Weird West JIMMY WAKELY "Phantom Brander"

What if the Original Ghost Rider was evil instead of good?

Art by Gil Kane

Well, he'd probably be a lot like this hombre, who appeared in the final issue of DC's Jimmy Wakely!

The "Phantom Brander" was a near-exact clone of the Original Ghost Rider...

...down to the use of phosphorescent paint and misdirection to convey a "supernatural" effect against his opponents.

Jimmy Wakely was one of numerous "singing cowboys" (like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers) popular during the 1930-1950s in b-movies and radio.

Like many other Western stars, Jimmy had a comic book featuring himself in action against various menaces, but in a clearly present-day Western setting.

This particular story, illustrated by Gil Kane and Bob Lander, was from Wakely's final issue, #18, in 1952.

Gil Kane would later do numerous covers in the 1970s featuring Marvel's version of the Old West Ghost Rider aka Night Rider aka Phantom Rider.

(Marvel kept changing the Western character's name to avoid confusion with the more-popular motorcycle-riding hero!)

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Christmas on the Prairie SUPER-STAR HOLIDAY SPECIAL Jonah Hex in "Fawn and the Star"

Unseen since publication in 1980...

...this over 40 year-old Yuletide tale offers us insight into how and why Jonah Hex turned into who he was!

Written by Michael Fleisher, penciled by Dick Ayers, and inked by Romeo Tanghal, this story appeared in DC Special #21 (1980): Super-Star Holiday Special, an anthology featuring all-new Xmas tales starring Batman, Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes, Sgt Rock, Jonah Hex, and the hosts/stars of DC's mystery comics.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

CoronaVirus Cowboy Comics TOMAHAWK "Village of Death!"

Lethal epidemics are not a new phenomenon!

 In fact, they used to be fairly common until the mid-20th Century!

Westerns featured a number of pandemic/epidemic tales involving both Indians and settlers, but rarely one detailing whites deliberately exposing Native Americans to things like smallpox which occurred in real life!

This never-reprinted tale from DC's Tomahawk #125 (1969) is technically not a Western!

His series was set in the period during and after the American Revolution but before the Louisiana Purchase, so Americans had no access to land west of the Mississippi.

However, it featured Indians and, what is now the MidWest was the wild frontier at that point, so series like this and ones involving real-live personalities like Davy Crocket, Daniel Boone, et al, are at least related to Westerns, if not exactly being Westerns!

(For the last year of its' existence, the book changed to Son of Tomahawk and detailed the adult adventures of his offspring in the early Old West!)

Artist Frank (Red Sonja) Thorne is known to most comics aficionados, but writer Howard Liss is another matter entirely.

During his too-brief 1966-1970 sojurn into comics, Howard worked almost-exclusively on DC's military and Western comics!

Outside of comics, he'd written several dozen books about athletics with the best-known and best-selling being Giant Book of Strange but True Sports Stories.

(Oddly, he never worked on any of the sports one-shots like Strange Sports Stories that DC did from time to time in the Silver Age!)

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ADVENTURES OF ALAN LADD "Guns of Smoke Valley"

Was there any manly movie star of the 1940s who didn't have his own comic?

Personally, I'm surprised there wasn't an Errol Flynn or Tyrone Power title, but it's probably because the licensing rights would've been too expensive.

The scripter of this tale from DC's Adventures of Alan Ladd #1 (1949) is unknown, but we do known it was illustrated by Ruben Moreira, one of the first Puerto Rican artists in comic books.

Among his credits during his twenty-year comics career are a two-year stint on the Tarzan newspaper strip and co-creation of DC Comics characters Rip Hunter: Time Master and Roy Raymond: TV Detective.

Like other titles featuring cross-genre stars like John Wayne and Buster Crabbe, Adventures of Alan Ladd ran stories in other categories like crime and contemporary adventure.

Unlike those titles, AoAL played up the fact that Ladd was, first and foremost, an actor, with the level of fame his profession brought him ("Gosh, you're that movie star...Alan Ladd!"), and a guy who wasn't used to doing the strenuous stuff stuntmen did in his films!

The title ran nine issues, with almost every issue featuring a Western-themed tale.

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TWO GUN PERCY "Cow-Sheep War"

Besides fighting Indians, cowboys constantly battled each other...

...as they divided into factions of cattlemen and sheepmen who fought over territory for their respective hungry herds!

While the cow-sheep feud is played for laughs here, it was, in fact, one of the bloodiest conflicts of the history of the Old West.

Two Gun Percy was an ongoing feature in DC's All Funny Comics for its' entire 23-issue run, after which it made two more appearances in the back of World's Finest Comics before disappearing into limbo, never to be reprinted.

This tale from  #11(1946) was written by the strip's co-creator Joe Samachson and illustrated by Jimmy Thompson, who also did another Western humor strip, Rodeo Rick, in Western Comics.

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MOVIE COMICS "Stagecoach"

Nobody personified Western movies like John Wayne, and this was his breakout film...

...immortalized in print with a unique fumetti-style adaptation in DC Comics' Movie Comics #2 (1939)

Using photographs was certainly one way around the problem of getting an exact likeness of the actors!

The design/compositing/additional art was done by Jack Adler, a production artist/illustrator who rose thru the ranks and eventually became DC Comics'  Production Manager/Vice President of Production, innovating a number of production techniques that became standard comics practices.

Movie Comics ran for six issues, adapting everything from Westerns to romances to science fiction.

(Our "brother" blog, Secret Sanctum of Captain Video™re-presented the adaptation of Phantom Creeps starring Bela Lugosi which used the same fumetti-format HERE.)

Here's a fascinating piece from a feature called Screen Scoops featuring tidbits about the actors from the various movies adapted in that issue...

Art and script by Walter Galli

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