William Henry McCarty, a.k.a. William H. Bonney, a.k.a Billy the Kid, was gunned down by lawman Pat Garrett in 1881. Or was he? Writer Eric Powell posits otherwise, working with the assumption that Garrett unknowingly killed the wrong man and Billy, wanting the law off his back, took the opportunity to change his name and disappear.

In Powell's version of events, however, Billy doesn't just vanish into obscurity. Instead, he's recruited by a band of sideshow freaks (or "biological curiosities") to take on the vile Dr. Victor Frankenstein (whose death was also exaggerated) and his minions in Europe, where a valuable treasure awaits them.

Billy the Kid's Old-Timey Oddities is a hoot and a holler, a fun, yet vaguely disturbing book that blends Old West attitudes and gunslingin' with Old World atmosphere and a varied bag of macabre, malformed grotesqueries.

The story, illustrated along unsettling lines by Kyle Hotz, teams Billy with Fineas Sproule, the human spider; Aldwin Callahan, the alligator man; Isadora Mavrites, the tattooed woman; Hector Delgado, the wolf boy; Watta, the wild man; and Jeffrey Tinsle, the miniature boy.

Opposing them are wealthy industrialist Leonard Abradale, Frankenstein and the doctor's numerous creations (only one of which is tall and lumbering in the manner you might expect). The story leads readers through a twisted tale filled with tentacles, decapitations, manacles, syringes, blood and other fluids.

I was quite proudly ready to liken the tale to a madly gleeful spaghetti western as written by H.P. Lovecraft -- until I read Joe Lansdale's introduction and realized he'd already gone in a similar line. "Way he writes," Lansdale states, "it's as if Billy the Kid was born under the pen of Edgar Allen [sic] Poe, then farted on by H.P. Lovecraft. Yeah, Eric writes that creepy." What he said.

And let's hope there's more to come.

by Tom Knapp
Rambles.NET
5 August 2006