Wednesday, February 01, 2012

Rereading Scalphunter

I dug out my box of Weird Western books and started rereading Scalphunter. Bat Lash gets a lot of love but Scalphunter deserves it as well, solely on number of appearances.

Brian Savage carried WWT for 31 issues, longer than Jonah Hex carried it. He also had only two writers, Michael Fleisher and Gerry Conway. While Fleisher is credited with creating Scalphunter, the letters page in WWT 39 gives the glory to Sergio Aragones and Joe Orlando. But, in the manner that Fleisher fleshed out the Jonah Hex that Albano and DeZuniga created, Gerry Conway is the man who really took control of Scalphunter.

I think a Showcase of all of Scalphunter, including the backup features and possibly his move to Opal City would be great. Bat Lash got one and he only had 7 issues, an issue of Showcase, and three backup stories.

4 comments:

Abe Lucas said...

I've been waiting for you to get going on this. Looking forward to your reviews. I'll have to start re-reading my own WWT; I have all but a couple of the earliest Scalphunter tales.

Dwayne "the canoe guy" said...

Yeah, I learned that I'm still missing a few issues, but I thought I would try to throw one of these in every week or so.

Cowboy Yogi said...

The first time that I came across Scalphunter was is the flashback issues of Starman in the '90s. Those were a great read, and had Scalphunter interacting with an immortal villain named The Shade. Is there a Scalphunter trade or collection yet?

Susan said...

Most of the Scalphunter appearances in Starman are uncollected, as they fall under the "Times Past" portion of the series and aren't usually part of the main story.

I never had a big interest in Scalphunter, but I did enjoy the Opal City years, and I hunted down his team-ups with Bat Lash 'cause I like him (and those weren't in his Showcase volume!).