Jack London and the Sparrows (Capitol Records of Canada, 1965)

Our Love Has Passed
Sparrows And Daisies
Take It Slow
You Don’t Want Me Now
It’s Been One Of Those Days
If You Don’t Want My Love
Give My Love To Sally
Glad To Be With You
Give My Love To You
Leavin’ Blues
Dream On Dreamer
I’ll Be The Boy

(track 3 is credited to Jimmy Reed, while all other songs are group originals)

Lead Vocals, Guitar – Jack London
Piano, Organ, Harmonium – Art Ayre
Vocals, Bass – Nick St. Nicholas
Vocals, Drums, Harmonica – Jerry Edmonton
Vocals, Guitar – Dennis Edmonton (tracks: Vocals on A3 and B4)

Ontario-based JACK LONDON AND THE SPARROWS were a Canadian beat-band who recorded a 1965 album with 11 out of 12 songs group originals, fronted by British emigrant Jack London (real name Dave Marden). The group is best known today for evolving into Steppenwolf after the departure of London (and a move to the US, with new lead vocalist John Kay) and also for sharing/trading members with the Toronto-based Mynah Byrds, Neil Young’s early group (Young’s fellow Mynah Bird and Buffalo Springfield member Bruce Palmer played in a version of the Sparrows prior to the recording of the LP).

While stories circulate online about London’s wanting the rest of the band to affect English accents, there’s no evidence of that on the album, and London himself would not be pegged as a Brit either, based on most of his vocals here.

What’s most interesting on first listen about the album is how it does NOT sound like a Merseybeat or British Invasion record: there’s not much emphasis on vocal harmonies; they don’t seem to have a background in blues or R&B (I could imagine them being folkies a few years before the album); the piano (electric piano on a few songs) is as dominant an instrument as the guitar; and there is little that is stomping or “beat”-oriented. I’m reminded most of the softer side of the Fantastic Dee-Jays (songs such as ‘Two Tymes Two’ or ‘Shy Girl’), though less jagged and less raw. One track (Sparrows and Daisies) is heading toward Peter & Gordon territory, and another is leaning in the direction of Freddie & The Dreamers, but only the album’s closing track sounds anything like British beat music.

I’m quite impressed, though, at a band offering a full album of almost all group originals (it’s interesting that the two songs sung by Dennis Edmonton, aka Mars Bonfire, are both blues tunes), which was not common at that time. It’s also mind-blowing to think about how in the space of little more than one year the core of this band, minus Jack London and with the addition of John Kay, evolved into The Sparrow, an amazing group who were, for me at least, one of the great bands of the mid-1960s. Listen to their 1966 single TOMORROW’S SHIP and then to any song on this Jack London and the Sparrows album. It’s as if The Beatles went straight from Please Please Me to Tomorrow Never Knows with no stops in-between. It must have been a fascinating year for The Sparrow, as they were known post-Jack London. If only people had been able to document daily activities via amateur video done through cell phones in late ’65 and early ’66 the way that they’ve been doing for the last 15 years, then we’d be able to re-experience this miraculous transition. Without that, though, we can only spin this Jack London and the Sparrows album, jump to The Sparrow, and marvel at how quickly major changes in music happened in that golden age, where 6 or 9 months difference seemed like a lifetime.

The whole album is available for your listening pleasure on You Tube, and for those who want a physical copy, a needle-drop CD exact reissue was released on Radioactive which can’t be that much of a big-ticket item (I could not find a copy for sale as Discogs blocks Radioactive releases from sale, being unauthorized reissues, and I did not see a copy for sale on US Ebay), and there was also a vinyl reissue on the UK Sweet Dandelion label which, as of September 2022 (when I’m writing this), can be gotten for $13.

Ring Of Fear (1954)

Ring of Fear (1954)
Mickey Spillane investigates crimes at the Clyde Beatty Circus in cinema-scope!
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Well, say what you will about RING OF FEAR, it’s certainly a novelty. First of all, the real “Star” is the Clyde Beatty Circus, which couldn’t have purchased better advertising than this beautifully shot color and cinema-scope production, half of which must be the circus’s best acts. A psycho is at loose in the circus, so the great crime writer Mickey Spillane, playing himself, is called in to investigate! Spillane himself calls in for a fellow investigator to help, and that guy poses as a magazine reporter. Pat O’Brien plays the manager of the circus, and Clyde Beatty himself also appears and does a number of lion and tiger-taming routines. Irish actor Sean McCrory, in an over-the-top performance, plays a one-time circus employee who became a stalker of a lady working at the circus and escapes from a mental institution to re-join the circus (and this is NOT a spoiler–all this is shown in the first few scenes), where he’s accepted back as ringmaster. There’s even comedy scenes with Batjac Productions regular Pedro Gonzalez-Gonzalez! My favorite scene is one where Mickey Spillane shows up at the circus and runs into the uncredited comic master Vince Barnett, who is reading Spillane novels on the job all day and explains to Spillane himself how his productivity has gone down so much due to Mick’s novels! Mick then produces his newest one, hot off the press, and hands it to Barnett, who almost salivates over it!

There’s not much “mystery” here since we know exactly how each crime is committed, and we only get to know about a half dozen employees of the circus at all, so obviously the suspect pool from which Spillane and assistant have to choose isn’t really that large. No, what makes the film entertaining is the circus setting, the idea of Mickey Spillane playing himself, and the colorful performances. Pat O’Brien (no relation to the bar or the TV gossip host) could play a role like this in his sleep, but he still has the gruff authenticity that makes him so watchable and loved by audiences for decades. Spillane comes off as an amiable and sarcastic yet tough guy. Sean McCrory, the “human star” of the film (the circus itself being the main star), chews the scenery and one wonders how ANYONE would not instantly think he was guilty of SOMETHING. This film will no doubt get a large audience through its being included in the new box set JOHN WAYNE’S SUSPENSE COLLECTION, which contains four Batjac Productions. It’s a fascinating curio that’s worth watching once, and may have some camp appeal for future viewings. As a Spillane fan, I’m happy to see the master in anything, so I may well watch it again. The transfer is superb on the DVD with rich colors and fine widescreen composition. One can only imagine how beautiful and awesome the circus scenes were on a large 1950’s movie screen.

Bill Shute, originally published elsewhere online in 2006

GHOST MANOR #2 (Charlton Comics, September 1968)

High school always seemed like a waste of time to me, so I put very little into it. By the time I came along (I graduated in 1975, a week before turning 17), many standards and any idea of a “classical education” had been thrown out the window in the late 60s and early 70s….however, the barrage of standardized tests that students coming along after the mid-80’s had to endure did not yet exist. Thus, I could fill my schedule with “creative courses” which required little work. Had basket weaving been offered, I would have taken it. And because I pretty much blew off my junior year, and the counselors wanted me graduated, they created an especially soft senior year for me….in fact, I even got two credits for working at Burger King (as a “home economics related occupation”).

Back during my sophomore year, one non-demanding course I enrolled in was Family Living, which was basically a euphemism for sex education. They were still showing those old instructional slideshows and 16mm films (probably dating from the 1959-64 period) with detailed drawings of human plumbing, cartoons of the travels of the sperm going its merry way toward fertilization, and the highlight of the semester, the color birth of a baby footage. We might have had quizzes on some of the anatomical things–I don’t remember–but they were of the “take it over again until you get them all right” variety. The main grade was for discussion, but that posed a problem because the girls would not discuss anything at all with us two boys in the class (it was about 15 girls and then the two boys)–they would ask us to leave and wait in the hall, and then when the discussion was over, generally a few minutes before the class ended, we’d be let back in. So I was in a class where the grade was primarily on discussion, but we were not allowed to participate in the discussion, and fortunately we were not penalized for that…meaning, I did next to nothing and got credit for it.

The other male in the class was Tom G. He was an OK guy, relatively speaking. The thing I remember most about him was that he lived next to a massive electrical generator. It must have been about two stories high and the size of four houses. It made deep metallic clunking, clanking, and droning sounds, 24 hours a day, that pre-dated Industrial Music, and it also had all kinds of warning signs on the fence surrounding it….not just to not enter, but to not get close. However, Tom’s house was right next to it. I always wondered about that.

I did not belong to any clique in high school–I was part of the group of people who were not wanted by any clique and thus became their own clique…..kids who were anti-social, kids who were bussed in from a rural county next to us in the mountains which did not have its own high school, kids who were home schooled previously and thus were not really socialized, kids who had specialized interests (ragtime music or Russian language and culture or Civil War history or libertarian economics), stoners, kids of ambiguous gender, kids who had non-traditional parents (practitioners of Wicca, officers in the John Birch Society, nudists, people who filed nuisance lawsuits against the city and/or the state every month). In my case, I’d attended a different junior high school than the ones 98% of the students at Golden High School had attended, so I did not really know anyone there when I began, and my observation was that the cliques from junior high school were just moved to the high school level and continued. I tend to lay back and observe when I’m put into a new situation, rather than put on a show in the hopes of being snapped up by one team or another….but you are put into a group whether or not you choose to be in one. As long as you are dealing with people on a daily basis, you cannot really remain “above the fray”–at that age, I was still naïve enough to believe that I could.

Dress was also unimportant to me (it still is, as anyone who’s met me can attest!). Comfort and cost were always my two priorities. Also, at that period, I sometimes shared clothes with my father, who was the same size I was. His style of dress was rooted in Nat King Cole, circa 1958—the fedora, the polo shirt, etc. However, since I was a heavy jazz and blues person, that was fine with me. The early 60s John Lee Hooker used to dress that way, and I had albums by people like Red Garland and Sonny Stitt who proudly wore that look, at least in the early 60’s, when the used albums of theirs I owned dated from. My own idols at that time in terms of style were the American 60’s bands who aped the Stones and the Yardbirds and the like…bands such as the Standells and the Chocolate Watchband…or the Count Five…or the Shadows of Knight. I’d even peroxided my hair a few years earlier to look like High Tide and Green Grass-era Brian Jones (and when I later scored a copy of DISTORTIONS by the Litter, I realized that I was not the only one who idolized that style….although I was a bit late at it). What else was there to follow in this pre-punk early 70’s period. The MC5 had broken up….Iggy was Iggy, so there was no need to imitate him as he was one of a kind. People who should have known better were championing things like Steely Dan or Ziggy Stardust-era Bowie (I did like Bowie a few years later, in the period from Station to Station up through Scary Monsters—-I had the privilege a few years later of seeing Bowie’s STATION TO STATION tour, the one where the film Un Chien Andalou by Bunuel was the “opening act”–I sat in front of Carlos Alomar’s Marshall stacks and thus heard his guitar for days after the show, but Ziggy and Aladdin Sane and the like always struck me as over-rated and made for critics….and they still do). I’m one of those people who considered Iggy and Lou Reed superior artists to Bowie–purer, deeper, people for whom life was their artwork. Bowie was an intellectual who’d studied the history of aesthetics and self-consciously “used” their purer art as spice for his own work, the way a chef would use cayenne pepper or cilantro to make a bland recipe more distinctive. We had no name for what we were into in those pre-punk days. When I stared at a Standells album cover or listened to the Shadows of Knight LP’s on Dunwich, I did not label it “punk” or “garage” or whatever. It was just good; it was rock and roll; it knew what was hip and what wasn’t. You want to praise “Ziggy Stardust”? Take a listen to my Dunwich 45 of the Shadows of Knight’s “I’m Gonna Make You Mine” at maximum volume, my friend….and then go crawl back under your rock!

Mostly, I wore a used army jacket back then. It often smelled of fried chicken. We had a Shakey’s Pizza down the hill from my home, outside of Golden, Colorado, and they had a $2.99 buffet. I would eat there maybe twice a month, and I would stuff my pockets and the lining of my coat with fried chicken from the buffet (and also pizza), and my family would live off that for days. I could literally stuff 20-22 pieces of fried chicken into that coat. My parents were both light eaters, so they could make the leftovers last…and it was cheaper than cooking.

Tom G looked kind of like Keanu Reeves at his most ragged. He also liked to exaggerate…and beyond. Knowing what kind of music I liked, he once told me that he’d been in the 60’s band The Yellow Payges, who’d recorded for Uni and whose album I owned and loved (I also had a few non-LP 45’s). I asked him why he was not on the album cover, and he told me he’d missed the photo shoot. Then I asked him to tell me about the songs on the album, since he was on it. He then claimed he was actually in the band BEFORE they made an album. He left them because he thought they were “going commercial” by recording for Uni. This was quite interesting, as he’d have to have been 10 or 11 years old when the Uni album was recorded, so he’d be even younger in the days prior to that album. However, even at that age, I realized that the best way to deal with such a liar is to just “let it go,” not ask any further questions, and move on.

I got to know Tom quite well for the half-a-school-year we sat out in the hall a few hours a week while the females discussed something about sex or human reproduction in the classroom we’d been sent out of. He had a few older sisters who’d gotten pregnant while in high school and had to drop out, and he told me that they believed things like “you can’t get pregnant the first time” and other myths of the ill-informed teenager. A shame they never took the class before dropping out….they could have even stayed during the discussions, as Tom and I could not.

We would often bring something to read during this class when we were in the hall.

As I remember, Tom would often read a sex-oriented letters mag that was in a small digest format. I was thinking it was PENTHOUSE VARIATIONS, but looking that up, I see that PV did not start until a few years after we graduated, so it must have been something else. He thought he was being tough reading a sex-oriented mag in the hall of the high school. Because it was letters and articles, it had no obscene pictures on its pages, and he’d keep it folded to some inside page, so the cover, which DID have an obscene image, would not be visible. As for me, I would sometimes have a literary work by Theodore Dreiser or Richard Wright or Gertrude Stein or William S. Burroughs, or a book of poems from Ted Berrigan or Paul Blackburn, but most of the time, it was a used comic book I’d gotten from a junk store or a flea market or a used bookstore. I could slip a few of them into the inside pocket of my army jacket (a pocket that had probably held some napkin-wrapped greasy legs and thighs a few days prior), and they were ready to take me to some other world whenever I had time to kill and wanted to veg-out.

This Family Living class was held in the main hall of the main building of the high school, the same hall where the main office was, but down toward the cafeteria side (at the other end was the band hall and the auditorium). The assistant principal (assistant principals are often the “enforcers” at high schools), Mr. Cochran (who would have been played by Myron Healey in a 50’s movie or Harvey Keitel in an 80’s movie), would often stand in the hall, his arms crossed, projecting authority. He was a fair man, and even if he’d never been a Marine, he projected that same calm-but-intense gravitas needed to keep order in a high school. I liked him, but then, I always stayed under the radar and never gave him any reason to “call me in” to his office. He would often be standing in the hall while I read my comic book and Tom read his sex-letters digest. During the first week of the semester, when we were sitting out in the hall, he came over to speak with us, thinking we’d been ejected for bad behavior, but we explained the situation to him, and he shook his head, looked at us as if we’d just told him that 1 + 1 = 3, and said, “that’s absurd.” Then he smiled and walked back to his position on the wall outside his office. He knew how much was absurd in the system he was a part of, and I’m guessing he just figured that this was one of the absurd aspects of the system that would never blow back toward him, and we seemed to enjoy the time off, so he was fine with that, one less thing he had to worry about.

I have no idea where I scored this copy of GHOST MANOR….junk store, used bookstore, the budget boxes at a comic store….but I did not buy it new (I bought the majority of my comics from secondary outlets–they were cheaper that way). GM had a relatively good run, 18 years and 96 issues, although it changed its name to GHOSTLY HAUNTS after a few years. Charlton in particular had a few superb horror/ghost anthology comics, as did DC and Marvel and Gold Key/Whitman. The 1950’s TALES FROM THE CRYPT/VAULT OF HORROR/HAUNT OF FEAR series from EC were probably the inspiration for most, and the long-term popularity of the BORIS KARLOFF–TALES OF MYSTERY comic did not go unnoticed either. Generally, these “ghost” comics would offer three or four separate, unrelated pieces, often introduced by a narrator character who was featured in a kind of frame story. No concern with story arcs or consistent character details was required with these as every issue had totally different characters and settings. Unless Boris Karloff was the narrator, I usually paid little attention to the “host” of these comics. As the 1970’s came in, these hosts tended to become more ironic and/or sarcastic in tone, and by the mid-1980’s the old-fashioned horror/ghost genre in comics pretty much died. For me, this was simultaneous with the death of “classic” comics and also the death of Charlton. However, this copy was early in GHOST MANOR’s run, and the mag was quite fresh and vibrant. A number of European horror films with an “old dark house” premise played the drive-ins of America in the 1960’s, and these also may have influenced the various ghost comics.

GHOST MANOR #2 has TWO copies of the same cover stapled on it, a nice reminder of Charlton’s quality control. How considerate of them to provide me a second one so I could tack it up on my bedroom wall

Take a look at the cover of this issue of GHOST MANOR….the screaming maniacal woman, the vicious bird on the attack toward a miniature man, trying desperately to defend himself. Then the catchy tagline WITNESS TO A MURDER, POLLY THE PARROT! What teenager looking for a 12-cent thrill would not throw down his or her change on the counter for such a comic book! Please remember that back in those days, one did not have portable movie entertainment as people have today. If you wanted to see a horror movie, you had to go to a theater….or wait for one on TV. If you wanted to see an anthology TV series devoted to the odd and the supernatural, you had to wait for whenever something like NIGHT GALLERY aired….or reruns of THE TWILIGHT ZONE or ONE STEP BEYOND. You could not watch them anytime you wanted on your phone anywhere you were. Comics allowed you to take over-the-top supernatural stories ANYWHERE you went—-in my case, in the hall outside the sex education class I was not allowed to attend 2/3 of the time. Hey, I was getting a much better deal than the students stuck in that tedious class.

As with many of these anthology horror comics, there was a throwaway frame story of the ghoulish narrator, some hunchback with a patch over one eye. Soon, however, we move into the meat and potatoes of the issue. WHO’S DOWNSTAIRS, set in France, has a sinister old building set for demolition—-the elderly caretaker warns the uppity civil servant who wants to raze the building to respect the building’s history and to, whatever he does, NOT go into the cellar. Turns out Mr. Leech, the civil servant, doesn’t take that advice. WITNESS TO MURDER–POLLY THE PARROT (and, by the way, in the great tradition of exploitation film and B-movie posters, the scene on the cover appears NOWHERE in the story!) features a lady who is mourning the death of her fiancé, who was murdered in the main room of her apartment, the room where Polly’s cage is, and she is being hit on by a sleazy guy wanting to take advantage of her during her weakened state. Anyone who’s seen the film FREAKS can guess how this one ends. THE FIRES OF HELL trots out that old favorite plot, the crooked North American out to steal native relics of spiritual significance from some tribe in South America. He certainly pays the price for not respecting the local culture and traditions! In addition, you get a one-page short story about a Professor who swerves to avoid hitting a girl on the road and thus crashes into a lake….and awakens to face Death incarnate, who makes him, as the Godfather used to say, “an offer you can’t refuse.” Also, we get a one-page comic called THE WITCH’S CURSE. Add to that the usual ads for song-poem companies, model rockets, lifts for one’s shoes (to make you two inches taller), skin-clearing anti-blemish creams, money-making opportunities which involve sending a company some of your hard-earned cash first, etc…and you’ve got a better window into the world of the average small-town Joe or Jane of 1968 than anything the History Channel can provide.

Looking up this issue at Comics.org, I see that Charlton later cannibalized these stories in early 1980’s issues of their various horror-genre titles like GHASTLY TALES and HAUNTED (and also later issues of GHOST MANOR itself, #56 and #59)…and why not! The same people who bought comics in 1968 were probably not still buying them in the early 80’s, and even if they were, with so many of these horror comics dipping their ladles into the same well of images and plots, the average reader would just assume this was yet another story with the same archetypal plot elements. In the pre-internet age, things were not as meticulously documented as they are today. You could sell the sizzle from the same steak multiple times and get away with it more easily then.

I bought this comic used in the early 70’s for a dime or whatever, I read it multiple times then, I then re-read it at later times in my life when I had no money and could not afford a TV or other entertainment, and an old comic book provided late-night chills and thrills….and now 40+ years later I’m enjoying it again. Quick, efficiently told stories full of fast-moving visual images, able to take me to a place far away from my freezing apartment in a neighborhood full of domestic violence, alcoholism, minimum-wage jobs, dodgy used-car lots, half-abandoned strip malls, pawn shops, payday-loan stores, and people who will not talk to you if you do not attend their church—-Yes, indeed….CHEAP USED VINTAGE COMICS ARE YOUR BEST ENTERTAINMENT VALUE!

Bill Shute, originally published elsewhere online in 2017

TEX RITTER WESTERN #25 (Charlton Comics, October 1954)

Those who were the stars of the classic B-Westerns of the 1930’s and 1940’s came to their positions from a number of different routes–some such as Buster Crabbe (USC), Johnny Mack Brown (University of Alabama), and Tex Ritter (University of Texas, then Northwestern University Law School) were successful college men. Among those, TEX RITTER always had a unique persona as a Western personality, both in his films and in his even longer and more successful career as a recording artist. Ritter had studied Western History and Folklore at UT with legendary folklorist J. Frank Dobie and was quite an authority on original cowboy songs of the 1800’s. After his college and law school days were over, he went to New York where he was a pioneer in early radio broadcasting and, like Will Rogers before him, appeared on Broadway, milking his western persona. Although he had many records in the country charts over a 30-year period, he sounded like no one else, with his well-worn baritone delivering songs and recitations that truly sounded like they were from an earlier age. His lugubrious (I’ve been waiting to use that word) delivery on his best known song, the ‘Do Not Forsake Me….” theme from the film HIGH NOON, is typical of his “western balladeer” style. No one would ever describe Tex Ritter’s voice as “pretty” (as they might for Roy Rogers, who also trafficked in songs rooted in the West), but it had a gritty authenticity and could be very moving.

Like Ernest Tubb or Wilf “Montana Slim” Carter, Ritter had an uncommercial voice, but a voice that was trusted.

Although Ritter’s B-Western starring career lasted just under ten years, he worked steadily…starring in 52 features….first with his own series at Grand National. GN was an odd studio, best known (if known at all) as the studio that James Cagney retreated to for two films while he was on strike against Warner Brothers. Those were GN’s most successful releases, but when Cagney went back to WB, Grand National began to flounder and only lasted a few years. One odd thing about much of GN’s product is that, unlike the usual low budget studio such as Monogram, which tended to favor action and comedy to mask their poverty row economy, Grand National’s features tended to be talky and stage-bound. They really needed the quickie location shooting one would find in other low-budget films in order to give the films some grit and rawness. Tex Ritter’s films for GN, independently made by producer Edward Alperson, were unlike most of the studio’s product and resembled the typical B-Western product made by other indies….except for the persona of their star.

While Tex could be authentically tough and was quick with a gun, he had a laconic and cerebral quality….so you had a man whose songs (he sang in most of his features) were old-fashioned cowboy- themed material echoing an earlier age, a man who was slow to anger and in his thick Texas accent spoke slowly and carefully, and a man who was both the ultimate good ole boy yet also had something of the intellectual about him–in fact, in his final run with eight films at PRC in the Texas Rangers series, with Dave O’Brien (one of the great leading men of low budget movies of the 30s and 40s, now best known as the psycho “Ralph” in Reefer Madness) and the great Guy Wilkerson as the comedic “Panhandle Perkins,” Ritter played an attorney (Tex Haines), fast on the draw but pursuing justice. He would often be perusing his law books and take a break to launch into a song! However, three things Tex Ritter ALWAYS had in his films were qualities that could not be faked: gravitas and presence and authenticity.

As with most B-Western stars of the 30’s and 40’s, early TV gave their careers a shot in the arm as their old movies were played constantly as cheap filler and brought them legions of young fans, the kind of people who bought comic books. That’s why comic books emerged in the 1950s for people like Bob Steele and Tex Ritter, both of whom had stopped making B-Westerns in the mid-1940’s. In Ritter’s case, his continued success as a recording artist and as a radio and television figure kept his name current, so he actually had a comic book of his own as late as 1959, which was 14 (!!!!) years after his last western at PRC.

Tex was a unique figure in both western films and in country music, and while this comic under review is no classic, it does manage to capture some of his unique qualities–in the parts of the comic devoted to him, that is.

On the masthead on page one of the comic, we learn that it is produced by the Al Fago Studio….and many will remember Mr. Fago as the man behind ATOMIC MOUSE. Although I have no evidence to support this, considering Charlton’s modest page rates, I would not be surprised if Fago delivered a complete magazine to Charlton for a set fee. So many of the comics professionals back in that day were able to work equally well in any number of styles—they had to as it was a job, and the more eclectic you were, the more work came your way.

One aspect of country music that died decades ago (for the most part it died in the 70’s, when country music started trying for “respectability,” not realizing that its strength was its unique rural and heartland identity) was the “show” aspect. It was not just a concert. You got with your show ticket baggypants rural comedy and maybe even horse performances, perhaps a Gospel mini-set, some recitations, etc. Even Elvis—in his pre-RCA days—followed this tradition, as bassist Bill Black would do comedy skits, “ride” his bass, etc. as part of the “show.” In a sense this comic book follows in that tradition….although I’m not sure if that’s intentional or just an outgrowth of padding a comic book with unrelated filler to get it up to the required length (if I were a betting man, I’d bet on the latter—but that certainly does not take away from my appreciating it as if it were for the former reason).

The two long stories featuring Tex Ritter are exciting, seem to capture his screen persona adequately, and could be plots from one of his films (though, obviously, there’s no songs in them). We also get a “note” from Tex (see pic) telling us a story. The odds are 100-to-1 that Tex never even saw that note, let alone wrote it, but it would be fine for a 12 year old fan….and considering how most press releases from the film studios of the day were composed by the PR department and put into the mouths of the stars, it probably reads like something Grand National might have issued on behalf of Tex, had they bothered to do that!

The issue also features (is padded with) a 3-page story featuring Indian hero Young Falcon, two half-page western slapstick strips featuring Whiz Banks, another half-page humor piece featuring Wagon Wheels, another half-page humor piece featuring Wilbur The Waiter which is funny but not even a western (!!!), a six-page western comedy piece featuring Denver Mudd and Bushy Barnes (imagine Vince Barnett meets Al Fuzzy St. John), another non-western half-page comedy strip from Vita Min (a young girl), a half-page from Tumbleweed Jr., and finally a full-page black and white strip from Happy Homer (see pic) which has a style not unlike that later made famous by Robert Crumb. Oh, the back cover has a black and white still from one of Tex Ritter’s films.

Well, you be the judge….either this comic book presents a wide variety of entertaining and diverse selections, anchored by the great Tex Ritter….or Tex is a guest star in his own comic book! The two Ritter stories are relatively long—-8 and 10 pages, respectively—-so I’m not complaining.

You can read and download this entire issue at comicbookplus.com—-if you enjoy it, check out one of Tex Ritter’s PRC “Texas Rangers” westerns (there were 8 of them). GANGSTERS OF THE FRONTIER (see poster) is available for free on You Tube. Ditch the Netflix and Amazon series and let Tex Ritter, Dave O’Brien, and Guy Wilkerson entertain you in classic B-minus-western style! You get THREE songs from Tex AND the comic genius of Wilkerson as Panhandle Perkins. That, my friends, is entertainment!

Bill Shute, originally published elsewhere online in 2017