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

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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