MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 564: THE GHOST OF WINTER RANCH

(The Funnies 030, 1939)

This fellow is from a story starring Gene Autry, singing cowboy. It's printed in a comic put out by Dell that mostly features reprints of comic strips and that's probably what this is? Even though online sources suggest that the first Gene Autry comic strip started in 1940 and this came out in 1939? Ultimately, these are mere details. The important fact is that this is my most favourite style of putting a film cowboy actor in an adventure comic: the real Gene Autry is just riding around in the Western US - Montana, in this case - with some sixguns and a guitar, having adventures but also doing all of the singing and movies that are his bread and butter. It's somehow slightly less plausible than when they just drop Tom Mix or Buck Jones into the Old West with no justification but the weirdness makes it fun.

As for the comic itself, we find one "Rowel" Collins (I had to look this one up - a rowel is the pointy wheely bit on a spur, so this is just a more Western version of calling someone Spike) who has just discovered that the mine full of useless ore that he sold as part of his former ranch is in fact a mine full of extremely valuable pitchblende and since Rowel Collins is a dastardly character (just look at his evil mustache!) he vows to get the money that the mine is worth by hook or by crook.

Lucky for Rowel, there are a lot of local superstitions for him to take advantage of: the ranch is situated on a piece of land called the Devil's Ironing Board; the pitchblende is in the Devil's Cave and crucially the ranch is supposed to be haunted (by a cow leg-stealing ghost?). Rowel immediately heads to a nearby shack to activate his old crony Smoky Plants.

Smoky, as the glowing Ghost of Winter Ranch, only really takes one pass at scaring off ranch owners Dan and Peg Winters and since they have the moral support of Gene "ain't scared of no ghosts" Autry Rowel has to resort to gunplay and kidnapping to force the sale.

Rowel and Smoky almost get away with it, in fact, but it turns out that hatching a scheme to sell a mine full of radioactive ore and knowing anything about radiation are two different things and they both end up dropping dead of radiation poising due to the radium they used to make the Ghost's glowing robes. It's terrible, terrible poetic justice.