Stray Bullets

Matt Liebowicz aka Matt Hawk was a Boston lawyer who, inspired by a dime novel character, took on the identity of a masked gunfighter for justice, the Two-Gun Kid. Matt Hawk was killed by the Two-Gun Kid on April 28, 1885 and the Kid died in July of that year. Except that they were one in the same man, and he did not died in 1885, but rather in 1887 in Wonderment, Wyoming, fighting alongside a number of colorful crimefighters of the Old West.

Unless he didn’t. In 1938, Dr. Thomas Holloway was tending a dying, elderly man who claimed to be the Two-Gun Kid. He seemed to know the future. He bequeathed Holloway a mask and a pair of six guns. Holloway would use these to become the vigilante called the Angel.

Two-Gun Kid visited the future at least twice, becoming an Avenger. Perhaps his timeline is as branched as Kangs? Here he went out in the blaze of gunfire, there he died in bed, there he visited his own grave, seventy years after his death.

Jonah Hex’s fate is more certain. Maybe. He was shot and killed by the coward George Barrow while playing cards in Cheyenne in 1904. Barrow opened fire with a shotgun while Hex fumbled with his glasses. His body was stolen by an unscrupulous wild west show promoter who had it stuffed and put on display.

Jonah Hex visited the future, too. Stolen from the year 1875 (or more likely 1878), he spent years in a nuclear war ravaged future. He also met the Justice League as a member of a group picked by the Lord of Time. Is it possible then, that the Jonah Hex whose stuff body was displayed in the Frontier City Amusement Park in Laramie, Wyoming, as late as 1987 (Hex had seen it himself in storage in the 2050s), was not Jonah Hex but an imposter? Hex knew the future needed a body, but did it need to be his body? Just who was George Barrow, really?