theodore, 3, 76 90 INDEX

S V Sabin, Roger, 11 Vengeance, 5, 61 Scalping, 15, 17, 23, 29, 31 “Vengeurs de Buffalo Bill”, 28 Schrader, Paul, 28 Villains, 5, 6, 20, 29, 42, Schwartz, Alvin, 79 43, 57, 58, 61, 71, Scouts of the Plains (play), 2 77, 85 Seduction of the Innocent, 13, 31n6 Violence, 3–5, 10, 13, 28, 29, Severin, John, 38 31, 38, 40, 45, 46, Sheyahshe, Michael, 10, 79 56–58, 61, 64, 66, Sidekicks, 13, 14, 34, 37, 53, 57, 71, 68, 77, 84, 85 72, 77–78 Silver, 62, 72, 79–81 Sitting Bull, 69 W Six Gun Heroes, 53, 76 Walker, Janet, 4 Slotkin, Richard, 48 Warriors of the West, 69, 70 Spanglish, 42 Wayne, John, 53 Sparling, Jack, 34, 35 Wertham, Frederik, 13 Spiegle, Dan, 74 Wild Bunch, The (film), 29 Stagecoach (film), 53 Women Streamline publishers, 12 Annie Oakley and Tagg, 73, 74 Sun comic, 44, 47 Calamity Jane, 15–17, 19 Superheroes, 6, 42, 45, 51, 52, Evans, Dale, 1, 54–56, 85 73, 82n11 Oakley, Annie, 15, 16, 48, 72–77, 82n16, 85 Queen of the West Dale T Evans, 54 Toby Press, 53 Woo, Benjamin, 52 Tompkins, Jane, 23, 24, 29, 61 Worden, Daniel, 3 Tonto, 60–62, 72, 78–80 World Distributors, 38, Trigger, 65, 72, 80 56, 65 Tuska, John, 57 Wright, Will, 4, 5, 37, 84