Kid Colt #1 (1948)
written by Ernie Hart
pencils by Bill Walsh
cover by Syd Shores
With superheroes losing popularity in the late 40s, one genre seemed ready to replace them: Westerns.
They had been a consistent presence throughout the Golden Age… after all Action Comics #1 also included a Western serial… but they exploded in popularity later.
A couple of clarifications here. While this is technically a post-Golden Age story, it’s too early for the Silver Age either… we’re in sort of an interregnum period. But for classification purposes, I’m still placing this under the Golden Age.
Second, I’m not really into Westerns so I won’t be talking about any particular discrepancy with the tropes of the genre.
We begin with Kid Colt showing some sympathy for a poor guy who is being whipped.
Also notice the jab at him being called “no-gun kid”, which is hilarious in retrospect since Kid Colt will eventually be overshadowed by Two-Gun Kid.
Kid Colt’s initial gimmick seems to be that he’s a cowboy who doesn’t use guns.
This despite the fact that he’s really good at using them.
He’s then accused by the sheriff of having murdered his own father.
The guy he saved at the beginning of the story helps him escape from jail.
I might not be into Western, but I figured out the sheriff was the murderer the second he accused Kid Colt.
And that’s the reason why Kid Colt carries a gun.
Yes, his last name is actually Colt.
It doesn’t take him much before he avengers his father.
He also deals with the whip guy from the beginning of the story…
…and in a bit of a twist, doesn’t end up clearing his own name, so Kid Colt is now a fugitive.
Well he DID murder the sheriff.
There are multiple Kid Colt stories in the first issue.
Including an entire page dedicated to his guns.
The second story has him becoming a marshal.
But after he cleans up the city, he has to leave before anyone discoves he’s a fugitive.
Both the third, the fourth AND the fifth story also ends with him leaving a town after helping out. Even I know it’s very typical for a Western, but it feels very formulaic.
Historical significance: 1/10
Despite a surprisingly long career, Kid Colt ends up being the most forgotten Western hero at Marvel.
Silver Age-ness: 0/10
Not really.
Does it stand the test of time? 
/ 10
This is SO out of my genre that I don’t feel like I’m competent enough to call it… for what it’s worth it’s well-written, even if the dialogue is a bit stilted, and the action flows fine.
It’s just very hard for me to find Westerns interesting unless they do something different, and this plays the tropes as straight as it can.
How close is this to the modern character? What modern character?
On a technicality, Kid Colt is not the first Marvel western series. Two-Gun Kid precedes him by a few months… but it’s not the Two-Gun Kid you might be thinking of.
It’s a completely unrelated character, who will still get a respectable 59 issue run before being replaced by a new character in 1961. We’ll talk about that when I review the more famous second Two-Gun Kid.
But back to Kid Colt, he was immediately a hit. The series was renamed “Kid Colt Outlaw” from issue #5, and it lasted an impressive 229 issues (!!!) until the series ended in 1979.
According to some sources, this 30 year run makes Kid Colt the longest running Western comic, but once again I’m no expert on the subject so take it with a grain of salt.
Also that run comes with a major asterisk: the last issue with original material is Kid Colt #141 from 1969, with all following issue (except one story, a team-up with Rawhide Kid) being reprints.
Back to the interregnum, Westerns were so popular that Kid Colt was also prominently featured in the anthology book All-Western Winners.
He also showed up on more anthologies: Two Gun Western in the early 50s, Gunsmoke Western throughout the 60s…
…and Mighty Marvel Western that ran from 1968 to 1976. This last one reprinted older stories, and it’s a bit infamous for reprinting the stories of the FIRST Two-Gun Kid… and recoloring his hair to pass them as stories of the SECOND one. Whoops.
Speaking of reprints, there are also three issues of Giant Size Kid Colt that reprint older stories of his solo book in 1975.
So you can’t really say that Marvel wasn’t giving at least SOME attention to Kid Colt, even after the Western boom had long passed.
Aside from his solo books, Kid Colt managed a few high profile cameos.
Easily the most memorable is on Avengers #142 and #143, also in 1975. Which means that this happened while his 1948 series was technically still running!!!
That story will lead to Two-Gun Kid to move to the 20th century for a while, and it’s a key reason for why you sometimes see him around.
But Kid Colt had no such luck: he stayed in the Old West, so he only shows up in time travel stories. I should point out that Kid Colt’s involvement in the 1975 Avengers time travel story was so unremarkable that when the West Coast Avengers had a follow-up in 1987, he didn’t return.
He has a VERY minor part in Fantastic Four v3 #33-34 in 2000, a slightly bigger one in Black Panther v3 #46-47 in 2002, and one in Indestructible Hulk #12 in 2012.
He also shows up in 2006 in the team-up special “Kid Colt and Arizona Girl”, where he fights alongside an extremely minor 1948 heroine.
In 2000, the miniseries “Blaze of Glory” by John Ostrander retconned MOST of Kid Colt’s adventures as having been fictional in-universe.
He dies in the last issue.
However, whether Blaze Of Glory is in continuity is a bit unclear, as is Kid Colt’s ultimate fate.
According to Falcon vol2 #4 in 2018, he died and went to heaven.
But if we believe “Skaar: King Of The Savage Land” #12 in 2011, he faked his own death and accidentally traveled to another dimension.
Because comics.
I prefer to think the dimension-traveling one on the pages of Skaar is an alternate version and that the actual fate of Kid Colt is from 2019’s Marvel Comics #1001, in a one-page story by Tony Isabella we learn that he eventually settled down and got married.
There was also an attempted reboot in 2009, which re-imagined Kid Colt as a 16 year old; it didn’t go past a single one-shot.
That was a weird decision… even I know that calling a Western character “Kid” has nothing to do with his age, so what the heck!?
Technically speaking, there IS a present day Kid Colt around. He’s from “Heroes Reborn: Young Allies #1”, and he’s a relatively more straightforward superhero who turns into a half-horse hybrid.
That guy hasn’t been seen since 2006, and yet I think he has more potential to come back than the original Kid Colt.
He doesn’t have anything to distinguish himself from other Western heroes!
Two-Gun Kid has the gimmick of using two guns AND of being a lawyer, plus he’s had several time travel stories focusing on him.
Ghost Rider has a killer design, and a far more popular hero with the same name associated with him.
Kid Colt and Rawhide Kid, however, are just Western heroes that don’t bring much to the table.
Although the fact that in recent years Rawhide Kid received A LITTLE more attention is baffling… at least Kid Colt has the potentially interesting aspect of being considered a criminal.
Maybe it’s the fact that “Kid Colt” sounds like the most generic Western name possible.