Many Western stars including John Wayne and Buster Crabbe had their own comics...
Here's one of the tales from his first issue...
...so when a new Western star (and his horse, Buckskin) came along in 1950, Fawcett Comics immediately gave him his own title, complete with backstory...
This never-reprinted tale from Fawcett's Bob Colt #1 (1950) was drawn by George Evans, but the writer is unknown.
Wanna know a secret?
Bob Colt didn't exist!
Well, the guy who portrayed him on the covers did exist, and if you've ever read "high adventure" paperbacks, you've seen him...
...on almost every Doc Savage book cover since 1964!
(Not to mention The Avenger, James Bond, two different incarnations of The Spider, even as puppet character Steve Zodiac from the 1960s tv series FireBall XL5...
...and, he was the second on-screen Flash Gordon [after Buster Crabbe], on a 1950s one-season TV series filmed in Europe!)
He's male model Steve Holland, who served as the visual template for Bob Colt, and posed for every cover during the book's run.
Fawcett was testing the waters with a plethora of new characters who were portrayed by actors/models on their covers including...
...Vic Torry...
and Bill Battle!
Perhaps they were hoping to sell the properties to tv production companies with the actors used on the covers as the series' stars?
None of them went beyond their comic book incarnations, but Bob Colt was the longest-lasting of the new characters, with a 10-issue run!
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