Bill Boyd Western #1

I personally don't care too much for westerns. I mean, they are all right when their stories are new and interesting, but as a genre it some times gets redundant. Most of time, you see a sheriff (or a ranger in a more famous case) who has to fight some bad guys. It just gets old for me (though I do like reruns of Wild Wild West, so its not all bad), but in honor of my grandfather who just loves westerns (though he usually forgets he sees them so every time its always new) I am going to review a western!

The Art

A while back when I first started editing the site, I added the dates and the titles onto the issues of several Fawcett series (in fact I am proud to say that I fixed up all of Captain Marvel Jr. and several other Marvel family titles). Anyway, one thing i noticed when I went through some of these series was the presence of these photo covers. For some reason, when I looked at those covers, I thought the art would be (you know) live-action or something. I know it sounds strange, but thats what I expected, so when I was able to read this comics on the web (agian, you can ask me and I'll send you the site) I was surprised to find normal comic book art. The art is alright (not the best I've seen of this time period, but alright). I think the highlight (pun intended) of the art would be the coloring. Every frame, the colorist changed the background coloring, which is...interesting...

The Writing

As I said, I don't care too much for westerns, but the plot was fairly good. There were some good scenes in this book and I was kept fairly entertained, so its not too bad.

Bill Boyd

What I really like about this series is that Fawcett took a real life actor and gave him a comic book series. Bill Boyd (I keep trying to call him Billy, but that's the wrong BB fawcett character) was the actor who played Hopalong Cassidy. Because I feel like a history lesson, lets take the Wikipedia WABAC Machine to remember (or find out) who this character is and why he is important. Hopalong Cassidy is important if you like westerns because it was the first to be aired on television. While not as long running as the Lone Ranger, he was popular enough at the time for Fawcett to publish a Hopalong Cassidy series which ran 85 issues before being moved to DC (where it ran till issue #135). This hero with a black hat seems to be popular enough for Fawcett, so they felt they needed to do a spin-off. This is why the actor, Bill Boyd, was given his own series. Of course, this series only lasted 2 years as aposed to Hopalong's 16 years (through DC and Fawcett), so that shows how hard it is for an actor to have his own series if people don't know your name as well as your character's name (wonder if Adam West has the same trouble...)

Conclusion

This is an alright book. I'm not a fan of Westerns (as I've said), but I'm sure this series and others could be entertaining for people who do like to see tales of the "old west" and guys with guns and 10-gallon hats. Hi Ho Silver! Away! (whoops! wrong show!)