The character is unrelated to the actor John Wayne's "Ringo Kid" in the Western film Stagecoach.

Ringo was the lead feature in the two-issue anthology series Western Trails #1-2 (May & July 1957).

But after this first issue was drawn and scripted, Marvel decided to do more superheroes and fewer cowboys, so it was set aside before inking".

[10] The Ringo Kid, dressed all in black, is a heroic gunslinger of the 19th-century American Old West with a Caucasian father, Cory Rand, and a Native American mother, Dawn Star, variously referred to as a Comanche or a Cheyenne "princess of her tribe despite the fact that the very idea of princesses was alien to that culture, imagined by settlers of European extraction, projecting their notions of royalty onto the natives.

His specific mission or goal appears not to have been stated explicitly, but there is intimation of some law-enforcement function: As many covers note breathlessly, "Ringo!"