A Billy the Kid Alphabet by Rick Geary

This was a Kickstartered project; you might not be able to get it. On the other hand, Rick Geary has been making books for decades - and comics for even longer than that - so I have to think that he'll have a way for people to buy his stuff. You don't get a career of that length and depth by making it hard for people to pay for your work. My guess is that it will show up on the Books page of his website eventually.

Geary has been doing Kickstarters for books - at this point, I think his output is about one Kickstarted book a year, and he's had probably a dozen or more going back at least a decade - for a while, and I've been backing them to get the books, since I'm a long-standing Geary fan.

The project for 2025, which got to me early in the new year, was A Billy the Kid Alphabet, an abecedary about the man known to history as William Bonney.

And you might be asking "wait, didn't Geary already do a book about Billy the Kid?" That's right: in 2015, he did a more traditional narrative version of Bonney's story, The True Death of Billy the Kid. That earlier book is longer, organized in a more familiar way, has more details, and in general is a better place to start. (Geary also did a book about the related Lincoln County War around the same time.)

But Geary is a fun, quirky creator, and I do enjoy his quirky projects. This is definitely one of them.

Alphabet more-or-less tells Bonney's story, though not in order. Geary has a reasonable word or phrase for each letter, from Alias (covering the names used by Bonney) to Zero (debunking the "he survived his death" rumors), but the stricture of the alphabet means that, for example, the Lincoln County War is referred to a few times before we get to Regulators (the group Bonney was part of during that war) and Tunstall (the landowner Bonney worked for, whose death sparked the war).

So Geary does get to the high points of Bonney's life - that war, his capture, trial, and escape, how he was killed by Sheriff Pat Garrett - but not quite in the order that they happened in life. This might confuse some readers, assuming Alphabet has readers who aren't familiar with the basic facts already.

Each letter has a left-hand page, with the letter big and the explanatory text for the chosen word, and then a right-hand page, with a Geary pen-and-ink illustration of the thing he's writing about. As always, Geary's art is detailed and particular - he's always been good at 19th century faces, clothing, and surroundings, and Alphabet shows his strengths well.

Again, this is a book that would be difficult to find at this point, though it will probably be available from the author in the near future. If you are a Geary or Bonney fanatic who didn't know about it, I wish you luck in finding it.