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[MarkWarner]

It looks like last week's book, Wonder Comics #10 was a pretty good choice. So let's hope the roll continues! This week we have another pick from my ancient and rapidly decaying list of requests. I could have sworn that we have already read this title, but I have had a look and can't find it!

The Hooded Horseman #25 can be found at https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=16024, and the story we are concentrating on is the first one starting on our page 3.

[SuperScrounge]

The Hooded Horseman - erg, western dialect writing... Yuh know Hooded Horseman ya'll be much more effective at sneakin' aroun', if'n yuh didn't narrate what you wuz doin'! Aside from those quibbles, not bad.

Hunting the Wild Buffalo - Cause I guess hunting the tame buffalo isn't much of a challenge. ;-) Interesting.

The Death of Little Cloud - Eh.

Injun Jones - Ehhh... had some nice moments, but overall not good.

The Lost Gold Mine - Interesting.

Duel! - Okay.

The Bantam Buckaroo - Fun little story.

Gunnfighting in the Old West - Interesting.

[Mazzucchelli]

First thing you need to know about this comic book is that it

[SuperScrounge]

the western dialect is everywhere. And it can be difficult to read for non-americans

It can be difficult for us Americans as well. 

Well written dialect dialogue can be good, but most writers aren't as good at it as they think they are. It's one thing to use it occasionally as a "flavoring", but going full dialect is almost always a mistake. Unless the point is that even other characters have trouble understanding the person, it should be avoided.

[jimmm kelly]

Not to be overly picky, but the linguist in me wouldn't exactly call this dialect.

The writer has misspelled words to give the flavour of the accent. But the problem with trying to approximate accents in written English is that everyone's understanding of how the letters should sound is different depending on their own regional pronunciation. To some people giving a soft pronunciation to the r is standard English while to others it should be a hard r that rolls.

English as a written language is designed to be understood by a broad group. We then read out the language with our own accent. So to some people "western" sounds like "wastrun" while to others it sounds like "westr'n"--funnily enough hardly anyone pronounces it like it's spellt.

There are a few words here that would create a dialect if there was a greater distinction from standard English. We don't usually say things like a-going--but it's not so out of the ordinary.

All of the English could've been rendered using the proper spelling, while throwing in some colloquial expressions, and it would have worked just fine.  That's my opinion on writing colloquial language. None of us actually speaks the words as they are spellt--we unstress vowels so they become schwa or we leave off consonant endings often when the next word begins with a consonant as well. But that's not enough to create a new dialect. It's just how we talk.

[Morgus]

The cover was laugh out loud funny for me, because, on our heavy days as work, I will jokingly call my boss 'sahib'. And I wanted to see him ride that tiger BAD. And, yeah, Mazzucchelli I bet less then one kid in ten didn't notice the bait and switch.
...but that accent? (Or whatever it is?)
Reminded me of Mantan Moreland in his movies...especially KING OF THE ZOMBIES. Since Mantan breaks me up, this was pretty funny to me. I LIKED the art just fine, but yeah, the hero telling everyone just what he was doing as he was doing it got a bit thin.
So for me, it was a nice fun read.

[crashryan]

Jimmm, your discussion brings to mind "Captain Brassbound's Conversion," in which George Bernard Shaw renders Drinkwater's lower-class accent phonetically. I tried reading the play and gave up in despair after a few pages, deciding to wait for a performance (which never came, incidentally).

As one who hears the words as he reads, I'm always aware of this stuff (probably too much so). Some phonetic Cowboy Spelling drives me crazy. Especially ones like "thuh" for "the." Most Americans these days pronounce "the" as "thuh," not "thee." Ditto "whut" for "what." Some people do say the word with the "aw" sound, but "whut" is definitely the most common pronunciation. Maybe the variant spelling is supposed to suggest illiteracy or something. Personally I'd think tossing in a few Cowboy Cliches would be sufficient. "You rannies better mosey on along." A construction like "them there hills" does the job just as well as "thum thar hills."

[bowers]

May I add a hearty "Amen" to all previous comments? I truly understand the writer trying to give his work a bit of "authenticity". I find this type of dialog annoying, distracting and rendering the story almost unreadable.

Looks like another Lone Ranger knockoff. Heck, how many can you name? Ajax had The Lone Rider,  Standard the Mystery Rider, ME had two- Masked Ranger and Tim holt did a stretch as Red Mask of the Rio Grande. Also Atlas had The Black Rider, Charlton The Masked Raider, and I think the UK had something called The Hooded Rider. Also pretty sure Toby had one. Any more?

I like western comics, but didn't enjoy this one very much. My favorite feature was probably the Lost Dutchman story, followed by Bantam Buckaroo. This one was barely ok. Cheers, Bowers

[crashryan]

So hyar we be, podnuh. Let's git tuh wuhk inspektin'...I can't do it. I can't bring myself to write this critique in Cowboy Speak.

Having already discussed the agony of ploughing through all these pages of Western palaver, I'll only make a couple of quick observations. One is that even in western comics the heroes tend to speak more clearly than others. Some pronunciations, like "jist" and "idee" are usually reserved for comic relief characters. Here the heroes mangle with the best of them. Then, on page 15, a cowboy says "crikey!" I don't know if it's true in the real world, but in American pop culture "crikey" is what Cockney Englishmen say. This would be like Andy Capp saying, "Thunderation!" Finally, in the Injun Joe story the Apaches speak better English than anyone else in the comic!

Even acknowledging the different attitudes of different times, the Hooded Horseman story is awfully heavy on the Noble White Men vs. the Murderous Redskins stuff. Aside from that, for some reason I find the story funny. Maybe it has to do with exclamations like "Jumpin' Jimson!" and "He's a two-gun fool!" On page 8, when Flash is running to the rescue, the caption says, "...borne faintly on the night wind came the unmistakable signs of his master's presence." I immediately imagined that The Hooded Horseman's exertions in the previous pages had given him a killer case of B.O. which SAVED HIS LIFE! If he'd used Lifebuoy HH would be dead now.

"Hunting the Wild Buffalo" celebrated the ruthless slaughter that nearly made the bison extinct. The text story, ":Death of Little Cloud," begins with a little sympathy for the Indians' point of view, but ends with Little Cloud deciding it's not so bad to be exterminated because the White Men are just so good at it. Yuck.

"Injun Joe" is so-so. Is it an editorial oversight that two rifles-to-the-Indians stories appear in the same issue? I find the story a bit confusing. However I admit that I didn't wade through all the dialogue so I may have missed something. "Bantam Buckaroo" isn't too bad. In both this and the Hooded Rider story you can see Leonard Starr working toward the mature slick style he used on "On Stage." I like his work.

The true-story shorts about the lost mine and justified homicide in the Old West are interesting. In fact they're more fun than the features.

As for the cover...if I had bought this comic as a kid I've have been furious. I would have bought it on the strength of the cover alone. The image is irresistible! And then to discover Cowboy Sahib isn't in the book! This has to have been the result of a production mixup. I understand covers were sent to the printers before the insides. Maybe Cowboy Sahib was to have been in this issue but at the last moment they learned it wouldn't be ready. They were stuck with the cover, so a letterer crammed "He's coming soon" in just before it went to press.

One last thing. In the ad for "The Kilroys" we read about teenager Natch and his "little lovin' oven" Judy. Even in my naive youth I'd have found that phrase rather suggestive.

[MarkWarner]

I know he's just another Lone Ranger clone, but I have always liked the look of the Hooded Horseman. The covers always look cool. Although scoring high on the coolness factor, this one is not typical as it doesn't feature him ... and from what I gather there is not a sniff of Cowboy Sahib inside!

After reading the first story I can say he's okish. 'B' movie on a page, but no ducking the issue by handing them to the sheriff, the baddies died!

Next is a one pager. I am not a great fan of hunting, so reading how to slaughter buffalo is well down on my to do list. The text story, 'The Death of Little Cloud' is a complete waste of time. A non-story! Injun Jones stated OK, but it got increasingly "hard work" and I ended up a tad bored. The one page "The Lost Gold Mine" was excellent. A real tall tale and certainly the best bit of the comic so far! The text story Duel! was just about acceptable.

The Bantam Buckaroo follows next, and I think this going to be a hard slog to the finish line.

YAAGH! Muh head's been sliced clean off'n muh carcass!

Hear that? Them's his last words ...

Apart from reading the text was akin to wading through treacle, this actually had a story and a bit of humor. We finish with a lightweight two pager about gunfighting.

Verdict: A disappointment and a big miss! Read the one page "The Lost Gold Mine", and skip the rest. Looking at the other comments, for me the language was a minor irritation. My main gripe is the lack of storyline and it being plain boring!! The art I thought was actually rather good and it has a great cover!

[narfstar]

Pretty mundane tale. Nothing much more than I agree with the other comments.

[crashryan]

One lthing about this comic really surprised me. Injun Joe, though fighting on the White Man side and speaking Cowboy Speak, is without question a full-blooded Indian. Yet he has a White girl friend. She cares for him deeply and has even promised to marry him! At the time--especially given the racial bias throughout this book--such a romance would have been unthinkable. Almost like a black/white romance. I wonder if the editor and/or publisher was too close to the character to catch this.

[narfstar]

Or such a forbidden romance may have been part of their ancestory and they wanted to show it in a positive light