At right, a cover painting from the Masked Rider Western pulp; at left, Masked Raider art by Pete Morisi
The western genre crossed the border into superhero territory early on through figures like Zorro and the Lone Ranger.
And their imitators were numerous — from the Ghost Rider to Marvel’s Two-Gun Kid and Black Rider to DC Comics’ Nighthawk and El Diablo. The pulp Masked Rider Western ran from 1934 to 1953, and the ever-derivative Charlton Comics offered the Gunmaster (Six-Gun Heroes 57, June 1960) and the Masked Raider, who debuted in his own title in June 1955.
And why not? Westerns, private eye stories and superhero sagas all share a similar theme.
“Weighed down by anxieties they were largely helpless to resolve, audiences in the 1950s craved simplicity and clarity,” wrote literature professor Kathleen L. Spencer in her thoughtful book on Have Gun Will Travel. “The western gave them a world in which social problems could be solved by direct action, including violence if necessary.”
Even as the initial popularity of superheroes faded after World War II, the masked western heroes were still riding high.
Comics historian Don Markstein noted, “Western heroes who wear masks to conceal their identities, like the Lone Ranger, predate comic books — but as the genre grew to prominence in comics, following the drop in popularity of once-dominant superheroes, cowboy heroes with secret identities proliferated in comics like they never had elsewhere, perhaps because that story element had become so familiar to writers that they had an easy time constructing stories around it. Thus, by the end of the 1940s, Johnny Thunder, the Ghost Rider and more were sporting that superhero trope, with more coming as long as westerns retained their position in the field.”
“(W)ith Nighthawk, the Lemonade Kid, the Lone Rider and so many more all concealing their names while doing their good deeds, it seems almost as if the previous decade’s superheroes hadn’t gone away, but just traded in their Batmobiles and Star Rocket Racers for horses,” Markstein wrote.
Pop culture historian J. Fred MacDonald observed, “What the TV western was offering was open warfare, a protracted battle between obvious legality and illegality. At stake was control of civilization. There was neither time nor reason for studied response. The answer to each dilemma was obvious: enough strategy, enough muscle, enough gunpowder. Through the concerted application of the brains and brawn of good men, this form of adult entertainment showed, indeed advocated, an efficient way to tame the savage and rescue humanity.”
Spencer said, “In the process of exploring such issues, the TV westerns of the 1950s provided models for how a man was supposed to act: protecting the weak, facing down the brigand (whether outlaw, marauding Indian or tyrannical cattle baron) to prevent them from abusing the innocent, even while restraining his own violent impulses within the boundaries of a rigorous ethical code. The western hero, in his purest form, sacrificed himself to make a better world for others, to transform a nearly lawless frontier into a place where civilization could take hold.”
“There is no way to know how many viewers took these lessons to heart and and acted on them in the real world,” Spencer wrote. “Perhaps some of the idealistic college students who risked their lives to fight for civil rights for blacks in the South were inspired in part by the Westerner; certainly (as anecdotes reveal) some small but real percentage of the young men who volunteered to go fight in Vietnam were motivated by the television heroes of their childhood and adolescence.”
So why did these cowboy heroes, once so ubiquitous on TV and movies, ride off into the sunset? The answer is they did not. They are still with us, in disguise.
In all important respects, the western hero is the superhero, now all dusted off, now streamlined and jet-propelled. Civilization is still threatened, but now by forces tricked up as super criminals, alien invaders and supernatural monsters.
Like the western hero, the superhero is still simplistic in his solutions, still self-sacrificing in his ethics and still stands between us and the savage menaces of the frontier, but one that is no longer merely geographical.
The superhero’s frontier is, as Rod Serling once intoned, “…a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination.”
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