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Arizona Jim. Arizona Jim appeared in the Spanish dime novels 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 a Yellow Peril (who is actually 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.

Arizona Jim appears in stories with titles like “The Worshipers of the Serpent,” “Octopus the Mysterious,” and “The Terrorists in Green.” 

* I've included the Arizona Jim in the Best of the Encyclopedia category because of of the pulp's ideasplosions. During the pulp era of the 1920s and 1930s you didn't find many Western pulps, American or otherwise, that mixed genres, much less heartily embraced the fantastic. Arizona Jim's pulps were the rare exception. The variety of other-genre tropes used in the Arizona Jim stories was high, their quality fine, and (thanks to the Spanish pulp/dime novel industry being little regarded or noticed internationally) other characters' copyrights were gleefully ignored if that character would make for an entertaining crossover with Arizona Jim. Which is how you got Fu Manchu (I) (in a particularly enjoyable crossover) and Captain Nemo's Nautilus appearing in El Sheriff. Moreover, the use of a POC as a sidekick was rare and welcome, and the retconning away of Arizona Jim's death in Aventuras Ineditas, El Intrepido Arizona, and Arizona may be the first major retcon in popular fiction. 

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