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.