Straight Arrow #3

History

The Straight Arrow character was not born in a comics editorial office but in a Madison Avenue advertising brief: the McCann-Erickson agency created the concept on behalf of the National Biscuit Company (Nabisco) to market Shredded Wheat to children, with writer Sheldon Stark developing the dual-identity Comanche warrior Steve Adams for a radio program that debuted regionally in 1948 and went national on the Mutual Broadcasting Network in February 1949. When the radio show proved a ratings success, Nabisco contracted Magazine Enterprises to publish a comic book adaptation beginning in February 1950; editor Raymond C. Krank oversaw the series, with Gardner Fox writing the bulk of the scripts and Fred Meagher handling most interior art throughout the run. Issue #3 arrived bi-monthly in June–July 1950, with Frank Frazetta contributing the cover while Fox and Meagher handled the interior stories.

Trivia · 8 facts

• Published June–July 1950 by Magazine Enterprises; 36 pages, bi-monthly frequency, edited by Raymond C. Krank.
• Cover penciled and inked entirely by Frank Frazetta — one of only two covers he contributed to the series (the other being issue #22); the GCD and the Frazetta comics checklist both confirm issue #3 as a Frazetta cover.
• Interior art by Fred Meagher (primary) and Bob Powell; scripts by Gardner Fox, who wrote the majority of stories across the entire 55-issue run.
• Story content includes 'The Killer Bear!', 'The Doctor of Medicine Hat!', 'Red Hawk in the Earthshaker', and 'The Traps of Terror!' among other features, plus non-fiction segments on horses and Native American lodge-pole construction.
• One story, 'White Comanche', is explicitly based on the real-life history of Quanah Parker and his mother Cynthia Ann Parker — an early example of a mainstream Golden Age western comic incorporating documented Indigenous American history into its narrative.
• The protagonist, Steve Adams / Straight Arrow, is a Comanche orphan raised by a white ranching family who maintains a secret warrior identity — a dual-identity structure modeled in part on radio-era hero conventions.
• The cover art for issue #3 was later reprinted in Vanguard Productions' 'The Complete Frazetta White Indian' (May 2011), confirming its place in Frazetta's documented comics bibliography.
• The broader Straight Arrow franchise — radio show, comic book, newspaper strip, and Nabisco 'Injun-Uity' cereal cards — represents one of the most thoroughly cross-media-branded properties of the early Golden Age, with the comic book series ultimately running until March 1956, five years beyond the radio show's 1951 cancellation.