Billy the Kid

Few names carry the mythic weight of Billy the Kid, who rode onto the Golden Age comics scene in 1952 with Outlaws of the Wild West #1 from Charlton Comics — a publisher that knew how to make the frontier sing. This gunslinger has kept remarkable company over the decades, sharing pages with the legendary Billy Bonney himself, and has appeared across titles like Billy the Kid, Great American Western, and Gwandanaland Comics. What's genuinely striking is the longevity here: a run stretching all the way from 1952 to 2019 means this character outlasted countless flashier heroes, a testament to the enduring pull of the Wild West in American comics culture. If you're building out a Charlton collection or chasing the roots of Western comics, this is a name worth tracking down.