Awesome / Tex Willer

• At some point Pat Mac Ryan realized most people see him just as Dumb Muscle... And learned how to take advantage of it and even play it up. More than once people trying to fool him realized the large and extremely strong man they were scamming was onto them and ready to whoop their asses.
  • His brief stint in the army is full with him fooling his enemies repeatedly, well after they should have learned he's nowhere near as stupid as he seems when he noticed some soldiers were cheating him at poker and called them out on it. To their defense, Pat's biggest hit against them was to call in Tex the moment he realized he was being framed for a theft... But he always makes sure he has enough cash on him for a telegram to Tex to send the moment he notices he's in over his head.
• Sangue Navajo (Navajo Blood) is a crowning storyline of awesome. It starts when two Small Town Tyrants on a train shoot four Navajo kids For the Evulz, and both the governor of Arizona and colonel Elbert, commander of Fort Defiance, try and pass the murder for self defense to protect the two rich men. Tex replies to that with an awesome, if bloodless (almost: an idiot tried to shoot Tex and was promptly killed for that), Roaring Rampage of Revenge:
  • when Elbert has the gall to tell Tex it was self defence, our hero insults him to his face and, threatened with arrest, takes him hostage to leave the fort before freeing him;
  • after that he goes to the nearby town of Gallup to see the faces of the murderers Sam Hope and Bart Barlow, and beats up Barlow in public when he says a few words he should have not said;
  • Elbert, who is not a complete idiot (and had actually tried to stop the shooting, as he was on the same train), has called for reinforcements and, received a squadron from Fort Wingate, attacks first. As soon as he leaves, Tex and the Navajos capture the remaining garrison of Fort Defiance and burn it to the ground, and then capture Elbert's attack force;
  • in the meantime, anticipating the need to feed the soldiers, Tex goes and steals Hope's cattle, burns his ranch to the ground just to add insult to injury, and, stumbling on Hope, gives him a beating too;
  • when asked to surrender, Elbert fired on Kit Willer, who was under a white flag. Tex gave him another beating, had him stripped to his underwear and shaven bald, and then freed him;
  • when another squadron from Fort Wingate came to see what had happened, Tex captured them too;
  • still, the US Army remains too powerful, and when they'll bring their forces to bear the Navajos, in spite of their valour and their easily defended territory, will lose. That's why Tex got an embedded reporter (a journalist who was on the train when Hope and Barlow started shooting and denounced them on his newspaper) and, after capturing the second military expedition, had him send a reportage to the great newspapers of the East Coast. The result: the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Denver Post, the Baltimora Express, the Kansas Courier, the Santa Fe Examiner and the Phoenix Post started an hell of press campaign that caused the Department of War to categorically order to cease any and all operations that could provoke the Navajos and the Congress to order the start of an enquiry about the facts, with the governor being forced to order the arrest of the two hicks. That's victory, completely bloodless... But not enough;
  • Tex, to make a favour to the Navajo tribe from which the victims hailed, convinces Gallup's sheriff to deputize him and assemble the most epic Posse in the history of the western genre: it's made of all the warriors of that Navajo tribe. And not to kill them, but to arrest them so they would get tried and hanged. It's almost too bad that Hope and Barlow, trying to escape, ended up killing each other...
  • In short, Tex started and won an Indian War, without killing a single soldier, in order to have justice.
• Padma versus Mefisto. For most of the story arc Padma had not stopped Mefisto, trying instead to turn him to good. When at the end he's forced to actually fight him, and holding back as he was not allowed to kill, he conjured such nightmarish illusions that Mefisto was reduced to an harmless idiot from the sheer fear. Remember, Mefisto's the same guy who can casually deal with hellish powers...
• In "On the Trails of the West", Tex and an anonymous salesman rout a large band of Apache Jicarillas. How? Easy: the salesman worked for Mauser and was trying to sell a scoped Gewehr 1871/84 rifle, with three times the range of the lever-action Winchesters used by the Apache. Between that and losing their chief at the first shot, it didn't take much to make them run.
• In "The Immortal Warrior, Tex, armed with a Winchester, had to face a hitman armed with a Sharps rifle, a Sniper Rifle, near the limit of the Sharps' range, and well beyond the theorical range of a Winchester... And still shot and killed him. And in spite of the hitman saying it was impossible before dying from the wound, it is possible in real life: Tex knew that his round would reach the distance but would have dropped, so, applying a common trick of real life snipers, he calculated the round's drop and aimed high enough the hitman was hit in the chest.
• In "Black Gold!", Bob Braddock, Small-Town Tyrant and mayor of the city of Hellsfire, is forced to appoint a sheriff to avoid trouble with the governor of Texas (who, by the way, has just sicked on him Tex and Carson), and, in a mocking ceremony, appoints his one-armed doorkeper Randy Nelson. Randy's reaction? Publicily arrest Braddock for the two murders he witnessed. Tex and Carson, who show up as it happens, waste no time in declaring him Crazy and help him.
  • Later in the story, Braddock's men believe his brother is going to let them take the fall and try and kill him, Randy, Tex and Carson. Braddock's men number sixteen. Tex and Carson casually kill twelve of them and beat up the ringleader, with the other three surrendering out of fear for their lives.
• "A Quiet Man" tells a tale of Sam Willer, Tex' younger brother, and what happened when a seven-men gang attacked the Willers' family ranch. Everyone thought him soft and weak because he doesn't like killing... Then he killed the entire gang.
• The entire "Pinkerton Lady" storyline: set before The American Civil War, it features a young Tex, then still an outlaw, and the real life Pinkerton Detective Kate Warne (the titular Pinkerton Lady) foiling an assassination attempt against presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln... With Mefisto himself and his sister among the assassins.
  • One for the writers, as they managed to have Tex and Mefisto fight each other without actually meeting in person or even learning of each other's involvement, as it's set well before their official first encounter.
• The storyline "The Defeat" has two, one for the killer-for-hire Ruby Scott and one for Tex:
  • The first one is for Ruby Scott, who does what nobody else had done before or since: he defeats Tex in a duel.
    • How he does it: part of it is by being quite fast and having an exceptional aim, and part of it is sheer Combat Pragmatism, as his swiveling holster allows him to aim and shoot his gun without drawing it. With it he manages to disarm Tex while he was still drawing, and then he draws and shoots to kill. The only reason Tex survived was that Ruby Scott, knowing just who he was facing, had set the duel at a certain hour so that Tex would have the sun in his face, only for Tex to see through it and making sure it would be Scott to have the disadvantage, thus throwing off his aim enough that Tex survived.
  • Tex' one arrives soon after: as soon as he wakes up, Tex, weakened by the blood loss, has the medic inject him with an eccitant and then walks in the local saloon to challenge Scott to a rematch. A rematch that Tex wins with his off hand (as the right arm had been wounded in the first duel), thanks to Scott having a Villainous Breakdown at the sheer shock of Tex being already there rather than in a bed trying to survive the blood loss.
  • Still, Tex and Carson now have to deal with the Small-Town Tyrant that had set Scott on Tex for giving a much needed lesson to his son (who had started shooting around the town for the hell of it and nearly hit Tex and Carson while they were eating peacefully at a restaurant) and said son... Or they would, if Scott's Indian wife hadn't arrived in town to try and prevent the duel after her tribe's shaman told her that Scott would surely die if he faced Tex: upon discovering she's late and her man is dead, the woman swears revenge, calmly walks up to the hick's son, and kills him on the spot for being the cause of the duel (Tex, after all, had faced Scott in two honorable duels, while the hick's son was just a cowardly bully who should have just taken his lesson, and she knew it), with his bodyguards being too shocked to do anything but scream as she walks away until their shouts call the sheriff in. The news of his son's death, and how it had happened, drive the hick into a Villainous Breakdown in which he ends up burning down his house around himself.
• Shortly after the Civil War, many politicians in Washington were considering forcing the disbandment of the Texas Rangers as punishment for many of their numbers fighting for the Confederates. Then Archie Clement and his gang of bushwackers raided Lexington, Missouri, to prevent voting during the 1866 elections... And the gang, some 100 men strong including none others than Jesse James, was decimated by Texas Rangers Kit Carson (neutral during the war), Dan Bannion (Unionist), and newbie Tex Willer (also Unionist), with Clement bleeding off, courtesy of Tex' bullets, right in front of a group of Missouri militiamen that had arrived precisely to stop him, and James being forced to run from Bannion. The attempts at disbanding the Rangers ceased as soon as the Missouri militia reported what had happened.
  • This gets even better when compared to what happened in real life, where Clement's gang did successfully disrupt the elections and the Rangers would be eventually disbanded for three years... But in this comic Tex, Carson, and Bannion changed history.