I went through my notes on my recent request to have my fellow Kid Krazy friends tell me what drove them around the bend on the boy outlaw. Here are my tabulations:
Went Kid Krazy due to:
6 blamed it on The Saga of Billy the Kid by Walter Noble Burns
5 blamed it on the two Young Guns movies
4 blamed it on Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid
4 blamed it on growing up in Billy the Kid Country
3 blamed it on me and my Illustrated Life & Times of Billy the Kid
2 blamed it on The Left-Handed Gun with Paul Newman
And the following all received one vote: The comic Lucky Luke, The West of Billy the Kid by Fred Nolan, The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid by Pat Garrett, Joe Grandee cover of True West, One-Eyed Jacks with Marlon Brando, Gore Vidal's Billy the Kid, the History Channel, The Tall Man, and finally a claim of being related to one of Billy the Kid's victims (Robert Olinger).
Pretty crazy, eh?
Meanwhile, Mark Gardner, the author of To Hell On A Fast Horse sent me a link to a Spanish website and an article on 10 books to understand America. Of course it's in Spanish, so Mark sent me to a Google translation page where a humorous mash-up of English and Spanish results in copy like this:
Understanding the U.S. through Billy the Kid
Here's a garbled example:
The land of opportunity is the self-made man, too, the financial gangsters who kidnap democracy. From the gold rush to the feverish stock market bubble. The capitalist crime news now written Madoff & Co. (Errata Naturae, 2012), the "brothers Malasombra» Lehman, founded in 1850 (more or less, when Billy the Kid was born). Has broken the social contract between elites and classes medium that supported meritocracy? Ten books to make sure every American dream becomes a myth or just bursting into countless fragments.
"I'll make you famous."
—Emilio Estevev, as Billy the Kid in Young Guns I and II
