Straight Arrow #3
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeStraight Arrow #3 stands as one of the earliest and most visually striking examples of a corporate-born character making a genuine artistic mark on Golden Age comics. Its cover — one of only two Frank Frazetta painted for the entire Straight Arrow run — places it in a select tier of 1950 western comics where serious painterly craft met newsstand fare. Beyond the cover, the issue showcases Gardner Fox's willingness to anchor a pulp-western story ('White Comanche') in real American history, drawing on the documented lives of Quanah Parker and his mother Cynthia Ann Parker at a time when most western comics trafficked in pure fantasy. The series it belongs to is historically unusual in being the comics arm of a fully coordinated multimedia brand — radio show, newspaper strip, cereal-box cards — conceived from scratch by an advertising agency, making it a document of mid-century cross-platform marketing as much as of sequential art.
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We Buy Collections ▸History
The Straight Arrow character was not created by a cartoonist or an editor but by the McCann-Erickson advertising agency, commissioned by the National Biscuit Company (Nabisco) in 1947 to sell Shredded Wheat cereal to children. Screenwriter Sheldon Stark developed the concept of a Comanche warrior living a secret double life as rancher Steve Adams, and the radio show debuted regionally in 1948 before going national on the Mutual Broadcasting Network in February 1949. With the radio show climbing into the Nielsen Top Ten, Nabisco contracted Magazine Enterprises to publish a comic book tie-in beginning in February 1950, edited by Raymond C. Krank, with most stories written by Gardner Fox. Issue #3, cover-dated June 1950, arrived just as the multimedia franchise was at its peak, and it attracted Frank Frazetta — then deepening his relationship with Magazine Enterprises through the 'White Indian' feature in Durango Kid — to supply one of his characteristically dynamic painted covers.
Trivia · 7 facts
- Cover painted by Frank Frazetta, depicting Straight Arrow locked in combat with a grizzly bear — one of only two Frazetta covers produced for the entire 55-issue Straight Arrow run.
- Interior stories scripted by Gardner Fox, who wrote most of the series; interior art by Fred Meagher and Bob Powell.
- Issue edited by Raymond C. Krank.
- The story 'White Comanche' is explicitly based on the real-life history of Quanah Parker and his mother Cynthia Ann Parker, an unusual instance of documented historical grounding in a Golden Age western comic.
- Non-fiction backup features on horses (horse-breed identification) and lodge poles ran alongside the adventure stories, a recurring educational element throughout the series.
- The Straight Arrow character was created by Sheldon Stark for McCann-Erickson and owned by Nabisco, making this one of the few Golden Age comic series to originate entirely from an advertising agency and a corporate client rather than from a publisher or creator.
- The Frazetta cover for this issue was later reprinted in The Complete Frazetta White Indian (Vanguard Productions, 2011).
Full credits
Reprints
Reprinted in Great Western #8 (1953), The Complete Frazetta White Indian #[nn] (2011), Bumper Western Comic #20, Straight Arrow #25
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