YEAR 1949: TWO-GUN LIL

In the medium of cinema, tough cowgirls of one stripe or another dated back to the silent era.  In comic books, however, most of them didn't make it as headliners.  Western heroines made minor though constant appearances in an assortment of comic books, but always, like TWO-GUN LIL, as backup characters. Thanks to having a reprint or two of her adventures by Americomics, Two-Gun Lil is one of the few of these sagebrush-backups who can be seen without purchasing original Golden Age comics.

I've only read a handful of these stories of fast-drawing Lil Peters, who seemed content to stick around one particular podunk town and guard its inhabitants from outlaws for a healthy enough run of about 20 issues in Quality Comics' CRACK WESTERN #63-84.  Not having read her first tale, I've no idea how she got to be tough as nails and fast with a gun.  The stories I've seen, rendered by artists like Gill Fox and Pete Morisi, are usually very competent but simple done-in-one tales.  The drawing above shows an anachronistic quality given the shortness of Lil's skirt during the western era, but compared to a later western heroine like "Lady Rawhide," Lil's positively demure here.