By issue 86 (March 1967), Two-Gun Kid was nearing the end of the trail.
He’d actually been two distinct characters during the title’s run — first wandering gunfighter Clay Harder, then masked avenger Matt Hawk.
This issue pitted the fictional Two-Gun Kid against the real Cole Younger, a Civil War Confederate guerrilla who later committed robberies with the James-Younger Gang.
He’s jailed here by the Two-Gun Kid, but in real life Younger was imprisoned in 1876 after a botched bank robbery. Paroled in 1901, Younger wrote a book, toured in a wild west show and died in his hometown of Lee’s Summit, Missouri, in 1915, age 72.
“Kid Colt Outlaw #139 and Two-Gun Kid #92 (both dated March 1968) marked the end of two of Marvel’s three Old West titles, leaving Rawhide Kid as the last cowboy standing until the 25-cent Mighty Marvel Western series (comprised of Kid Colt, Rawhide and Two-Gun reprints) premiered during the summer,” observed John Wells in American Comic Book Chronicles.”
Cancelled in 1968, Two-Gun Kid returned in May 1970 mainly to limp along as a reprint title. But the title, like Marvel’s other westerns, had contributed significantly to the development of Marvel’s superheroes.
“The early, formative years grew out of a period in Marvel’s history that was dominated not by superheroes but by westerns, teen humor, romance and weird adventure comics,” recalled Pierre Comtois in Marvel Comics in the 1960s. “It was among these categories that many of the themes incorporated in the later superhero comics were first explored: western heroes like the Two-Gun Kid and the Rawhide Kid were misunderstood outcasts just as Spider-Man and the X-Men would be, the Hulk and the Thing were direct descendants of many of the brutes that roamed through scores of weird tales, and the desperate, paranoid characters who populated Lee and artist Steve Ditko’s fantasy stories would later seek out the help of Dr. Strange or skulk in dark alleys for an unwary Daredevil.”
