Young Buffalo Bill

Origin[]

Bill was a young orphan who lived adventures in the West with his horse, Blackie.

All published appearances of Young Buffalo Bill from before January 1, 1930 are public domain in the US.

Young Buffalo Bill was created by Harry F. O'Neill, who illustrated it from June 7, 1927, to July 8, 1950, for United Feature Syndicate. The strip was renamed Buckaroo Bill in 1930, and finally became Broncho Bill in 1932.
Young Buffalo Bill is sometimes considered the first Western comic strip. However, according to Allan Holtz and Alex Jay (authors of the blog Stripper’s Guide) and William Grady in Redrawing the Western: A History of American Comics and the Mythic West (2024), earlier examples exist. Victor Forsythe created the humorous strips Bad Bill the Western Wildcat (1911) and Tenderfoot Tim (1912–1914), which already explored Western themes in comic form.
Also in 1927, specifically in October, J. Carrol Mansfield, best known for the educational strip High Lights of History (1924–1942), launched Buffalo Bill, Scout of Scouts, a daily strip depicting the youth of Buffalo Bill.
A Sunday page was introduced in 1933, with O'Neill also drawing an topper called Bumps, centered on circus life, the topper ran until 1939.

After O'Neill left, Fred Meagher drew six more strips between July 10 and 15, 1950, as well as the strip for July 17, 1950. On July 18, 1950, the title changed once again, this time to Buffalo Bill. It is unclear whether this was intended to be the historical Buffalo Bill or simply a similar character. In the narrative, Broncho dies and Buffalo Bill takes over the strip,^[1]^[2] which continued until 1956.

The timeframe of the series is difficult to define. According to Don Markstein (1947–2012), it showed the characters “cavorting through an era-unspecific (looked like 1860s to 19-aughts) Western landscape.” However, in the story The Girl in the Car! published in Broncho Bill#10, March 1949, which according to the GCD originated from a Sunday strip, the setting already suggests a more modern context, complicating attempts to place it historically.

In 1947, Broncho Bill received a comic book series published by Standard/Pines, composed mostly of reprints. The covers were drawn by Alex Schomburg and Ralph Mayo, while splash panels for re-paginated comic strips were created by artists such as Mayo himself, Art Saaf, and Rafael Astarita. The title ran until December 1950 and featured only Harry O'Neill’s stories.