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CHAPTER 4 Quick Draw The Comics ofRoy Rogers, Dale Evans, and Trigger Comic books from 1930 ro 1960 provided hours ofentertainment for millions ofyoung Americans as they read, collected, and traded their favorite publications. Collecting and trading was a universal activity among American juveniles of that time, and it was an unusual child who did not have a stack of comic books tucked away under his or her bed, ready for an easy read or trade. These youngsters each had their favorite comic book heroes. They all waited expectantly for the local newsstand or drugstore to receive the new monthly or bimonthly issues featuring Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel, Wonder Woman, Plastic Man, the Green Lantern, and others. Although superheroes dominated in popularity among comic book heroes of the period, western American heroes were also important, especially those based upon the fictional lives of B Western stars. Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, although not the first, became western comic book characters in the 1940s, following a pattern that had been established in the 1930s. Beginning in the '30s and continuing through the 1940s and 1950s, comic book companies featured several movie cowboys. Tom Mix made the earliest appearance in March 1937 with a story in The Comics; the same magazine published a Tex Ritter comic story the following year. Tom Mix also appeared in Popular Comics in 1938, followed by Tim McCoy and Gene Autry in the early 1940s. Fawcett Publications began a regular Gene Autry series in 1941, but two years later Dell publishers took control of the sequence and shortly thereafter included Autry in its Four Color comics before giving him a regular series in 1946. 1 In the late 1940s and 1950s, Fawcett, Dell, Magazine Enterprises, Charlton, Marvel, Toby, and DC comics published books featuring , among other western movie stars, Buck Jones, John Wayne, Bob Steele, Bill Boyd (Hopalong Cassidy), Johnny Mack Brown, Tex Ritter, Allan "Rocky" Lane, Tim Holt, and Lash LaRue. The Lone Ranger also had a series beginning in 1948 and continuing through 145 issues to 1962.2 These western comic book series varied in story quality and artistic appeal, but were all action oriented with stories that featured riding, roping, shooting, and fist fighting. While some publishers may have been a bit more graphic in their violence than others, generally the heroes all respected life and seldom shot to kill. DC Comics provided strong western action with unusual stories and character development. For instance, DC 67 Copyrighted Material 68 King of the Cowboys, Queen of the West Comics hero Jimmy Wakely (Jimmy Wakely, no. 18, July-August 1952) deals with incredible mysteries that include strange miniature wooden figures that talk and a ghostly presence called the Phantom Brander. Also, DC took a chance on female western heroines and initiated the Dale Evans series in 1948. In the Jimmy Wakely comic, DC ran "Kit Colby: Girl Sheriff," a story featuring a trouser-clad, six-gun-toting redhead who uses her fists, a lariat, and a pistol to subdue villains. While Dale Evans in her DC comics certainly matched the drama of Kit Colby, the stories in her later Dell series were more subdued. The Tex Ritter stories, published in Fawcett Comics, combined interesting art with scripts and dialogue that were much more wordy than the Roy Rogers tales in the Dell series. For instance, a comparison of three Fawcett Tex Ritter stories with three Dell Roy Rogers scripts reveals that the Ritter yarns averaged 26.5 words per panel while the Rogers narratives averaged 18.6 words per panel. (Tex Ritter, no. 16, April 1953; Roy Rogers, no. 79, July 1954). On the other hand, the individual Rogers stories included twice as many picture panels as the Ritter narratives, all in an appealing page layout. Tim Holt, in Magazine Enterprises comics, engaged in more graphic violence and gunplay than did Ritter or Rogers. With his sidekick, Chito, Tim occasionally shot to kill and readily punched and kicked the villains (Tim Holt, no. 14, January 1950). While comparisons and contrasts can be made, one must not overplay the minor differences between Rogers and Evans's comics and those of other movie cowboys and heroines. Their common characteristics of cowboy action and adventure set in the West made them more alike than different. A basic understanding of all western comic book heroes comes after a survey and analysis of the comic books of Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, and Trigger. Beginning in 1944, when Dell first featured Rogers...

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