Western Comics Spotlight: GUNHAWKS

 Troy D. Smith


For Marvel Comics' 80th anniversary, the company is doing special one-shots briefly resurrecting some of their lesser known titles from years past with an all-new story. I believe this is going to be a monthly feature, because last month was the 1970s war comic WAR IS HELL, and this month it is the 1970s western title GUNHAWKS. I have heard future months will feature some of their horror, sci fi, and romance titles from previous decades.

GUNHAWKS was a different sort of western which originally ran for only seven issues, in 1972-73. The full title was RENO JONES AND KID CASSIDY: GUNHAWKS. It was written by Gary Friedrich and drawn by Syd Shores. Warning- spoilers ahead for the 1970s series.

Cassidy was the son of a Georgia plantation owner, and Jones was a slave whose mother was the cook in the big house. The same age, they grew up together as friends -and when the Civil War started Reno was conflicted. Cassidy marched away with the Confederate Army, and many of the male slaves joined the Union Army. Reno felt loyalty to the Cassidy family because its patriarch had paid his slaves wages and allowed them to come and go at will. Unwilling to fight against either side, he stayed behind to help the old man look after the plantation.

When the Yankees came they killed all the men defending the plantation except for Reno, whom they left for dead. They abducted his girlfriend and fellow slave Rachel. Filled with a desire for vengeance, he joins the Confederate Army to kill Yankees.

(I could write a whole essay just about the historical problems with this story and its connection to the Lost Cause Ideology... and in the book I am currently writing about the history of race in comic books in the 1970s I do. For our purposes here, I am just laying out the plot.)

At the end of the war Kid Cassidy and Reno Jones are joyfully reunited when they both return to the ruined plantation. They decide to start a new life out West, and head to Kansas to become buffalo hunters. They are constantly confronted with difficulties due to prejudice against Reno. When they are attacked by rival buffalo hunters who want to steal their take and kill one, Reno finds Rachel's locket in the dead man's possession. They hunt down the others, and learn from them that they occasionally work for another transplanted Southerner, a former Confederate colonel who is still using black people as slave labor, abducting them and sometimes selling them. Rachel had been in his possession, but had been abducted in a recent Cheyenne raid on the farm. Reno organizes an uprising among the "slaves," who kill the colonel.

Soon the two heroes are caught in the middle between the Cheyennes and a Custer-like cavalry officer prone to large-scale slaughter of women and children. They are separated, with Cassidy taken captive by the Indians and Reno imprisoned by the army. Cassidy learns that Rachel is among the survivors of the village, but does not want Reno to know she is still alive because she has been taken as wife by the band's leader, Gray Fox, and does not want her beloved to ever learn of her shame. Reno eventually gains his own freedom and arrives at the Cheyenne village to rescue Cassidy, with the cavalry hot on his heels. The Indians retreat, and Reno sees Rachel among them. When he tries to go after her, Cassidy -having sworn to protect Rachel's secret -stops him. He refuses to give an explanation for doing so, and Reno angrily draws his pistol and threatens to kill him -just as the cavalry arrive.

Reno fires but deliberately misses. Simultaneously, however, Gray Fox -who had doubled back, still in possession of Rachel -takes aim at the hated cavalry colonel and fires. Fearing he may accidentally hit Reno, Rachel tries to knock aside his rifle -and he accidentally shoots and kills Kid Cassidy instead. The colonel demands Reno be arrested for murder, even though one of his men had seen the puff of smoke from Gray Fox's rifle in the trees. Reno manages to escape, stricken with grief. Gray Fox finds him and attempts to kill him so as to no longer have a rival for Rachel's affection. During the fight, in which Reno kills the Cheyenne leader, Rachel runs away yet again.

The death of Kid Cassidy and the subsequent events I described take place in issue #6. With issue #7 the series is renamed RENO JONES, GUNHAWK. Reno had really been the primary protagonist anyhow, with Cassidy playing a supporting role, which is not what one might have expected in a 1972 comic. Issue #7 finds Reno trying to track down his beloved, but now a fugitive with bounty hunters tracking him. That issue ends with him captured and in jail awaiting hanging. There was no notification of the book's cancellation, just a message at the end that Reno's fate would soon be revealed in a team-up with the Rawhide Kid.

And it was... it just took a quarter of a century.

Reno Jones played a central role in the 1999 miniseries (collected as a graphic novel) BLAZE OF GLORY by John Ostrander and Leonardo Manco. This book was mentioned in my 2013 interview with John Ostrander at this very blog, You can read that interview HERE.

It seems that Reno had escaped execution and roamed the West looking for Rachel, befriending along the way other western heroes such as the Rawhide Kid and the Two-Gun Kid. Many years later, having abandoned his quest for a woman who did not want him, he has married someone else and started a family and is living in the Exoduster town of Wonderment, Montana (with his wife Mary and a son he named Cassidy). A local land baron wants the African American community gone, and hires a group of hooded racist enforcers called the Nightriders to slaughter the town. Reno sends word to his friends for help, and all the major Marvel western heroes show up for a dramatic stand against the Nightriders (with several of the heroes perishing in the process).

In an unexpected twist, the leader of the Nightriders is none other than Kid Cassidy. He had survived the gunshot which he believed came from his disloyal best friend, and as a result was consumed with hatred for not just Reno but black people in general. This time Reno kills him for real.

All right, that catches you up on the legacy of the Gunhawks. There will be no spoilers for the new one, just a description and set-up. You can buy the new one at amazon and other sites, but be forewarned that a single issue of a comic book is now four bucks.

The new iteration has nothing in common with the original except for the genre and the title. It is an all-new story with new characters. It is drawn by Luca Pizzari and written by David and Maria Lapham, who are best known for their classic gritty crime series STRAY BULLETS.

The new "Gunhawk" is Dean Donnelly, recently married sheriff of Clearwater, Arizona in 1914. The town did not know his secret, though- that before coming there to be sheriff he had been a ruthless mercenary in the employ of Mexican usurper Victoriano Huerta against Pancho Villa and other rebels. This single-issue comic is the story of how his past catches up to him.

The book also includes a brief editorial about the important place the western genre has held in the history of Marvel Comics, and how it has been making a comeback in comics the past few years. If you're like me, you are always happy to see a new western from any comics publisher.