Two Gun Western #5
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeTwo Gun Western #5 (November 1950, Atlas Comics) holds a firm place in Marvel history as the debut issue of the Apache Kid — Alan Krandal, a white orphan raised by Apache chief Red Hawk who operates under the dual identity of roving cowboy Aloysius Kare. The character stood apart from the crowded field of 1950s Western comics by making a genuine, if imperfect, effort to portray indigenous Americans with the same moral complexity as white characters and to distinguish among tribes rather than treating them as a monolith. The issue also inaugurated the Ten-issue Two Gun Western Vol. 1 series — itself a renamed continuation of the crime title Casey: Crime Photographer — demonstrating how fluidly Atlas Comics pivoted between genres to chase the Western boom then sweeping American popular culture. The cover art by a young John Buscema marks one of the earliest published works by an artist who would go on to become one of Marvel's defining pencilers.
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The series launched at the height of the postwar Western comics craze, when Atlas (Martin Goodman's comic-book division, operating out of the Empire State Building and soon to evolve into Marvel Comics) was flooding newsstands with frontier titles to fill the void left by fading superheroes. Two Gun Western #5 inherited its numbering directly from Casey: Crime Photographer #4, a genre-hopping editorial maneuver Atlas used frequently to spin up new series without starting from #1. The writer who co-created the Apache Kid remains unidentified, though John Buscema is confirmed as cover artist and interior penciler on the lead story, with Gene Colan and Pete Tumlinson also contributing interior art to the issue.
Trivia · 8 facts
- First appearance of the Apache Kid (Alan Krandal / Aloysius Kare), the character who would headline his own title the very next month as The Apache Kid #53 (December 1950).
- First appearances of the Apache Kid's core supporting cast: adoptive father Chief Red Hawk, Army officer Captain Bill Gregory, and Bill's sister Mary Gregory — all introduced in the lead story 'Massacre at Fort Madison.'
- Cover art and lead interior pencils by John Buscema, credited as one of his earliest published works for the Atlas imprint.
- Gene Colan and Pete Tumlinson contributed additional interior art stories in the issue, making it a notable early showcase for multiple artists who would define the Atlas era.
- Published by Atlas Comics (cover date: November 1950; release date: July 12, 1950) as the launch issue of the Two Gun Western Vol. 1 series, which continued for ten issues through June 1952.
- The series continued the numbering of Timely Comics' crime title Casey: Crime Photographer, reflecting Atlas's genre-hopping publishing strategy.
- The origin story presented in this issue was contradicted in Apache Kid's own subsequent series; a later retcon in Apache Skies #1 (2002, written by John Ostrander) reframed the character's entire Atlas-era run as fictionalized dime-novel accounts of his real adventures.
- Apache Kid reprints derived from his Atlas-era stories — originating with this debut — appeared in Marvel's 1970s Western Gunfighters omnibus series, issues #2–33 (October 1970 – November 1975), giving the character a second life for Bronze Age readers.
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Reprinted in Two Gun Western #5 (1950)
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