In the grand list of comic book characters with suggestive names, even GI Joe’s much-maligned (and chronically useless) Snowjob takes a back seat to Marvel’s Rawhide Kid. With the former, at least, the creators had to know what they were getting into, but for the kid, it’s more a matter of the fifty-two years since his creation, wherein Westerns have fallen out of favor in pop culture and left leather straps to a whole new connotation.

This is probably why Marvel picked the Kid for a 2003 revamp called “Slap Leather,” where he was “turned gay” by Ron Zimmerman and veteran penciller John Severin in a story that drummed up a fair amount of controversy, despite being—and we’re being pretty charitable here—not very good. The whole thing was at best an embarrassing eye-roller right from the start, like a Western Will & Grace, and at worst, it was downright offensive, with a scene where a group of kids end up at the Kid’s campfire played like SNL’s Canteen Boy skit, but without the laughs.

And besides, it was pretty thoroughly unnecessary: We’d already gotten a story that outdid anything Zimmerman could’ve cooked up with almost forty years before. I mean really...

...It really doesn’t get much funnier than that.

The story in question is, of course, Rawhide Kid #56’s “Fall of a Hero,” and to be honest, the whole thing reads like your average paint-by-numbers Marvel Western, but bear with me here.

It starts off with your usual nameless town being protected by a guy named Bret Adams—alias the Peacemaker—who came to fame by out-drawing an entire gang of standard issue outlaws and saving the town from being ransacked. Thus, Adams becomes the sheriff, and immediately decides that he’d like to marry Laura Harrison, the daughter of a rich cattle rancher.

Conflict in this case is provided by the fact that that Harrison thinks Adams is a phony who’s just after his money and, in a stern lesson to the teenage girls of 1966, he is absolutely right. As it turns out, he paid the gang off to earn his rep as part of a master plan to knock off the old man and inherit the fortune. Being able to hook up with a hot blonde, however, is just a side benefit.

It all comes to light after Adams shoots Harrison to keep him from changing his will and frames the Kid for it, even going so far as to pay off the gang of owlhoots/rannies/whatever to ambush him in a conveniently located ravine. Of course, as you might expect if you’ve ever read a comic book before, the Kid manages to beat up enough people that the truth comes out, and Adams is left to wander the desert in shame.

Like I said, it’s pretty standard stuff, and even with a scene where the Kid chastely turns down the hot, blonde Laura as she totally throws herself at him in thanks for saving her virtue and considerable fortune, you may well be wondering what you’re doing reading about it here. And to that, I can only reply that for about three pages, this thing is actually the funniest comic book ever printed.

Why? Because of the obligatory Page Three Fight Scene(TM) that gets things moving before the bulk of the story kicks in, where the Kid runs afoul of a shirtless ranch-hand for a throwdown that may actually be the most homoerotic fight scene of all time. And yes, that includes 300.

To be fair, it might not have the same ring to it without the Zimmerman story to contextualize it, but the dialogue alone cracks me up every time:

“I’m not so new that I haven’t pegged you, Burke!”

“Front or back—it don’t make no nevermind to me!”

And my personal favorite (and quite possibly my favorite piece of dialogue ever):

“Okay, we’ve tried it with bare fists and hot lead! What’s next, Burke?”

Normally, this is where I’d be writing a joke, but come on: Do I really need to?

When Chris Sims isn't reading comics (which is probably far too often for his own good), he's writing about them on the Invincible Super-Blog, where he can be found wielding the English language like a cudgel on a daily basis.

Article copyright Chris Sims Images and characters copyright of Marvel Comics, Inc.

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