Cowgirls of the Old West - Annie Oakley
Posted by: Chris Hails in Cartoon, Cowgirl, Western Icons Add comments
Annie Oakley was “the first American female superstar” according to her Wikipedia entry. Not bad for a girl born in a cabin in rural Ohio who suffered a fairly eventful childhood and honed her skills as a sharpshooter hunting game from the age of 9 to sell to neighbours to support her family.
Born Phoebe Ann Mosey, Annie Oakley took her stage name before joining Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in 1885 and became known as ‘The Little Sure Shot of the Wild West’.
Compare the Wild West Show promotional poster below then with the second image taken from a 1959 era comic ‘Wild Bill Hickock & Jingles #7‘ published by Charlton Comics:
The dark brunette hair is the first thing to go for Annie’s transition into comic heroine:
In the ‘Weaker Sex’ comic story, “only Annie Oakley and others of her sex wanted the outlaws to leave… The sharp shooting queen of the Wild West thought it looked like a nice town at first…” but it turns out that “the honest men were too busy counting profits” to do much about Turko Brown’s gang.
Page one reads pretty well for a pre-feminism comic book! But by the last page the women of the town are fainting, worn out from their battle with the now evicted Turko. Annie’s last words: “She’s a real lady. She waited till the fightin’ was over to start actin’ like a female again.”
The Wild Bill Hickock comic is a product of the era though - whilst it ran alongside the TV show of the same name, not long before Charlton had been publishing it as Space Western. Anyone who’s seen Disney Pixar’s Toy Story and Toy Story 2 movies will already be familiar with the space vs wild west duel to the death that took place in the 1950s and 60s as kids turned away from cowboys to the promise of space exploration.
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Tags: Comics | Cowgirl | Western Icons
March 31st, 2009 at 1:01 pm
[...] post from October last year comparing images of the real and the cartoon Annie Oakley has been most popular for quite some time [...]
October 2nd, 2009 at 2:10 am
[...] almost a year since I wrote about Annie Oakley, “the first American female superstar” and how she’s been portrayed in the media over the last 100 [...]