Latigo
Encyclopedia
Latigo was a comic strip
Comic strip
A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions....

 written and drawn by cartoonist
Cartoonist
A cartoonist is a person who specializes in drawing cartoons. This work is usually humorous, mainly created for entertainment, political commentary or advertising...

 Stan Lynde
Stan Lynde
Stan Lynde is an American comic artist, painter and novelist. Born in Billings, Montana, he was raised on a sheep ranch near Lodge Grass. He attended the University of Montana in Missoula and now lives in Helena....

, who also created the Rick O'Shay
Rick O'Shay
Rick O'Shay is a Western comic strip created by Stan Lynde in 1958. It was distributed worldwide through the Chicago Tribune Syndicate until publication ended in 1981.-Characters and story:...

 comic strip. After a dispute over the ownership of Rick O'Shay with the Chicago Tribune Syndicate, Lynde left and went to Field Enterprises
Field Enterprises
Field Enterprises was a private holding company founded on August 31, 1944, by Marshall Field III and others whose main asset was the Chicago Sun. That same year the company acquired the book publishers Simon & Schuster and Pocket Books....

 to launch Latigo.

The daily Latigo daily strip
Daily strip
A daily strip is a newspaper comic strip format, appearing on weekdays, Monday through Saturday, as contrasted with a Sunday strip, which typically only appears on Sundays....

 began 25 June 1979. The Sunday strip
Sunday strip
A Sunday strip is a newspaper comic strip format, where comic strips are printed in the Sunday newspaper, usually in a special section called the Sunday comics, and virtually always in color. Some readers called these sections the Sunday funnies...

, in a half-page format, began 1 July 1979. The daily strip ended May 7, 1983, followed by the last Sunday strip a month later on June 5.

Characters and story

Set in the old West, it told the adventures of Cole Cantrell, aka "Two Trails". His father was a mountain man and his mother a Crow Indian. After serving in the Union Army during the Civil War, Latigo returned to the West and became a Federal marshal. Comics historian Don Markstein
Don Markstein's Toonopedia
Don Markstein's Toonopedia was a web encyclopedia of print cartoons, comic strips and animation. Don D...

 detailed the strip's background and characters:
The star was Cole Cantrell, nicknamed "Latigo" (after a saddle part), a veteran of the Union army (in contrast to his friend, Duke Sateen, who had fought for the Confederacy). He was raised among Crow Indians, where his name was the Crow equivalent of Two Trails. He had long-standing, unspecified "issues" with a railroad outfit called the Python Corporation and its ruthless CEO, Claudius Max, and clashed directly with them several times. He was an extremely good fighter, with either his fists or a gun, but tended to avoid fighting when he could. Latigos daily strips were taken up with fairly serious continuing stories, tho not without an element of humor. In the Sundays, which told self-contained stories, the humor was a bit more pronounced, but seldom predominated. Sober or funny, the series always represented Lynde's personal philosophy, which was strongly linked to a gentle style of Christianity—gentle not in the sense that he was shy about asserting it, but that unlike some strongly religious people, he never denigrated the beliefs of others. The Latigo series wasn't nearly as successful as Rick O'Shay, and lasted less than four years.

Books and reprints

The Latigo
Latigo
Latigo was a comic strip written and drawn by cartoonist Stan Lynde, who also created the Rick O'Shay comic strip. After a dispute over the ownership of Rick O'Shay with the Chicago Tribune Syndicate, Lynde left and went to Field Enterprises to launch Latigo.The daily Latigo daily strip began 25...

 daily strips have all been reprinted in three volumes from Cottonwood Publishing
Cottonwood Publishing
Cottonwood Publishing is a small press publisher created in Helena, Montana by American comic artist, painter and novelist Stan Lynde and his wife Lynda to publish Western genre books and art, primarily work written and drawn by Stan Lynde...

. In 2007, Lynde allowed the complete run of Latigo to be rerun online at a now-defunct website, Humorous Maximus. After Humorous Maximus closed, the strip continued on the website of the Rip Haywire web comic.

Comics Revue
Comics Revue
Comics Revue is a bi-monthly small press comic book published by Manuscript Press and edited by Rick Norwood. Don Markstein edited the publication from 1984 to 1987 and 1992 to 1996....

is reprinting the Latigo Sunday strips in color, starting in issue #300 (April 2011).

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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