21 Comic Covers Referencing the Legend of William Tell
As the legend goes, in the year 1307 in the small town of Altdorf, Albrecht Gessler, a tyrannical agent of Austria’s Hapsburg dynasty, placed a Hapsburg hat on a pole and announced that all who pass by must uncover their heads before it. William Tell, a local farmer and hunter, kept his hat on his head and was promptly dragged before Gessler, who ordered that an apple be placed on the head of Tell’s son. He then told Tell that if he failed to shoot it off with a single arrow at a distance of 120 paces, both he and the boy would be put to death.
Tell paced off the distance, loaded and aimed his crossbow, shot his arrow, and the apple fell. “Your life is now safe,” Gessler said to him, “but kindly tell me why I saw you putting a second arrow inside your jacket?” Tell answered: “If my first arrow had killed my son, I would have shot the second at you, and I would not have missed.”
Enraged, Gessler had Tell taken away to a dungeon… but that would not be end of the legend of William Tell, a man whose exploits would inspire a series of events that turned a few isolated settlements of medieval mountaineers into the modern nation of Switzerland. And while not everyone outside that nation might know the whole story of William Tell, you can bet most people will recognize the image of an archer aiming at an apple on someone else’s head.
Often deployed as a way to demonstrate a character’s mastery of archery, pulling a William Tell can also be played for laughs, either by having the target get hit by an arrow (hopefully the suction-cup type) or the introduction of a much larger fruit (to suggest a certain lack of confidence in the archer’s skill).
Played straight or not, the message is still the same: (1) don’t ever get in the way of a Swiss man fighting for his freedom and (2) for the love of all that’s holy, kids, do not try this at home:
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