Confederate Comics GRAY GHOST "Point of Honor" Part 1

A Civil War Confederate Guerilla with His Own TV Series?

Yep, it happened...

...and here's a story from the two-issue comic book based on it!

To be Concluded
FRIDAY
at our 'brother" RetroBlog, Secret Sanctum of Captain Video!

The series portrayed Mosby as a Robin Hood-type rogue who just happened to serve the Confederacy.

He's shown to be a man of honor and moral conviction, and the matter of the actual reasons for the Civil War is never addressed!

This never-reprinted tale from Dell's Four Color Comics #911 (1958) is illustrated by Ray Bailey and George Woodbridge, who later became a regular contributor to MAD Magazine.

The adaptation's writer, however, is unknown...

The story is adapted from Ep 3 of the 39-episode TV series!

Sadly, little physical evidence exists of the 1957 all-but-forgotten syndicated show besides the two issues of Dell's Four Color Comics!

Trivia: the best-known performer (to the contemporary audience) in this episode was Angie Dickenson as Edie!

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Gray Ghost
Life of Colonel John Singleton Mosby

Confederate Comics THE REBEL "Bad Medicine" Part 2

We Have Already Seen...

...returning to his home town after the end of the Civil War and avenging the death of his father, former Confederate soldier Johnny Yuma feels there's no reason to stay...

Will Johnny Yuma rescue Dr Holcomb?
Will Little Buffalo Calf foul up the attempt?
Find Out...
...FRIDAY
at 
Secret Sanctum of Captain Video

Written by Gardner DuBois, penciled by Mike Sekowsky, and inked by Mike Peppe, this section of this never-reprinted tale from Dell's Four Color Comics #1076 (1960) shows Johnny Yuma as a rather typical noble hero wandering the Old West, without any reference to his Confederate past, an element usually played up in the live-action series!

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The Rebel
Season 2

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 KID COLT COMICS "Black Rider in Face to Face with Death!"

Probably the only masked Western hero to be a medical doctor in his secret identity...

...a secret the mysterious Black Rider used to his advantage in this never-reprinted story from Atlas' Kid Colt Outlaw Comics #38 (1954)!

Illustrated by Joe Kubert, this tale of infection among Indians has an unknown author due to lack of credits in the pre-Marvel Atlas Comics!.

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Western Classics

Graphic Classics Volume Twenty

CoronaVirus Cowboy Comics MONTE HALE WESTERN "Curse of Typhoid Valley"

Monte Hale, like Gene Autry, Tex Ritter, and Roy Rogers...

...was a "singing cowboy" who had his own comic during the 1940s and 50s.

(Ironically, Monte ended up as a co-founder and curator for the Gene Autry Museum in Los Angeles)

Oddly, in most of these actor-named comics, the protagonists were the actors themselves (not characters they played), even if the stories were set in the Old West!

When this tale from Fawcett's Monte Hale Western #74 (1952) was reprinted in Charlton's Monte Hale Western (1956), the newly-formed Comics Code Authority insisted on a major change...

...removing the figure of the Grim Reaper from the title page!

Charlton's editor did it on the black line plate, but didn't change the color separations, which still match the figure of the Reaper!

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Western Films of Monte Hale

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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Vertigo Visions

Tomahawk

STAR RANGER "Trouble Shooters in Dude Ranch Dramatics"

What do cowboys do on Valentine's Day?

Apparently, they dress in women's clothing!

From Chester's Star Ranger #2 (1937), this never-reprinted short, written by George Nagle and illustrated by an unknown artist, is the only one of the series to feature cross-dressing.

Oddly, the strip started as "Trouble Hunters" in the previous issue, and continued after this tale with the name restored!

Why this one tale was labeled "Trouble Shooters" is unknown!

Two trivia notes:

There was no character named "Star Ranger" in Star Ranger!

This book, along with Comics Magazine Company's Western Picture Stories were the first Western comic books, coming out the same month in 1937!