This is a tale of two cowboys — both good guys. The first is Rick O’Shay, the boyish, amiable marshal of a town called Conniption. From 1958 to 1981, the comic strip exploits of Rick, gunslinger Hipshot Percussion, and gambler Deuces Wild appeared daily in the nation’s newspapers.
The second was Stan Lynde — Montana-born and raised in a world of cowboys, ranchers, and Native Americans from the Crow Indian Reservation. He grew up with a love of the West and Charlie Russell and a talent for drawing, which he put to good use when he created Rick and his friends.
The year Rick O’Shay debuted there were more than 25 westerns on television. This was not a coincidence. “While a few of these series were very good, many were not really westerns at all,” Lynde wrote in his book Rick O’Shay, Hipshot, and Me. “My goal from the start with Rick was to produce a feature which would satirize the fictional western from the standpoint of the authentic West, the West in which I had grown up.”
The charismatic mustachioed outlaw Hipshot Percussion became more popular with readers than Rick himself. Newspapers threatened to cancel the strip after a 1966 story left the gunfighter critically wounded. Montana governor Tim Babcock expressed his concern by offering Hipshot a full pardon for “all misdeeds committed in Montana … and amnesty for all other misdeeds.”
By that time, the strip was already evolving from its satirical roots.
Unfortunately Stan is no longer with us, but David did talk to Lynde art assistant Denney NeVille:
The high point of the strip’s mature era may have been “Trackdown,” a grim revenge tale published in 1974 – 75 in which Hipshot is targeted by an old enemy. Stan Lynde’s richly detailed drawings were by then enhanced by Denney NeVille, who helped produce Lynde’s pencils in the strip’s final six years.
“Most of his inkers at that time used a pen, but because of my art training I was more intrigued by doing it with a brush, which gave the strip a more fluid edge, and Stan really liked that,” NeVille recalled. “It was a lot of work. It probably took Stan eight to 12 hours to draw a Sunday page, and it took me four to five hours to ink it.
Sadly, Lynde’s connection to his beloved characters ended before the comic strip did, when he gave notice to his newspaper syndicate following a revised agreement he thought was unfair. The company figured it could keep the strip going with a new writer and artist. Bad move.
Loved the strip, particularly the Sundays in which Hipshot dispensed a little cowboy philosophy that showed some solid country roots. I grew up on Hollywood cowboys, but Rick O’Shay — or was it Latigo? — challenged the stereotypes.
Eric O. Costello
A later writer being Chuck Jones’ second wife, Marian Dern.
D. D. Degg (admin)
With art by Alfredo Alcala and Mel Keefer. It wasn’t the same.
Mike Tiefenbacher
In 1958, due to first-run syndication, the number of TV Westerns on the air in any given week was closer to 60. In 1959, it approached 90! Within five years, it was down to 30, within ten, fewer than a dozen. By the ’80s, closer to none–which is likely why RICK faded away…America lost its taste for “oaters.” Seems like even though he talked a good game at the outset, Lynde’s approach always seemed designed to fool part of the readership into thinking RICK was more a gag-a-day strip than a straight Western, even when it wasn’t. Looking back on it from that perspective, I read it more parody than authentic Louis L’Amour–not denigrating its quality in any way. Perhaps I’d have preferred he’d given Rick some earholes.
Mike Peterson (admin)
Note that the Kennedy Assassination put a damper on Westerns as networks backed away from storylines in which the solution to each week’s problem was to shoot the bad guy. We got over that kind of cause-and-effect reasoning, however: By the Reagan years, the response to an attempted assassination was to change the Greatest American Hero’s last name from Hinkley to Hanley.
Paul Berge
If I remember correctly, Chicago had Rick O’Shay running in the Tribune and Tumbleweeds in the Sun-Times. A trip to the library to read both was always worthwhile.
Un
It as an odd strip at the beginning with Conniption as the intersection between two different eras, one set in 1860 and the other, 1960. Most, but not all, things in Conniption seemed to be something that would be from 1860 but the modern world kept encroaching. Citizens rode horses yet the Indian chief drove a horseless carriage. People sat around the saloon, playing poker with entertainment from dancing girls while a motion picture was being shot in town. Finally Lynde decided to move the whole shebang back to 100 years ago and do away with all of the juxtapositions. He then alternated between humerous and serious stories with the serious stories almost always involving Hipshot. It is hoped that some day, somebody will realize how great this strip was and do a complete reprinting of the strip in its entirety with, hopefully, the Sundays in full color.
Less well known was Stan’s other strip, Latigo. It was exceptional as well. And it is worth noting that after retiring as a cartoonist, Lynde wrote a number of western novels featuring his cowboy hero, Merlin Fanshaw.
Bob
There’s a Rick O’Shay Sunday strip from the ’70s that has stuck in my mind my whole life.
Hipshot and a kid (possibly Quyat Burp, according to Wikipedia) are out riding in the wilderness, and Hipshot points out that animals that are predators have eyes facing forward while prey have eyes that face off to either side
I forget exactly how the conversation proceeds, but I think eventually the kid observes that people’s eyes face forward and Hipshot just answers quietly in the affirmative.
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