Friday, December 03, 2010

Reprint This! Have Gun, Will Travel

Yet another title caught in licensing purgatory. There's a slim ray of hope, however, as we've seen more and more licensed stuff has been finding its way onto the shelves at comic book stores. This is a TV show that has maintained its popularity for 50 years, and can certainly be counted among the best remembered TV westerns of all-time. There's a lot to like about the comic book series as well. Including the three issues published as part of the Four Color anthology, the series lasted 14 issues, each of which features a Richard Boone as Paladin photo cover. The majority of the artwork was done by the great Alberto Giolitti, with the underappreciated Frank Bolle filling in on a few issues. As far as I can tell, the bulk of the stories were written by Paul S. Newman. Now, I'm not familiar enough with the TV show to know whether the stories were adapted from the screen but it doesn't really matter to me. I'd pay a pretty nice sum to get a a collection of Giolitti drawn western stories into my collection.

2 comments:

Dan said...

I love Have Gun, Will Travel and would be all over a comic anthology. There was talk for a long time about a feature film with Eminem attached to star. I believe they wanted to do a "modern re-imagining" (yikes). Here's to hoping they never do that.

I believe HGWT is the only television series ever started as a show but later inspired a radio program (usually it was the other way around).

Four-Color Kid said...

I am a huge western fan, and do own the first 3 seasons of HAVE GUN' WILL TRAVEL on dvd and I think I can safely say that it was the best written western tv series of it's era (which was the Golden Age of tv westerns).

The comic books are usually rather expensive on Ebay, so I never got my hands on one. So I second the motion, I would love to see a collection of this cool series, but unless a revival or new movie/tv series about Paladin comes out, I won't hold my breath for reprints.

Another gorgeous, but much shorter series I would like even more to see reprinted would be the LARAMIE comic books (also from Dell). The tv series was pretty good, not as great as HAVE GUN,WILL TRAVEL, but the art on the comic series was done by Gil Kane and Russ Heath!!! Two of my favorite artists