| “ | Frank Malone: Mr. Boston, I won't take you any further if you don't pay me $1000 more! Andrew Boston: Frank Malone, you're a thief! We've already paid you to go to California! Add to that that you're nothing but a drunk and a cheat! Frank Malone: Those'll be your last words, Boston! |
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| ~ Frank Malone blackmailing Andrew Boston by asking him to pay him $1000 more to travel further through Nothing Gulch, despite the pioneers having already paid him to travel to California and then attempting to kill Boston for his refusal. |
Frank Malone is the main antagonist of the 1964 Lucky Luke comic book The Wagon Train and it's 1984 Hanna-Barbera adaptation.
He is the captain of a pioneer wagon train who stops it's route in the town of Nothing Gulch, forcing Mr. Andrew Boston, it's leader, to pay more money to travel further, despite the fact that the latter already paid him to travel to California. After failing to kill Boston thanks to Lucky Luke's intervention, he disguises himself as an old lady and goes on to sabotage the wagon train as revenge, while infiltrated as a passenger. While the passengers don't know who caused the several incidents during the trip, Luke later finds out that one of them, the old lady, is none other than Frank himself, resulting in his disguise being exposed and his arrest shortly after.
Biography[]
At the beginning of the story, Frank Malone is seen guiding Andrew Boston's pioneer wagon train through the town of Nothing Gulch on it's way to California. However, Frank halts it and asks Boston to pay him $1000 to continue further, despite the fact that he was already paid by the pioneers to travel to California. Annoyed at Boston's refusal, he attempts to kill him, but his gun is shot out of his hand by Lucky Luke, who was watching the scene nearby. As he leaves, he plots to get revenge on Luke and Mr. Boston for going against his orders.
To do so, he disguises himself as an old lady and goes on to sabotage the expedition in many different ways by sawing the wheel of a wagon, cutting the harness of Boston's horses with a razor, piercing holes in the barman's water barrels and blowing up a wagon of ammunition (which nearly made the wagon train defenseless against the Indians), causing several pioneers to be framed of "sabotage" despite their innocence. As the "incidents" went on, the so-called old lady was seemingly shown to only do some sewing (which, unknown to Luke, Boston and the other pioneers, is actually Frank Malone pretending to act normal to avoid being exposed as the expedition's saboteur) all along.
On Indians' territory, during the night, he sets up a fire while Luke and the other pioneers were asleep. Luke is then woken up by the smoke of the nearby fire, which he quickly extinguishes as he told everyone to not light a fire so no Indians would be alerted. This was futile as the Indians already saw the smoke and their chief, Rabid Dog, ordered one of his men, Ox Tail, to find out about the smoke's presence. Luckily, Ox Tail is captured by Lucky Luke and Ugly Barrows and kept as an hostage. However, during the night, Frank knocked out Boston and freed Ox Tail, allowing him to tell his chief about the upcoming wagon train full of goods, which engages a war between them and the wagon train, only to quickly be stopped as the wagons were surrounding them.
Later at night, Frank scares away the wagon train's horses by shooting in the air with his gun as a final attempt of sabotage, but this ultimately fails as the horses fled to a mexican's prairie, which unexpectedly rounds them all together, much to the mexican's confusion.
The next morning, realizing that all of his sabotage attempts were thwarted, he flees the wagon train, discarding his old lady disguise in the process. His disappearance wouldn't go unnoticed as one of the pioneers tells Luke that the old lady was missing, thinking she had fallen along the way. After being told that the old lady wasn't the pioneer's grandmother and in fact a passenger that asked the pioneers to take her along ever since Luke became the captain, Luke concludes that the old lady was none other than Frank Malone and immediately goes to search for him. Along the way, Frank takes cover behind nearby rocks and attempts to kill Lucky Luke by shooting him when the wagon train passes by, but fails to hit a single bullet on him due to his bad precision and is put under arrest by the latter, revealing to everyone that Frank was the saboteur of the expedition all along. Locked inside a wagon, he is sent to the California Courts, where his sentence remains unknown, though it is likely that he was sentenced to prison for his crimes.
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 Villains
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Dalton Family Other Outlaws Comics Movies The New Adventures of Lucky Luke Kid Lucky | ||