A Shirt of a Different Color The Lone Ranger started out in the comics wearing a red shirt, yellow neckerchief, and blue trousers. Later, the neckerchief would become black. The trousers would be seen as dark blue and black as time wore on. And the bright red shirt would be seen as maroon at times. On April 22, 1951, right in the middle of a story, the Ranger suddenly was seen in all-gray attire. (The comic book series, giving us additional Lone Ranger sagas at the time, picked up on the change, but went to an all-blue outfit instead). At any rate, the Lone Ranger with whom many Americans had ridden side by side with--at least in their imaginations--had undergone a radical change in wardrobe. On September 2, 1956, he is witnessed in a green shirt, and on April 10, 1960, he's seen in an all-purple outfit. The demanding and tedious work of rendering essentially the same characters, appearance-wise, took it's toll on Flanders, and subtle changes can be witnessed as the adventures played on, even as early as the 1950s, but the most drastic changes are only obvious when one compares the extremes, say the 1930s and 1960s, and the 1940s and the decade of the 70s. One can imagine how taxing such work must be, day after day, year after year, and especially if the artist never took advantage of using any "ghost" assistance. Who knows? According to what is known now, Flanders hung tough, all alone, over the drawing board, regardless of the effect it was having on our hero, but it seems that everytime we turn around these days, we're learning something new from our dogged research. I may be the first to suggest this notion, I don't know; however I have spent many years now studying comics art in an exhaustive manner, magnifying glass and all--and it may be learned some day that the changes seen in the Lone Ranger, the rather "loose" work witnessed across these many years, were the result of someone else applying the pens now and then--but I wouldn't hold my breath in this instance. It is known that Flanders had no absolute aversion to receiving a little assistance on occasion, for the artwork of Lone Ranger maestro Tom Gill, has been witnessed in the strip, in fact, on May 13, 1956, as well as work from John Hampton. It has been reported that Russ Winterbotham did some of the scripting, as well. But Gill's work was anything but "loose," for the important role he would come to play in the Ranger's history, lies just around the bend, in this story. But back then, Flanders may have just been stubbornly forging ahead, all alone for the most part, and King Features was not going to switch horses in the middle of the stream, as popular as this masked rider and his strip was. By December, 1971, as society had done a back-flip in the Sixties, the cowboy just wasn't the character that was representing how the majority of those reading comics, felt...and the masked man and his Indian companion, Tonto, let their horses out to pasture for awhile. Has anyone bothered to count the owlhoots that they brought to justice across all of the Texas ranges they had ridden--in the newspaper strips, the films, the television series episodes, the comic books? Not that I am aware of, but imagine what kind of a world it would be now, if we hadn't had this justice rider all those many years! Think things are bad now! Fortunately, we have never had to live in a world entirely without the Lone Ranger, in some form, since the day he first rode into American's lives on the radio air