Marvel's Rawhide Kid mini-series from 1985 is buried in multiple layers of nostalgia. There's the nostalgia the reader feels today, looking back on the Marvel of the mid-1980s. There's the nostalgia for the bygone days of Marvel's Western comics, when characters like the Rawhide Kid, Kid Colt and the Two-Gun Kid were published regularly. Then there's the nostalgia felt by the Rawhide Kid himself, an older character in this mini-series, for his youth, when he could "roam the country freely, riding four weeks without seeing another human face, let alone having to circumnavigate a fence."
Writer Bill Mantlo, one of Marvel's busiest scribes in the 1980s, does a good job balancing modernism with the Old West of so much dime-novel and Hollywood myth-making. The Rawhide Kid in Mantlo's script is both a beneficiary and a victim of this myth-making, being the star of a series of magazine adventures that exaggerate his prowess and burnish his legend. The stories are a source of income, but they also lead to gunfights in every city he visits when young turks anxious to make names for themselves attempt to outdraw him. (It's never explained why Rawhide — "Don't call me Kid! Ah'm old enough t'be yore daddy!" — doesn't just change his clothes and go by a different name.)
Fans of the original Rawhide Kid stories will find much to appreciate here. He still shoots the guns out of his opponents' hands, rides backwards on his trusty steed, Nightwind, and swings off buildings like a trained acrobat. While he complains occasionally about his age and arthritis, neither condition keeps him from outdrawing and outfighting his enemies. Each issue is mostly self-contained. Young Jeff Packard, Rawhide's "understudy" who is on the run from Pinkerton agents, does provide an overarching subplot from month to month.
The most successful issue is the first, illustrated by Herb Trimpe and John Severin, and colored by Marie Severin. Not surprisingly given the Severins' presence, it evokes classic comic-book Westerns of the past. The first issues also gives readers a quick recap of the Kid's "origin," where the young character seeks revenge for the death of his Uncle Ben (shades of Spider-Man!).
Trimpe pencils the remaining three issues, inked and embellished by various hands — Gerry Talaoc on issues two and three, Dan Bulandi on the fourth. It's all easy on the eyes and clearly delineated, although it's hard to see any of Trimpe's style throughout; the inkers and finishers really overpower the pencils.
At various points, Mantlo addresses social concerns outside the realm of Marvel's earlier Westerns. In the second issue, Rawhide demonstrates empathy for the plight of Native Americans: "Grey Bear and his people didn't have no real way o' defendin' themselves against the white folks who flooded over their lands an' swept their way o' life away!" The third issue features an African-American bounty hunter and the Ku Klux Klan, although they are never called by that name. It's a welcome concession to the larger realities of the nineteenth century that are too often glossed over in the genre.
That last issue is where a mostly pleasant series goes off the rails, as Rawhide spends too much of the story having nightmares about his own death and fighting under a cloud of hallucinations, fancying that he faces many of his previous enemies. It feels a lot like those Marvel anniversary issues of old, such as The Incredible Hulk #200, where the title character faces phantom versions of all his foes while traipsing around at microscopic size in somebody else's brain. And I was disappointed that the Terrible Totem didn't put in an appearance. As one of Rawhide's strangest foes, he definitely deserved a shout-out.
I'm not sure what to make of the ending. Has the aged Rawhide outgrown his legend? Embraced it? Does he ride off to further adventures? Or to a life of peace? He does show up fifteen years later in two fantastic mini-series written by John Ostrander and Leonardo Manco, but is that the same Rawhide we see here?
Regardless, the final issue is the one misfire — get it? — of an otherwise enjoyable series of adventures with one of Marvel's earliest characters. I don't believe these four issues have ever been collected, but I can't believe the originals would be hard to come by or very expensive.
No comments:
Post a Comment