Arizona Jim. Arizona Jim appeared in the Spanish pulps El Sheriff #1-200? (1929-1935), Aventuras Ineditas de Arizona Jim #1-4 (1936), El Intrepido Arizona #1-24 (1942), and Arizona #1-41 (1959). Arizona Jim is the sheriff of a town in Arizona. He fights crime with his six-shooters, but his exploits take place during the modern era, and eventually Arizona Jim’s cases take him outside of Arizona and even the United States. Many issues of El Sheriff verge on the fantastic. Arizona Jim fights a number of supernatural evils, duels with Fu Manchu (I) and captures the Nautilus of Captain Nemo. Arizona Jim is assisted by the Chinese teenager Pete (II). In the last issue of El Sheriff Arizona Jim is killed, a development ignored in later stories, where he returns to mentor Pete (II) as a kind of zombie sheriff.
Ah, the Spanish pulps. Glorious, weird, and unconstrained by the limits of genre. “Many issues of El Sheriff verge on the fantastic” understates matters–the Arizona Jim stories dabbled in many genres, from Westerns to mysteries to horror to sf to fantasy, and wonderfully so. Truly, the Spanish Civil War was a crime against literature, to put an end to the Arizona Jim stories at their height.
Plus, of course, zombie sheriff!