COMIC DETAILS
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Comic Description:
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Four Color 931 Universal
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Grade:
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8.0
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Page Quality:
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WHITE
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Certification #:
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0078000011
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Owner:
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4GEMWORKS
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SET DETAILS
Owner's Description
Have Gun Will Travel 8/58 (#1)
Photo Cover: Richard Boone (photo)
Pencils & Inks: Bob Correa
This is actually the seventh of just eight copies graded to date. A single 9.6 tops the census. 01/13. I originally bought this copy graded, as is, from Heritage Auctions.
Table of Contents
1. 1. The Brave Man
Have Gun, Will Travel
2. 2. The Girl From Picadilly
Have Gun, Will Travel
3. 3. Hired Gunmen
4. The back cover of this issue is a Wrigley’s Gum ad.
Here is some additional added information courtesy of Wikipedia:
Have Gun—Will Travel is an American Western television series that aired on CBS from 1957 through 1963. It was rated either number three or number four in the Nielsen ratings during each year of its first four seasons.[1] It was one of the few television shows to spawn a successful radio version. The radio series debuted November 23, 1958.
Have Gun—Will Travel was created by Sam Rolfe and Herb Meadow and produced by Frank Pierson, Don Ingalls, Robert Sparks, and Julian Claman. There were 225 episodes of the TV series, many of them written by Gene Roddenberry); 101 were directed by Andrew McLaglen[2][3] and 19 were directed by series star Richard Boone.
The show followed the adventures of "Paladin," a gentleman gunfighter (played by Richard Boone on television and by John Dehner on radio) who preferred to settle problems without violence; yet, when forced to fight, he excelled. Paladin lived in the Hotel Carlton in San Francisco, where he dressed in formal attire, ate gourmet food, and attended the opera. In fact, many who met him initially mistook him for a dandy from the east. But when working, he dressed in black, carried a derringer under his belt, used calling cards with a chess knight emblem, and wore a stereotypical western-style black gunbelt with the same chess knight symbol in platinum attached to the holster.
Paladin took on his role by happenstance, as revealed in a flashback during the first episode of the final season ("Genesis," episode 193). To pay off a gambling IOU, he had been forced (by his creditor, who obliquely referred to his "distinguished family name") to hunt down and kill a mysterious gunman called Smoke (played by Boone without his moustache and with grey-white hair). When they meet, Smoke gives the Paladin character his nickname, facetiously calling him "a noble paladin" after a well-meaning but mercenary medieval knight.
Paladin charged steep fees for his services—typically a thousand dollars a job, a small fortune at the time. His primary weapon was a custom-made .45 caliber Colt Single Action Army revolver[6] that was perfectly balanced and of excellent craftsmanship. It had a one-ounce trigger pull (virtually impossible to achieve reliably with the Colt lockwork; most SAAs are four to eight pounds, not ounces, and a one-ounce pull would be very dangerous) and a rifled barrel[7] with the rifling unaccountably stated in the show as though it were a special feature, though all SAAs had rifled barrels unless specially made for shot cartridges. The accuracy was given as "one inch to the right at fifty feet" though such a large error in windage surely would have been corrected on a custom-made Colt.[8]
Paladin's great advantage over adversaries was not his impressive equipment or even his ability as a marksman, superior as that was; Paladin's edge was his rich education and tactical sense. He had an infallible ability to relate ancient antecedents to his current situations. When the enemy was surrounding him, Paladin could usually make some insightful quip about General Marcellus and the siege of Syracuse or something similar and then use this insight to his advantage. Burying a rancher killed by Indians, he recited John Donne's "Death Be Not Proud" above the grave. In other episodes he quoted lengthy Shakespearean passages from memory. A male role model who memorized poetry was unique in a 1950s television series. Like a chess master, he sought control of the board through superior position and usually killed only as a last resort.
In the final episode of the radio show, Paladin returns to the east to claim a family inheritance. In the 1972–74 series Hec Ramsey, set at the end of the 19th century, Boone stars as an older former gunfighter turned early forensic criminologist. At one point Ramsey denies that, in his younger days as a gunfighter, he had worked under the name Paladin. The origin of this myth is Boone's remark in an interview, "Hec Ramsey is Paladin—only fatter." Naturally, he merely meant the characters had certain similarities: Ramsey, for his part, was practically buffoonish, imparting a measure of humor to Hec Ramsey missing from the erudite Paladin.
In the two-part 1991 TV mini-series, The Gambler—The Luck Of The Draw, a poker game is played by the rules of "the late Mr. Paladin" in the hotel where Paladin usually stayed. Alas, Paladin had finally died.
Broadcast history and ratings
September 1957-April 1963: Saturdays at 9:30 pm
• October 1957 – April 1958: #4 – 33.7
• October 1958 – April 1959: #3 – 34.3
• October 1959 – April 1960: #3 – 34.7
• October 1960 – April 1961: #3 – 30.9
• October 1961 – April 1962: #29 – 22.2
• October 1962 – April 1963: #29 – 20.8
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Have_Gun_%E2%80%93_Will_Travel
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