Kid Cowboy #1 (1950) launches Ziff-Davis Publishing Company's western series about a baby-faced teenage gunslinger and his Pawnee blood-brother Red Feather. The issue opens with the character's origin: young Randy survives a wagon-train attack, is taken in and raised by the Pawnee, and returns to his step-father's family as a teenager with a gift for gunplay and a hard sense of justice. Two further Kid Cowboy stories follow — the pair expose a corrupt "Indian agent" named Jenkins who is deliberately starving the Apaches in the hope of provoking a war, and track the Corbitt gang to a blizzard-swept mountain, surviving a grizzly attack on the way. Rounding out the 36-page book are non-fiction features: Heroes of the West: Wild Bill Hickok (drawn and signed by Ogden Whitney, covering Hickok's run-in with Dave Tutt and his killing by Jack McCall), Western Desperadoes: Billy the Kid, and Custer's Last Stand!

The book is a Ziff-Davis production, and that is the interesting part. A major magazine house that only briefly dabbled in comics in the early 1950s, Ziff-Davis pointedly avoided superheroes in favour of horror, crime, sports, romance, and westerns — and installed Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel as art director of the line. It also paid for good art: this issue carries a painted cover credited to a young John Buscema, two decades before Conan the Barbarian, and interiors by Whitney (later an Eisner Hall of Fame inductee for Herbie Popnecker) and Bob Brown (later of Challengers of the Unknown, Daredevil, and The Avengers). Timing is worth noting too: Harvey's Simon-and-Kirby series The Kid Cowboys of Boys' Ranch appeared with an October 1950 cover date, and by Joe Simon's account Ziff-Davis wrote to Harvey accusing them of lifting the idea from Siegel — a dispute that went nowhere, but which places Kid Cowboy squarely in the middle of the 1950 western land-rush.

Today the issue is worth attention as an early-career artefact: painted-cover Ziff-Davis westerns are among the best-looking newsstand comics of their moment, and Kid Cowboy #1 sits at the head of a series that would later host early work by Gene Colan, Ross Andru, Matt Baker, Joe Maneely, Dave Berg, and eventually Joe Kubert. It is also a genuinely awkward document. The Kid's Pawnee upbringing and his partnership with Red Feather were, by 1950 standards, a relatively sympathetic framing; the corrupt-agent plot even puts the villainy on the settler side. But the book is still a white hero's story told through Native characters, and reading it now means reading both things at once.