Beware! The Rawhide Kid!

In many ways it can well be said that the Marvel Age of Comics began with the Rawhide Kid. With the seventeenth issue of that comic, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby took a character from the Atlas catalog and utterly reinvented him and imbued him with a brash energy which was evocative of changes to come later in the pages of Fantastic Four and beyond.

The original Rawhide Kid was a tall blonde heroic figure decked out in western finery and strutted in proper fashion. The new Rawhide Kid was a real youngster named Johnny Clay (later "Bart") who wore fancy leathers but cut a small figure with a chip on his shoulder. An orphan twice over there seems to be an interior nature to the Kid which was often missing from the typical stalwart western hero.

This new Rawhide Kid wanted to stay out of trouble until he didn't. He wanted to be law-abiding until he didn't. He was a tough as nails little fellow ready scrap and also willing to tuck in his pride if it would help the situation or establish a proper lesson. We have here a more complex character than comics was used to (for the most part) and you can see in his peripatetic adventures a range of feelings and reflections as he moseys across the hills and plains of the mythic west.

Kirby's artwork is dynamic and his storytelling is spotless in these issues of Rawhide Kid. He seems to really have an affinity for the little man who rides the rugged trails and has to constantly prove his mettle against all sorts of men who tower over him. He is constantly underestimated and proves his skills are more than sufficient to overcome. Kirby had to identify with the Rawhide Kid more than a little.

With the thirty-second issue Jack Kirby stepped away from the interior art chores though he stayed on covers. The expanding nature of the Marvel Universe proper left him no time for the Old West adventures of the Rawhide Kid. With special annual issues for the Fantastic Four and elsewhere and new series pending like The Avengers and The X-Men something had to give way.

And while Jack Davis (of EC Comics fame) does a creditable job for several issues beginning with issue thirty-three, he's not an artist in the Kirby mode by any chance and his Kid is at once older and less classically handsome.

After Davis leaves the series, Dick Ayers steps in to take over as he did on Sgt.Fury and the Howling Commandos so effectively. But eventually even Ayers steps away and Larry Lieber, who had been used as a writer for the most part, steps in and makes the Rawhide Kid his own for the duration of the strips long run.

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