Judge Colt, The Wolf Man And Me

In her lifetime, my mother had relationships with (as far as I knew) three different men named Bob.

No, not at the same time!

Tonight’s post involves Bob #2, whom my mother courted briefly when I was 14.

Bob #2 had a stocky build that could have intimidated an introvert like me, but he also had a gentle, quiet disposition, evidenced by his soft blue eyes and tight-lipped smile. I never heard him raise his voice, and for that matter, never heard him laugh out loud, either. Despite his low-key mannerisms, he was quite colourful.

He drove a rickety pickup truck that was one loose rivet from a “This could be you” warning in a highway safety film. He lived on one side of a two-story house that was partitioned in the middle of the main floor by a door-sized piece of Styrofoam. His elderly mother lived on the other side. A flannel blanket for a curtain covered his living room window. His kitchen was basically a workshop, where counters were adorned with wrenches and screwdrivers instead of strainers and can openers, save for the dish rack where cups and plates waited in vain to be cleaned. Sometimes, much to his chagrin, his mother would come over and do his dishes for him. One assumed she didn’t walk through the Styrofoam.

His drink of choice was rye and coke, which he always stirred with the little wooden pencil in his flannel shirt pocket. Always. Whenever he’d pour a new shot, we would offer him a spoon or a swizzle stick. Nope. The HB still came out. If pencils hadn’t been composed of graphite, he’d have had lead poisoning.

Bob #2 had these lamb chop sideburns, which prompted me to nickname him Wolf Man. I didn’t intend to be spiteful. This was another of my ill-fated teenaged attempts at hiding awkwardness with humour. My demeanour would be taken the wrong way… but no wonder! Even so, in a few weeks, off went the lamb chops. (In the age our tale unfolds, the day’s fashion trends included leg warmers, purple hair and neon. Birdtown on the other hand, was still a decade or two behind the times. Sideburns and brown corduroy were still “in”. Even at this remove, you could still find hippies playing guitars downtown.)

By the way, these paragraphs weren’t meant as a putdown. I really did like the guy. These eccentric traits I found kind of endearing. The rebels and the oddballs of my native Birdtown always fascinated me. Anyone who shook up the town’s broomstick-derriered status quo was okay in my books.

Bob #2 and I shared common interests- some only became apparent after I knew him. He enjoyed watching westerns, serials, Tarzan and Hercules movies, which were then plentiful on WUTV, Channel 29 from Buffalo. (Readers of a certain vintage in Southern Ontario or Western New York will elicit pleasant sighs at memories of their retro programming, especially their weekends of kaiju and kung fu movies. WUTV originally played on our cable 9, until it was bumped off our VHF dial for the French Channel, and emigrated way up to cable 19, which you needed a converter to see. For years, I was deprived of WUTV, because my mother was convinced a converter would bugger up her television. But, the rest of this story belongs in a future blog post all its own.) The time with Bob #2 predates my full-fledged cinephilia. In another five or ten years, we would have had much more to discuss.

Instead, we had bonded over another medium that told stories and created worlds within a frame: comic books!

Bob had been a serious comic collector for about three decades, and stopped buying new books around the mid-1970s. He still enjoyed the medium, and would pull stuff out of his collection to re-read. It was shocking to me then that he had no interest in long-underwear superheroes. His archive was deprived of obvious things like Spiderman or Superman. Rather, his collection focused on genres that existed in the margins to the current mainstream: westerns, action-adventure (jungle, sword and sorcery), and Disney! Instead of the usual Marvel or DC banners that infiltrated most others’ collections, his would consist of titles from Dell or its sister company, Gold Key.

I was already a Gold Key fan, thanks to their runs of Star Trek and The Twilight Zone; among their many adaptations of TV show properties, from the 1960s to the imprint’s demise in the early 1980s. Gold Key’s appeal was also for their eye-catching painted covers, and the other enticing titles that I had discovered when Woolworth’s used to sell assortments of Gold Key’s in grab bag collections of three or ten. (This too deserves its own post some day, but I’ll briefly mention that UFO Flying Saucer, True Ghost Stories, and Space Family Robinson were among those discoveries.)

It was through Bob though, that I first got a taste of Dell’s long-running, serpentine Four-Color Comics, its series of one-off movie adaptations called Movie Classics, and a similar run by Gold Key, informally titled Movie Comics. Through these adaptations, I was already familiar with the stories of Rio Conchos and The Dirty Dozen long before I had seen the movies they were based on.

My parents divorced when I was very young. I still saw my father once a week or more, but I have no experience of living in a household with a patriarchal figure. If I was ever subconsciously seeking a “surrogate father” in my mother’s boyfriends, I had no longer sought such a role when Bob #2 entered the picture. By then, I was older, and had learned to live without a father figure. Additionally, several months before she began dating Bob #2, my mother’s boyfriend Frank died suddenly, just days before Christmas. I think Frank was and remained her true love. Admittedly, it felt weird seeing different men around the house for several months afterwards, but I accepted that she rightfully was trying to get on with her life, and sought new companionship. As a result, I had no expectations of Bob #2 being “my new dad”, anymore than he expected me to be a surrogate son. He was a man of few words, but I’d like to think that during his brief courtship with my mother, he recognized a bit of his younger self in me.

One Sunday afternoon, he volunteered to drive me in his rickety pickup to a couple of flea markets around the county.  In both cases, he would stand around with a Styrofoam cup of coffee and chat with people, while I checked out the tables at whatever halls or church basements we infiltrated. That day’s haul was just a couple of Family Circus paperbacks, but it’s about the thrill of the hunt, which any collector knows, and surely he did. My memory of this afternoon persists, because it was one way in which we silently bonded over this same passion.

Quite often when he came over, he would bring me a stack of comics from his collection. With one handful, he would say, “These ones, I want back." And with another handful, “These ones, I don't care what you do with them.” Some titles I recognized from the “grab bag” days (he dropped off almost complete runs of The Jungle Twins and Brothers Of The Spear), while other short-run series were unfamiliar to me. (One such title I recall was The Scarecrow, from the “want back” pile. which I read and gave back the same night.)

Perhaps his aversion to long-underwear superheroes influenced my own. In another two or three years, I would stop collecting comic books once my interest switched to film history. Further, superhero stories had become increasingly stupid and juvenile. Otherwise, a small town comic collector had few other options than Archie. (The blossoming independent and direct market worlds were out of reach.) In the later days of collecting, I slavishly bought the long-underwear stuff because “they will be worth something one day”. I’d read an issue once, shrug, and pack it away. Instead, anything I dug from the archives for re-reading was stuff considered by fellow collectors to be disposable and of little worth: westerns, crime, science fiction, action-adventure, and even some horror, published by Gold Key and Charlton. They spoke to me more. (This too is deserving of a post all its own some day.)

And among those that would get constant rotation was a title run I was introduced to, thanks to Bob: the short-lived western series, Judge Colt, published by Gold Key in 1969-70. (He had three of its four-issue run; I’d eventually track down the stray issue years later.)

I’ve always loved western movies of any stripe: from the tough 1960s revisionist westerns to the 1930s singing cowboys. Western comic books that still existed in the 1970s and 80s were still very much stuck in the 50s, largely because the majority of them were reprints from previous decades. They still adhered to the squeaky-clean “white hats vs. black hats” mentality, and had little room for the moral ambiguity to be found in, for example, DC’s Jonah Hex character.

Judge Colt, on the other hand, was an interesting bridge between the 1950s wholesomeness and the “new” western. To paraphrase a joke made by Henny Youngman around the time, “In the adult western, the cowboy still kisses his horse, only now he worries about it."

Technically, many western comic book heroes were superheroes in cowboy hats, whose amazing superpowers included larger than life stunts or tricky gunplay. In that sense, the Judge Colt series finds our hero in similar slam-bang adventures, but it had a far more psychological edge than, say, The Rawhide Kid. In fact, western comics had far too many “kids”: Billy The Kid, Kid Colt Outlaw, etc.  Judge Colt differed from the rest in age alone. He was middle-aged; hot youth was replaced with greying temples, and world-weary disposition.

Our hero, Judge Mark Colt, the much-feared “hanging judge”, rides the frontier to find the killers who gunned down his wife Maria, who was a bystander during a holdup.  In between the usual western adventure tropes, exists a brooding story of haunted love, as Maria still figuratively exists in the present through omnipresent photographs, flashbacks and Colt’s own nights of self-reflection.

Despite that he is feared for his equal proficiency with guns and ropes, Colt has an interesting Achilles heel, in that his body shakes after every gunfight. He is revealed as flawed, nakedly human, and significantly less than impervious. Colt is often morally conflicted and full of self-doubt. In his constant internal monologues, he questions if his actions are any less morally reprehensible than those of the crooks he sends to the gallows.

I’ve no information as to why Judge Colt only ran four issues. Perhaps this character was too offbeat for its audience, or perhaps he was shelved after poor sales, even though it offered the same quota of action and adventure as its six-gun competition. It would have been interesting to see his character develop in future editions, although perhaps its formula would have been too repetitive after a while. Eventually, Mark Colt would have to find all of Maria’s killers, otherwise try the patience of their readers. Comic book miniseries were more common a decade after Judge Colt ceased publication. A planned twelve-issue run would have best suited this story arc, and kept it fresh.

If you’re a collector, any of these books are worth having, although perhaps the fourth issue is the most interesting. In “Trial By Fury”, Judge Colt investigates a series of murders that are made to look like accidents, and discovers that each of the men in these so-called “accidents” are victims of a long-held revenge plot. At this revelation, Colt can only compare the killer’s actions to his own dubious mission to avenge Maria’s death. It is exactly this kind of smart writing and introspection that sets Colt apart from the usual six-gun comics.

It is tempting to say that Judge Colt had to happen so that Jonah Hex could appear, but its short run suggests that he likely didn’t inspire what was to come. The series only exists as an interesting footnote in Gold Key’s publishing history, or the history of western heroes. Still, his character seems a necessary stepping-stone between the squeaky clean 1950s cowboys and the moral ambiguity of Jonah Hex.

My mother’s courtship with Bob #2 lasted briefly, and in a few ways I was the catalyst for their separation. As time unfolded, they appeared to have less in common with each other than he did with me! After they split up, there were still some comics from the “want back” pile left at my mother’s place, although as time progressed I could no longer remember which was which.

I would occasionally see Bob #2 around town, like at a yard sale the following summer, where he bought another dish tray. I couldn’t help but chuckle. But as time passed, and as faces begin to fade, I would wonder what became of him. Only years later did I learn that he passed away, still in his 50s. I’ve no idea whether he still lived alone, or if he had any heirs.

But still, in the years after the brief time I knew him, I would revisit the stash of funny books in my mother’s basement, and he would soon enter my thoughts. I would skip over any titles featuring someone in a cape, and go for the stuff from that alternate four-colour universe that he turned me onto, and silently thank him. And especially for Judge Colt. He was the jewel of the lot.