What makes a comic book become one of your all-time favourites? Was it the artwork? Was it the storyline? Or was it simply because the lead character looked great? For me, in the case of El Lobo - The Man from Nowhere, it was the title. With that simple phrase, I was intrigued by its promise of mystery and suspense. The fact that it was written and illustrated by the late Keith Chatto, one of the best in the business, was icing on the cake.

During the 1940s and 1950s , Australia was no different from America in its love for cowboy yarns. Local paperback 'pulp' publishers like Transport Publishing Co. and Currawong Books pumped out hundreds of horse operas, written by Aussie authors using American-sounding pen names.
In the years before television, Western serials ruled the radio airwaves. Even The Phantom Ranger, an American Western cowboy character from Frew Publications (drawn by Jeff Wilkinson and Peter Chapman) earned itself a popular radio serial broadcast in Melbourne and Sydney during the early 1950s, starring the late Charles 'Bud' Tingwell in the title role.
Cowboys 'n' Indians were big business for Australian comics, too. Apart from reprinting American Western comics, local publishers took part in the Wild West stampede with their own homegrown gunslingers. Arguably the most popular of these were The Lone Avenger (appearing in Action Comics) and The Hooded Rider, both written and drawn by Len Lawson for publisher Henry John Edwards during the 1940s and 50s.

Keith Chatto, who had been writing and drawing comics for various publishers since the mid-1940s, was no stranger to cowboy comics, either. Chatto's first gunslinger was The Lone Wolf, created for Melbourne's Atlas Publications in June 1949. In an unusual twist on the masked crimefighter theme, The Lone Wolf was a mysterious, masked U.S. Marshall, who posed as the wanted outlaw, Luke Jordan. The Lone Wolf proved to be a popular title, notching up 61 issues, with Chatto was the principal writer and artist, to be followed in later issues by the equally talented illustrator, Yaroslav Horak.

Established in 1953, Cleveland Press produced a huge range of popular, digest-sized pulp Western novels, under such imprints as Bobcat Western, Iron Horse Western and Chisholm Western. Amazingly enough, the Cleveland Publishing Company (as it's known today) continues to release at least half-a-dozen digest Western paperbacks every month, which are sold through newsagencies across Australia.
Cleveland's founder, Jack Atkins, decided to expand into the local comic book market by acquiring the rights to a locally produced Western radio serial, The Twilight Ranger. Atkins commissioned Chatto to illustrate the comic, with scripts written by Michael Noonan, creator of the radio show. The Twilight Ranger was, in fact, the cowardly bookworm Jess Palmer who, with his young Indian offsider, Red Moccasin, rode the Carakaway Ranges in search of owlhoots, cattle rustlers and other roughnecks. First published in late 1955, the first two issues of The Twilight Ranger comic book were unnumbered, while the last issue was produced in full-colour. Despite the series' high quality, it lasted just seven issues.
Enjoyable as they were, I'd argue that El Lobo - The Man from Nowhere is not only Chatto's best Western comic strip, but represents some of Chatto's best-ever work for comics. El Lobo rode along the Rio Grande, where the South West Territories and Mexico met, dispensing tight-lipped, six-gun justice, his only companion a wild dog named Wolf. Local Indians believed the mysterious rider to be immortal, appearing only when trouble threatened the fragile peace of the Rio Grande (Like many Australian comic books of the 1950s, El Lobo frequently borrowed many storyline 'motifs' - such as the immortality myth and the use of a hidden lair, lined with ancient 'chronicles' - from the phenomenally popular Australian edition of The Phantom, published continously since 1948 by Frew Publications.)
Chatto strayed from the usual horse-opera locales and cliches, saving some of his best writing and artwork for a sequence set in El Lobo's mysterious homeland, Ninguna Parte, a hidden valley populated by descendants of the Mayan people. Their existence was threatened by the arrival of a band of Mexican outlaws, led by the notorious El Tigre, who'd discovered the valley's inhabitants had rich stores of gold. The storyline, which ran between issues #10-12, represents a highpoint in Chatto's comic book career.

Chatto dispensed with speech bubbles and thought balloons, confining the dialogue to text boxes. This archaic story-telling device (which Chatto previously used on The Twilight Ranger) lent itself perfectly to the comic's Old West setting. All of his heroes, including El Lobo, may have had weak chins, but Chatto lovingly drew a bevy of amply endowed heroines and villainesses - in fact, they were a Keith Chatto trademark! It should therefore come as no surprise to learn that some of Chatto's earliest published work included comic strips for Australian 'natural living' nudist magazines. Another highlight of the series was the beautiful, full-colour painted covers Chatto created for El Lobo, which graced the first 18 issues of the series (Issues 19-23 featured standard, four-colour line drawings)
El Lobo - The Man from Nowhere ran for 23 issues between 1957-1959. It was published by Apache Comics, which was the comic book imprint of Cleveland Press. However, all the covers of El Lobo bore the King Size Comics logo, which became the title for Cleveland's giant-size reprint title, King Size Comics. Interestingly enough, the eighth, unpublished installment of The Twilight Ranger apparently later appeared in King Size Comics.

Occasional reprints of El Lobo are to be found in both King Size Comics and Silhouette Western Library, a digest-sized comic published by Reigate Pty. Ltd. (another imprint of Cleveland Press), which featured reprints of local and overseas Western comic strips, and was exported to Britain during the late 1950s-early 1960s.
Decades later, some episodes of El Lobo were reprinted in The Australian Comic Buyers Guide, a Melbourne comic fanzine published by Joe Italiano and Peter Hughes between 1981-1982. The fourth issue featured a biography of Chatto and illustrations reprinted from John Ryan's 1979 book, Panel By Panel: A History of Australian Comics.
This column previously appeared in Collectormania magazine (December 2004) and was partly based on material previously published online at ModernTales.com. Image courtesy of the Rare Book Collection, Monash University Library.

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers"; so William Shakespeare wrote in Henry VI, Part Two (circa 1590-91), but we've had to wait until 2009 to see The Bard's wishes come close to fulfilment in the pages of Killable Hours.

Written by the psuedonymous 'Clay Blakehills', Killable Hours is set in the skyscraper offices of a Melbourne law firm, which is beseiged from within when most of its workforce is afflicted by a strange virus, which turns them into a ravenous horde of zombies. No one, from the senior partners down to the lowliest law clerk, is safe from the ensuing carnage.
Killable Hours is the the first horror pulp novella in the 'After the World' series, released by Black House Comics, publishers of The Dark Detective comic book series (For a review of The Dark Detective, click here.) Wrapped up in a gorgeous, blood-drenched cover painting by Jason Paulos, Killable Hours is an enjoyable piece of escapist mayhem, which sells for AUD$5.00 and is on sale at newsagencies everywhere.

Flicking through a copy of Madeleine Hamilton's new book, Our Girls: Aussie Pin-Ups of the 40s and 50s (ISBN: 9780980436754/Arcade Publications), I was surprised to see a photo showing a smart young couple sitting in a magnificent sportscar, bearing the following caption: "Norma with her husband, illustrator Vernon Hayles, in the early 1940s".

'Norma' was, as it turns out, Norma Padula, a striking brunette who won the Pix magazine 'Beach Girl' photographic contest in 1941. Her husband, Vernon Hayles, will be known to collectors of Australian comic books as one of KG Murray's earliest Australian comic book artists, who penned such engaging science-fiction adventures as the one-shot title, Man Out of Space, and 'Fort Zero', which appeared in Climax Color Comic #11.
Hayles later collaborated with the acclaimed children's author, Ivan Southall, on a comic strip titled Mike Manly, which appeared in the Australian Woman's Day magazine during 1954-55 (Hayles succeeded Peter James, the strip's original illustrator, who remains best known for his 1940s jungle hero, Panther Man). Sadly, as with so many Australian comic artists of the post-war era, little is known about Vernon Hayles' life and work.
However, anyone interested in Australian post-war popular culture, particularly magazine publishing history, will enjoy Madeleine Hamilton's book, Our Girls. The biographical portraits of the pin-up models and photographers from that era make for engaging reading in their own right - not to mention the photographs, of course! - but the book highlights the important role that popular magazines such as Pix and Man played in shaping Australia's post-war aspirations and sense of national identity, albeit in a playful, lighthearted manner.

To Australia's surfing fraternity, Captain Goodvibes needs little introduction. For those of us not familiar with the ways of 'skeg culture', this porcine, spliff-smokin', wave-riding superhero might need a little further explanation.

The creation of cartoonist Tony Edwards' fevered imagination, Captain Goodvibes was the Antipodean equivalent of Gilbert Shelton's underground comix hero, Wonder Warthog, and made his debut in the Australian surfing magazine, Tracks, in May 1973, remaining there until August 1981. Dedicated to the pursuit of good times (or should that be 'high times'?), Captain Goodvibes was sufficiently popular with the 1970s counterculture audience to burst out of Tracks, and appear in a few solo publications, such as the 1974 tabloid-sized comic, Captain Goodvibes: The Pig of Steel. Captain Goodvibes also apparently enjoyed a cinematic cameo in the 1975 surfing documentary, Crystal Voyager, appearing in a brief animated sequence during the film.
For those of you who can, through the thinning pall of dope smoke, still vaguely recall the good Captain in his glory days, or to anyone curious to know more about this genuine Aussie comic cult figure, then a mandatory visit should be made to the Captain Goodvibes Official Website, which has a brief history about the character, as well as a gallery of some of his finer exploits from Tracks magazine. (Thanks to Eddy Crosby for the heads up on this website)

Anyone doubting the comic strip's potential as an educational and instructional medium would surely cast aside such doubts upon rediscovering the 'Frontiers of Science', an Australian comic strip that was syndicated to over 600 newspapers worldwide between 1961-1982. The brainchild of Professor Stuart Butler (School of Physics, University of Sydney) and journalist and filmmaker, Bob Raymond, Frontiers of Science was conceived as a means of explaining scientific phenomena and documenting aspects of scientific history, in a compelling, visual manner. Butler served as the scientific consultant on the series, while Raymond wrote the scripts for each daily installment. Frontiers of Science was well-served by two accomplished illustrators; Andrea Bresciani, an expatriate Slovenian-Italian artist who spent much of his working life after World War II in Australia, and David Emerson, a prolific Australian cartoonist and painter, who took over as illustrator on the series in 1970.
The University of Sydney Library has recently launched the Frontiers of Science website, which features an online archive containing the first 200 episodes of the comic strip, along with biographical information about the series' creative personnel. This website is a handsomely formulated tribute to one of the unsung success stories of Australian comic strip art, which remains as informative and enlightening today as it did when it first appeared nearly 50 years ago.