Weird West DURANGO KID "Curse of the Bakala!"

We Conclude Our Contribution to CountDown to Halloween 2024...

...with a with a never-reprinted story that may, or may not, have happened!

You be the judge!

Illustrated by Joe Certa, this tale from Magazine Enterprise's Charles Starrett as The Durango Kid (yes, that's the comic's full title) #15 (1952) was part of a brief trend at the publisher putting horror elements into all the non-humor/romance comics!
ME also published the original Ghost Rider, which had such aspects already included.

As to the ongoing movie character the comic adapted...

The Durango Kid (1940) was the already-existing identity of a famous vigilante assumed by Bill Lowry to track down a killer.
(We never saw the original user of the name.)

In the subsequent 65-film b-movie series, while actor Charles Starrett always played the character, the secret identity had various names including Bill Blayden, Kip Allen, Steve Lindsay, Steve Williams, Jeff Waring, Steve Ranson, and Steve Brand, among others.
By the time the comic adaptation started in 1949, the publisher decided to use "Steve Brand" as the character's secret identity, though the movies continued to change the secret identity to the end of the film series in 1952.
The comic continued to 1955, when the publisher began scaling back as comics entered a downturn due to the "Seduction of the Innocent" mania created by Dr Fredrik Wertham.

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Weird West MASKED MARVEL "Creeping Death!"

The colorful masked hero who looks like a Dia De Los Muertos Sugar Skull...

...returns in another never-reprinted adventure...this time in a ghost town!

The Masked Marvel appeared in the entire 16-issue run of GunSmoke, but never had the cover, except in the background of one cover as a "Wanted" poster on a wall!

This story is from Youthful's GunSmoke #10 (1950), and, like all the other Masked Marvel tales, we have no idea who the writer, artist, or writer-artist is!

Trivia: This Masked Marvel was the fourth hero to have the name, but only the third comic book character!

The first was a Golden Age masked mystery-man in Centaur's Keen Detective Funnies as well as his own short-lived title.

The second was another mystery-man who battled Prize Comics' Frankenstein Monster in several stories before disappearing.

The third was a Republic Pictures 1943 movie serial hero with the gimmick that the audience didn't know which of several good-guy detectives he was...though the audience knew from the beginning who the villain was.

(Usually, a serial audience had to figure out which of several potentially-evil suspects was the mystery villain!)

BTW, you can read the other Masked Marvel tales we've presented HERE.
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Weird West BLACK DIAMOND WESTERN "Bingbang Buster and His Horse Hedy in "Swish!"

The Weird West Encompasses Many Strange Occurrences...

...not all of them supernatural (or even terrestrial) in origin!

This superb example of cross-genre lunacy from Lev Gleason's Black Diamond Western #21 (1950) is the work of legendary writer/artist Basil Wolverton, who never saw a concept he couldn't spoof.
Though better known for his serious sci-fi/horror work, Wolverton loved doing humor, with a lot of fun details and signage filling the panel with what fellow artist Jack Cole called "eyeball kicks", primarily in his long-running Powerhouse Pepper strip!
Interestingly, MAD comics, which really popularized this sort of wild storytelling, didn't debut until 1952, which indicates they imitated Basil, not the other way around!
He later did work for them both in their comic book and magazine incarnations!

The Bingbang Buster strip ran in from #16 to #28, and is Wolverton's only Western comics work!

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