Black Diamond's Western Lore!!

Let it never be said that comics weren't educational:

There. Now you've learned something today. You're welcome!!

From Black Diamond Western #14-15, 17 & 19 (1949-1950)

Manic Monday Bonus--This Is Why You Don't Crowdsource Horse Names!!

Back in 1949, Lev Gleason Publications decided to get in on the Western hero act, changing Desperado Comics to Black Diamond Comics with issue #9:

Not too much beyond the standard here--Bob Vale lost his family to outlaws (twice!!), and adopted a masked identity to hunt down bad guys. Sometimes he left a playing card with a black diamond (specially made?!?) as his calling card. And yes, somehow a masked man actually became a U.S. Marshall. Go figure.

Anyway, since he was a hero, his horse needed a name. And rather than come up with one themselves, they decided to outsource the job:

Yup, a "name the horse" contest, with a $1000 top prize.

You also had to solve a couple of puzzles (presumably to get around various state laws requiring giveaways to be based on skill, rather than luck?!?):

And yet a fourth page for the entry form and details:

Yes, they dedicated 4 entire flippin' pages to this contest!!

And they were serious, as they kept running full-page reminders for a couple of months:

Finally, in issue #15, we had a winner!

And the winner? The best name for Black Diamond's horse?!?

Reliapon?!? Are you kidding me?

Nope.

There were more $2 winners listed on another page, in case you're counting...

Sure enough, in that very issue, the horse was named Reliapon:

Sigh.

Today, Reliapon is a "police products" company offering "the finest in non-lethal products and training." No, really. 

Meanwhile, no matter how stupid I think the name may be, there was a race horse named Reliapon back in the 90s, so what do I know? As near as I can tell, though, it finished 10th in its only recorded race. Which is why you don't name a horse Reliapon.

The Greatest Horse Vs. Bear Fight In Comics History!!

The U.S. Army is trying to round up wild horses for the cavalry to use. But wild stallion Thunderhoof and his filly Stardust are having none of it!

But it's out of the frying pan...

...and into the fire!!

What follows is the greatest horse vs. bear fight in comic book history:

Hey!! Thunderhoof didn't need your help, puny human!!

Don't worry...Thunderhoof and Stardust get away and continue their untamed life...

From Black Terror #5 (1944)

The Hombre In The Iron Mask!!

As Marvel entered the super-hero era, Stan et. al sometimes tried to inject a little bit of that success into their Western titles, especially the villeins:

YOW!!

Here's the cover of a reprint of that story, by Gil Kane:

It didn't take very long to bring the guy back:

A re-colored and re-dialogued version from a later reprint:

You can't keep a good villain down for long, as...

Sure, Iron Mask only got a blurb there, but it was a Rawhide Kid/Kid Colt team-up. That's gotta be your cover.

Iron Mask had one last try left in him:

And he brought The Circus Of Crime (ye olde West version) with him!!

Here's the cover from the reprint, with some retouching from John Romita:

Now, the resemblance to prominent Marvel bad guy Dr. Doom is kinda of obvious...

...but in all honesty, the "Western villain in an iron suit" wasn't all that original of an idea,to begin with:

Indeed, one or both of these incarnations might have been inspired by Ned Kelly, Australian outlaw of the 1870s, whose gang all dressed in handmade armor and masks for their final stand:

SPOILER ALERT: The whole gang except Kelly died in that showdown, and Kelly himself was severely wounded, so maybe the dressing up in "bulletproof" armor wasn't such a great idea.

Marvel's Iron Mask has a a couple of time-travel based appearances since then, and an alternate-universe version of him showed up in one of the Marvel Zombie series.

But surely there's some undeveloped story potential left. Maybe after his many defeats at the hands of Kid Colt, blacksmith/genius Don Hertz traveled to the east, and met the monks who would later make Doom's armor. Throw in a side trip to K'un-L'un, and stowing away on Kang's vessel (from the time Thor & Hawkeye went to the Old West!), and we start to have a story maybe?

That's why I'm not allowed to write comics.

Tales From The Quarter Bin--Owlhoots?!?

Today I found these two book in the Quarter Bin:

So, what are the odds that I would find two books, right next to each other, that had the hero calling the bad guys "owlhoots" on the cover?

 As it turns out after a little research, it wasn't that unlikely...

Now, it should be noted that I'm sure I missed some. Marvel had an awful lot of damned Western titles, and some of them ran forever. Did you know that Kid Colt Outlaw ran for 229 issues?!?! The Action Comics of Westerns!!

So, yeah, lots of covers to look at, some titles I'm sure that I forgot about, and I was mainly skimming word balloons, so I almost certainly missed some.

It should also be pointed out that the majority of "owlhoots" come from the 1970s reprint covers. Timely/Atlas didn't usually have a ton of word balloons on their covers, and the '60s Marvel titles preferred "coyotes" or "varmints" or "polecats" or just plain "outlaws" as their cover sobriquets.

I'm not sure why that was. The term owlhoot was certainly around long before the 1970s. Was there a recent movie or TV series that made the term particularly popular at the time? Was whoever was editing these mags just especially enamored of the term?

(This is also a good time to mention that man, Marvel had a lot of Western anthology titles at the time. They were pretty much all reprints at the time, but they were obviously still popular enough to justify repackaging into a "giant-size" format to suck up kids' quarters.)

No, I didn't look at any DC western titles. I'll leave that for someone else.

Look, there's a rare example of an owlhoot in a cover caption!!

Anyway, why, exactly, did "owlhoot" come to mean outlaw/bad guy? Why not "falconscreech" or "pigeoncooing"? This website presents a couple of theories:

Outlaws were referred to as “owlhoots.” “Riding the owlhoot trail” referred to a man who had left the straight and narrow to become an outlaw.

One explanation of origin came from a man living in the Indian Territory of eastern Oklahoma around 1870. He claimed the name came about from the Indians in the area using owl hoots to signal danger or someone’s approach.

Another tale goes that outlaws were called “owlhoots” because, when they were getting ready to ambush somebody in the dark, they would imitate the hooting of owls to signal to each other.

Go figure. And don't ask me to explain this one:

Nope, I'm not going to scour comic book covers for the word "crawfish." You're on your own there.

BONUS: What if Peter Parker were raised in the Old West?

Man, if you're an uncle and your name is Ben--CHANGE YOUR NAME NOW!!!

DOUBLE BONUS: Wakanda forever?

T'Challa's great-great-grandfather, no doubt...

Wayne's World!

Party time! Excellent!!

Oh...wrong Wayne.

Yup, this is John Wayne Adventure Comics, which stars John Wayne as himself, both in westerns and WWII stories. Because you don't mess with John Wayne!

For example...

Here he's solving a Scooby Doo mystery, as bad guys are dressing like glowing skeletons to scare folks into selling their (uranium-filled!) land cheap.

Scooby Doo AND John Wayne?!? Man, it's enough to make you wonder whether these "make people think places are haunted" scams really happened...

Anyway, Wayne has a sidekick named Bonanza--go figure--who is mainly comedy relief. Because, really, is there anything wittier than constantly mispronouncing "skeletons"?

Oh, trust me, there's lots more talk about "skelly-tons."

Anyway, the owlhoots get the drop on our heroes...

...but Wayne shows his true grit!

D'oh!! Who'd have thought that there was a drawback to having gunfights in glow-in-the-dark costumes?!?

It's John Wayne's world, and we're just living in it!

From John Wayne Adventure Comics #15 (1952)