Marvel offered four genres on the newsstands in November 1960, and superheroes weren’t among them.
Readers could enjoy only westerns, humor, romance or giant monster comics from Marvel that month — although Two-Gun Kid was tackling the superhero-sized challenge of a giant monster.
Another Marvel western gunman, the Rawhide Kid, was in only the fourth issue of a new and more popular incarnation.
“The title now featured a diminutive yet confident, soft-spoken fast gun constantly underestimated by bullying toughs, varmints, owlhoots, polecats, crooked saloon owners and other archetypes squeezed through the prism of (Stan) Lee and Jack) Kirby’s anarchic imagination,” observed comics historian Don Markstein. “As in the outsized, exuberantly exaggerated action of the later-to-come World War II series Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, The Rawhide Kid was now a freewheeling romp of energetic, almost slapstick action across cattle ranches, horse troughs, corrals, canyons and swinging chandeliers.”
Two-Gun Kid was also due for a revamp. He’d become a masked western hero with a new identity in Two-Gun Kid 60 (Nov. 1962). The previous Two-Gun Kid, who’d debuted in 1948, was wrongly accused gunslinger Clay Harder, while the new one would be Harvard-educated attorney Matt Hawk. Harder rode Cyclone, and Hawk charged around on Thunder.
The connection? Hawk had read about Harder in dime novels.
“It wasn’t the first use of such a ploy,” Markstein said. “Six years earlier, DC’s character the Flash had chosen his name the same way.”
Four of the 11 titles on sale that month featured giant monsters — the Scarecrow, the Colossus, Rorgg and the Brute That Walks. Two were westerns, and five were aimed at a female audience.
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