Even though Stan Lee admired Gene Colan, he never actually did a lot of stories with his. But when Lee was writing western titles in the late fifties, he had a system. Out of the four or (later) five stories in a book, three (or later four) were with the main charcater. If the book was a compillation book, the main stories woud feature heroes who had their own books. The remaining story would be a random western story, without a name hero. And they could have been drawn by anyone. It was here Al Williamson dd most of his western work for Stan Lee, presumable because he couldn't carry a whole book on his own. But other artists, who could (and often did) carry their own books, drew them as well. George Tuska. Don Heck. Dave Berg. And Gene Colan.
Colan was doing better paid work at DC at the time, drawing stories for their licenced western title Hopalong Cassidy. His art was buried in the DC house style inking of peope like Frank Giella and Sy Barry. At Timely he probably did not get half the page price, but he was alleowed to do his own inking. And Stan Lee liked his work so much that he was the only artist give the right to open every story wth is page filling splash. Stan Lee often opened the book with that story, as well. I have written a whole article about this unjustly forgotten period of Colan's work (and I am stil looking for a magazine to take it). Most of the books he worked for were of the war or the post code horror/fantasy genre. But he did others as well, as this western. It was done before the page price of Timely dropped even further and Colan was allowed to work on smaller boards, but it does have one of his splash pages. Which raises the question: if the script was picked of the top of the pile and was not written especially for Colan, why does it have a splash page? Did Colan work these out on his own, which would mean that he was allowed to reformat the pacing of the story - working in a sort of Marvel Style long before others were doing it?
