[The Australian Panther]

Comic book superheroes of this time used to often have a teenage [or younger] sidekick.
In Westerns of the period the hero always had to have as a sidekick, an older bearded, short, idiosyncratic guy who was at times comic relief.
Fuzzy St John in this case.
Anybody explain to me 'Why?'

Link to the book: Motion Picture Comics 111 The Vanishing Outpost

[crashryan]

This is a good question. I wonder if there was an "original" bearded, short, older comic western sidekick who proved popular enough that all the studios cast their own imitation. There certainly were plenty of them in 1950s Western comics. I think the underlying notion behind all movie western sidekicks was to find someone as much as possible the opposite of the hero. Hero: serious, handsome, tall, young, intelligent, proper, physically fit, clean, effective, brave. Sidekick: prankster, "funny-looking," short, old, dumb/clueless, indecorous, scrawny/fat/weak, dirty/shabby/rumpled, bumbling, cowardly. Fuzzy St. John and The Cisco Kid's Pancho were the same character in different bodies.

[bowers]

 As sidekicks go, Panther and Crash are pretty spot-on in their descriptions of these necessary characters. However, I would like to mention Richard Martin who played "Chito Rafferty", the Mexican-Irish sidekick of Tim Holt. Chito was always very careful about his appearance, as he considered himself a ladies' man and often ended up with (or escaped from) the second female lead. A comic foil to be sure, but there was nobody better to have with you in a scrape. He repeated this character in nearly 30 films. I was surprised to learn he was born in my hometown of Spokane, WA. By the way, anybody know where we got the term "sidekick"?  Happy trails, Bowers

[crashryan]

I researched the origin of sidekick and came up with two competing explanations. The first, the one listed in Wikipedia and therefore the one spread about the Internet, says:

The term is believed to have originated in pickpocket slang of the late 19th and early 20th century. The "kick" was the front pocket of a pair of trousers, believed to be the pocket safest from theft. Thus, by analogy, a "side-kick" was a person's closest companion.

However I found a much more likely explanation over at World Wide Words (https://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-sid1.htm). Here they say:

It?s a relative of a rather older and much more obvious American colloquialism, side-partner, for one?s colleague, counterpart, buddy, mate or opposite number. That dates to the 1850s, if not before...The side part is easy enough to explain. It meant a person who was literally or figuratively at one?s side. The most likely source for the second part is an old sense of kick, meaning to walk or wander (the idea is of idly kicking stones) that turned into kick around or kick about, to hang around. Those are recorded in the US from the 1830s. So a sidekicker, later a sidekick, was a friend you kicked around with.

The essay provides many examples to back up its arguments, tying things up by observing, "kick for a pocket was British slang, not American, whereas the buddy meaning of sidekick is definitely from the US and is also older."