[MarkWarner]

Last week's book Noodnik #3 had rather mixed reviews, so I am not sure how this week's choice will be received.

I bumped across this in my travels. It's a great cover! Although I have heard of the Dalton Boys, I know nothing about them, so this seems a good opportunity to improve my knowledge (taken with  big pinch of salt!) and also choose this week's book!

Famous Western Badmen #15 can be found at https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=32069, and the story we are concentrating on is the last one "The Dalton Boys", which starts on our page 27.

[Captain Audio]

The stories were okay, as srories but had little to do with historical fact. The Dalton Gang were massacred while attempting a bank robbery in Coffeeville Kansas. Emmet Dalton survived.

The First story is further off. Black Jack Ketchum was wounded and captured in an attempt to rob a train single handed, and since they amputated the wounded arm everything he did from then on was single handed.
He was sentenced to death for robbing the Railroad, under a law later declared unconstitutional.
When hanged they mis judged his weight and let him drop too far and the noose jerked his head clean off.

Historical facts about these old west villians were far more interesting than these stories.

[SuperScrounge]

Rendezvous With A Rope - Not bad, although Black Jack's face in profile looked odd.

Shanghai Mary - Interesting

Jesse James King of the Desperadoes - Didn't realize desperadoes had a monarchy. ;-) Interesting comparing the legends with facts. Spin doctors are nothing new.

Geronimo - Nice, but it seemed like the artist used the same face for all the Indians.

The Dalton Boys - Not bad. Sure seemed like the artist tried to avoid drawing eyes though.

[crashryan]

The first thing that hit me when I read this comic was that it features some of the most egregious artistic corner-cutting I've seen. Everyone seems determined to draw as little as possible.

Overall the book is a 50s crime comic translated to Western times. Substitute cars for horses and you could use these scripts in any second-rate crime title. Each story is pretty generic and none stick in my mind. I leave it to others to fact-check the history. I presume the authors take the same lackadaisical approach to facts here as they did in contemporary crime stories.

In "Black Jack" the artist, Szokoli, doesn't cop out as often as the others in this book. Unfortunately his drawing is wretched. It messes up the ending because it's not clear that the rope around Jack's neck snags on a tree and hangs him. A caption would have helped.

In "Shanghai Mary" Goldfarb swipes almost everything from Alex Raymond. That's why Mary's hard-boiled mentor looks like a kindly middle-aged lady. She started out as someone's slightly befuddled aunt in an early Rip Kirby continuity. Even though he swipes everything Goldfarb still avoids as much work as possible, using close-ups of hands and feet as well as endless head-and-shoulder shots.

The art on "Geronimo" is awful. Check out page 22, panel 4, for one of the all-time worst "drawn out of his head" revolvers. The cop-out drawings make a confusing story even harder to follow. It's notable that the "bad guy" wins in the end.

In "The Dalton Boys" Bill Fraccio cements his reputation as King of the Cop-Out. He takes every opportunity to avoid drawing faces and he throws figures into silhouette at the drop of a Stetson. The story is just another crime story. We have a second outlaw hanged by his own rope, though here he survives to face the real hangman.

I didn't have the patience to read the text feature.

It's funny to find amidst all the personal-improvement ads an offer for a Sensational Spray Gun. Will it bring happiness as easily as playing the piano, losing fat, or conquering pimples? Maybe so--note the happy housewife spray-painting her refrigerator.

[Mazzucchelli]

At first glance I thought I was going to hate this week

[MarkWarner]

I am now just about to find out whether the inside of the book is as cool as the cover.

The first story was OK, but a bit too heavy on the moralist message for my liking. I also have a suspicion that this title might be rather samey. I preferred the next one Shanghai Mary, but again we see justice being done, this time it appears it might very well have been delivered by a lynch mob!

To save you time, the two page text story says Jesse James was a thoroughly bad lot, and not a Robin Hood character. O really ... my, o my! But when it comes to badness he's not a match with Geronimo, who is rotten to the core. He even has the audacity to kill whiteman! As far as I am concerned, this story has zero basis in fact, and would have been considered reactionary even back when it was first printed.

So here we are with the last story The Dalton Boys. You guessed it, baddies all died and good triumphed over evil. Plus, I have no idea if there is even a grain of truth in any of it!

Verdict: I am afraid this is a fail, as all the content is very similar, and if I wanted a sermon I'd have gone to a church! Not a dreadful fail, but I would not recommend this past the cover.

[bowers]

I'm going to have to agree that the art was pretty bad on this one, but the stories themselves were alright. The Geronimo tale actually had a small grain of truth to it but an incorrect chronology. Most historians agree it was an attack on his village by Mexican soldiers that caused Geronimo (or Goyathlay ) to begin his war of vengeance on the whites. He lost his wife and daughters in this raid- can one blame him? Oddly enough, he much later became a hugely popular draw at fairs and carnivals back east.
The Shanghai Mary story was my favorite. Art not too bad, and good ending.
The Jesse James text story brings up an interesting divide in American opinions of Mr. James. Many Americans believe him to be, indeed, a patriot and frontier Robin Hood, while just as many see him as a thief, murderer, and even a terrorist. I doubt if either view is totally accurate and the true character of the man must lie somewhere in the middle. A lot of nasty stuff occurred during these times, including the skirmishes between the "Bushwhackers" and the "Jayhawks". A lot of innocent people were robbed and murdered, their bodies desecrated and even scalped by both sides. Guerilla wars are not pretty.
All-in-all, I kind of liked this book in spite of the simply awful art. Maybe I just like westerns. Cheers, Bowers