I read an issue of Rawhide Kid last night (#68, 1969), a Marvel western that began in 1955 and ran until 1979. I really enjoyed Larry Lieber’s distinctive art. It has a clean sharpness to it that works well with the bright, bold coloring style of the comic. Lieber wrote and drew the comic from issue #41 until the title began publishing reprints in 1974.

Lieber is a bit of an unknown in the modern Marvel mythos, although he is the younger brother of the ubiquitous Stan Lee and a co-creator of several Marvel characters, including Ant-Man, Thor, and Iron Man. His run on Rawhide Kid became his best-known work and helped carry the western comic genre into the 1970s. By early 1974, I think all of Marvel’s still-existing western comics had become reprint titles. This included Rawhide Kid, as well as Two-Gun Kid and Kid Colt Outlaw. 

Marvel, and the western genre in general, really had a penchant for protagonists called the Kid…Marvel (and its predecessor Atlas Comics) also had as title characters Apache Kid, Western Kid, The Outlaw Kid, and Ringo Kid!

The western had been a hugely influential force in American society in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s but began, as Marvel publishing illustrates, to wane in the 1970s. By the middle of the decade, Marvel’s westerns were either discontinued or only publishing earlier stories as reprints, while, on the big screen, The Outlaw Josey Wales was heralding the end of an era in American culture.