Romance on the Range ROMANCES OF THE WEST "Cowboy or the Playboy?"

Did she want a man...or a real man?

This "modern" Western tale (set in the then-present day of 1949) has the answer!

This never-reprinted tale from Timely's Romances of the West #1 (1949) was one of Marvel mainstay John Buscema's earliest assignments, and only his second romance tale!

Do You Know About LOBO...the FIRST Black Character to Star in His Own Mainstream Comic?

In 1966, the year The Black Panther debuted in Marvel's Fantastic Four #52...

...Dell Comics went them one better, introducing the first Black hero to get his own comic!

Other Black characters had their own series (one one-shot features) in anthology titles, but Lobo was the first to have his name AS the comic's title!

Lobo combined a couple of popular plot concepts...

Man on the Run for a Crime He Did NOT Commit

Exemplified by then-hit tv series The Fugitive, Lobo was framed, but couldn't prove his innocence.

Lone Western Hero

A loner wandering the Old West, righting wrongs was an especially popular genre in tv Westerns.

Variations on the theme included gamblers (Maverick) and martial-arts experts (Kung Fu)

Note: the tv series Branded also combined both the Loner and Man Framed themes!

...as well as a new concept:

Prominent Black character

Black characters (except for sterotypes like Amos 'n Andy) were few and far between on tv until the mid-1960s, and even then only as supporting characters (usually servants).

1960s urban dramas like Naked City and East Side, West Side, which dealt with current social themes had Black guest stars including James Earl Jones and Diana Sands, but no Black regulars.

Star Trek (1966) had both a Black regular (Lt. Nyota Uhura) and Black actors in prominent roles as scientists and high-placed officers/officials (admirals, etc,).

But, at that point, there were no tv series with a Black lead or Black title character!

(Diahann Carroll's groundbreaking series Julia didn't debut until 1968, two years later!)

So, Lobo was, to say the least, a daring experiment, albeit one with as many popular themes as possible to maximize sales potential!

Dell writer/editor Don (DJ) Arneson and artist Tony Tallarico felt the time was right, and managed to convince their publisher to take a chance.

You can read Arneson's tale of Lobo's creation HERE.

Unfortunately, it didn't work.

Many vendors refused to put a comic with a Black hero on their racks, and the book had an almost 90% return rate.

Lobo the comic ran only two issues.

It's rumored that a script and unfinished art exist for a third issue, but that's never been confirmed.

You can read both issues of Lobo 

#1

and 

#2

Halloween on the Prairie TALES OF HORROR "Vampire Goes West!"

You'd think the American West would be the most unlikely place to find a vampire...

...and you'd be wrong...dead wrong!

"Silver bullets work on vampires as well as werewolves?" you ask?

Yep!

There are many methods to kill vampires in the folklore of Europe and Asia.

One of the lesser-known is the use of silver instead of wood to penetrate the vampire's vital organs.
This vampire/Western story is not from a Western comic, but the final issue of Tales of Horror (#13 from 1954)
The writer is unknown, but the penciler is Medio Iorio and inker is Sal Trapani.
Oddly, every comic story Iorio penciled, Trapani inked!
Weird, eh?

What's really weird is that there are several Western vampire films, all quite dissimilar to each other!

The earliest one is 1959's Curse of the Undead, starring Eric Fleming of Rawhide fame as a vampire hunter!

(There might have been an earlier flick had Bela Lugosi lived longer!

Ed Wood had a script entitled The Ghoul Goes West in preparation when Bella died!)

The 1960s gave us the ultra-low budget Billy the Kid vs Dracula, starring John Carradine as the Lord of Vampires.

Though there wasn't a 1970s vampire Western, the 1980s had a contemporary take on the concept with Near Dark, starring Aliens cast members Lance Henriksen, Jenette Goldstein, and Bill Paxton as vampires wandering the Southwest in a van.

But my personal favorite, from 1988, is Sundown: the Vampire in Retreat, a tongue-in-cheek flick starring a host of genre vets including David Carradine, Bruce Campbell, M Emmett Wash, Elizabeth Gracen, Dabs Greer, and John Ireland.

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Wicked West

Volume 1

CoronaVirusComics ROY ROGERS COMICS "Trigger and the Race of Life and Death"

Can you tell us what's weird about the first page of this tale of Roy Rogers' horse,Trigger?

Roy, though he appears in the story, isn't named!

Only referred to as "Trigger's owner" or, later, "Trigger's master"!

Writer Gaylord DuBois and artist Harry Parkhurst treated this never-reprinted short feature from Dell's Roy Rogers Comics #26 (1950) more like an illustrated prose story than a normal comic tale, heavy on narrative captions with minimal word balloons!

The bacteria Diphtheria is still a lethal threat to this day. but standardized vaccination keeps outbreaks at a minimum.

Besides a strip in Roy Rogers Comics, Trigger (like Gene Autry's Champion and the Lone Ranger's Silver) had his own comic, which ran 16 issues!

In his own title, Trigger was shown in his re-Roy Rogers days as a wild horse traveling with a herd, but the Roy Rogers Comics strip showed him in the care of "Uncle" Mike Hanford, who told stories of Roy and Trigger in the past tense.

Was Roy (the character, not the actual Western performer) retired or deceased at the time of the "Uncle Mike" atrips?

There's never a clear answer...

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Trigger

Lives and Legend of Roy Rogers' Palamino

Cowboys + Dinosaurs = CHRISTMAS FUN!

Art by Ross Andru and Mike Esposito

They just don't make comics like this anymore!

Masked cowboy hero vs gunslinger riding a pterodactyl...and a bright magenta pterodactyl at that!
It's the sort of concept a nine-year old would come up with while playing with his (or her) newly-unwrapped action figures under the Christmas tree, mixing the dinosaurs with superheroes and cowboys!

Why not?
That's what makes it so KOOL!
It's so darn silly, yet fun, you just have to look at it and think "what the--?"

That's exactly the sense of wonder we at Atomic Kommie Comics™ still feel!
We want to live in a world where anything can, and does, happen!
In pop culture, we call this sort of tale "cross-genre", where a story draws elements from disparate categories of fiction.

(BTW, you can read the tale behind the cover HERE!)

Sometimes there's a certain logic to it.
One of my favorite books involves fiction's greatest detective dealing with the first alien invasion!
Since he lived in London at the time the invasion took place, it seems only (dare I say it) elementary, that Sherlock Holmes would witness and analyze the Martian invasion of 1898!
That's the basis of the superb pastiche, Sherlock Holmes' War of the Worlds by Manly Wade Wellman & Wade Wellman!
That novel, to me, defines KOOL!
(The fact the story also includes another of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic characters; Professor Challenger from The Lost World and other sci-fi novels, is a cross-genre bonus!)
Track down a copy.
If you're a Holmes, Challenger, and/or War of the Worlds fan (I'm a fan of all three), it's well worth the effort!

Sometimes there's no real logic to it except--"why not?"
That's the category where something like Santa Claus Conquers the Martians goes!
And that's where the cover shown above goes.
This particular design was so cross-genre we put it in two wildly-different sections--Dinosaurs!, and Masked Western Heroes, because, hey, it fits both categories, so--"why not?"

Keep the Sense of Wonder alive!
Give a Christmas gift that keeps inspiring the imaginations of both the young and the young-at-heart!

BRAVADOS "Ride to Vengeance!" Conclusion

When Last We Left Our Heroes...

...Entering a small town, Gideon sees someone he thinks is Jonas Payne, sadistic commander of the Confederate POW camp where Gideon spent part of the Civil War!

The man claims he's not the Confederate, and the other Bravados pull Gideon off the guy before the enraged cowboy can kill him!

Returning to the bar, Gideon tells the story of how he met Payne and why he carries such a hatred for the man.

(Quick aside: If Gideon is the focus of this story, why is Josh Reno the focus of the cover scene?

Was the creative staff afriaid to show a black cowboy beating up white cowboys?)

And so, the saga of the Bravados ends.

There are rumors of unpublished material for almost all the Skywald color comics, but only a few horror stories for the b/w line have ever surfaced.

Pity...

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