The Sensational Character Find of 1950
/Though I love Silver Age super-hero comics, I had until recently been pretty uninterested in the other funnybooks of the 50s and 60s, the war and romance and teen comics. How could they hold the same appeal? But then I encountered the perplexing comic oddity known to man as Kafloppos, and was semi-consumed with finding more of them, with ferreting out exactly what the hell they mean. And since Kafloppos was a semi-homeless strip that bounced from All-Funny to Batman to Action Comics to Boy Commandos, I've ended up reading a pretty wide variety of books recently. And hey, it turns out that The Adventures of Alan Ladd, say, is basically filled with exactly the same kind of gangster-slugging, tough-talking, ridiculous adventure that I love, only with a fictionalized version of Alan Ladd in place of, say, Johnny Double.
And even if I didn't enjoy reading them, The Adventures of Alan Ladd would hold a special place in my heart thanks to these three panels from issue 2, in a story entitled "Sheriff Alan Ladd":
Specifically, that unnamed, unreferenced, unspeaking girl who mutely pines for Alan. There's something very nearly perfect about the way that she's been drawn.
She's just so... intent, and Alan is so oblivious, that for three panels her poignant little drama completely overshadows the ludicrous plot.
And then she is gone forever, hopefully to a long and happy life in her strange little Wild West themed 1950s town.
Alan Ladd caught the stagecoach robbers, by the way.
Silent Piner, I salute you.
