Best 1948 Adventures (8)

By: Joshua Glenn
July 12, 2018

One in a series of 10 posts identifying Josh Glenn’s favorite 1948 adventure novels. Happy 70th anniversary!

Kid Colt western adventure comics (1948–1979).

When I was an adolescent buying tattered ’50s comics from flea markets and thrift stores, I was a sucker for these stories about a peripatetic young gunslinger with a quick temper who tries to restore his reputation, and help the law… but usually ends up getting into worse trouble. After Blaine Colt’s father is murdered by bandits, he challenges them to a gunfight — and, because he is an incredible shot with his six-guns — kills them all. He is accused of murder, and takes it on the lam. (Kid Colt, published by Marvel predecessor Timely and later Marvel, was at first subtitled “Hero of the West,” but after a few issues this was improved to “Outlaw.”) Montana native Pete Tumlinson’s artwork, from May 1951 — January 1953, is pretty great; though Jack Keller, who drew the character for a dozen years after that, is the talented artist with whom this reader associates Kid Colt. So popular was the character that after the mid-1960s, when pretty much every other western comic had bitten the dust, Marvel kept blazing away with Kid Colt reprints.

Fun facts: Kid Colt was the longest-running cowboy character in the history of American comic books. From 1959-1965, Stan Lee wrote many of the stories; Jack Kirby and Dick Ayers drew the covers.

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Best 1948 Adventures (8)

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