David Allan Coe = G.G. Allin = Dog the Bounty Hunter

You may be familiar with that dizzying anxiety and attendant disorientation experienced by readers of Wolverine comics when they meet yet another Weapon X feral assassin who somehow resembles our hero in some regard or other. Marvel Comics never tires of coming up with new modified mutant pseudo-lycanthropes for the company coffers. It's confusing and yet we are drawn in irresistibly.

Three additions to the list might be David Allan Coe, G.G. Allin and Dog the Bounty Hunter. Were these three split from one atom? Did they each, in turn, jump "fully formed" from the head of Anubis? Were they each concoted in test-tubes at a secret location in the frozen wastes of the Yukon?

G.G. Allin's debt to David Allan Coe is established, it's a known fact. G.G. even recorded the song "Outlaw Scumfuck" which is a clever rewrite of Coe's "Longhaired Redneck."

Everybody knows that I'm a scumbag...

Who however has made the mysterious connection beteen Coe and Dog? Who ever has broken the code? (NB, Coe + Dog = Code Og). They look the same - or sim ilar - even on the page:

C - O - E

D - O - G

C directly precedes D; E almost directly precedes G were it not for the pesky letter F; but even such disparities are built-in to complex cryptography.

The two men both have early "stretches" in the "federal penitentiary" from which they draw inspiration to this day and about which they cultivate a mythos, while never being too exact about the actual events. Coe, it is said, was in the Ohio "pen" and killed a man who demanded oral sex from him (or, as Wikipedia has it, "anal sex"). Dog, or Duane, we are told, was jailed for killing a man. Can you really imagine that he could crush a fellow human's larynx with his thumb? I don't see it myself.

Both men also choose to wear their hair eccentrically, even into old age. They braid and twist their hair into corn cobs. Dog loves to back-comb his fringe into a pompadour and imagine he is still living in the 1950s. David meanwhile loves to grow his hair long and imagine he is a Confederate soldier riding into town looking for vengeance against the Union.

Hooray for the Union!

I just watched an episode of Dog the Bounty Hunter where Dog gave an inspirational speech from a stage in Chicago. I was waiting for him to start to sing - it seemed the logical thing to do under the circumstances. I wanted him to begin- - - -

Country deejays knows that I'm an outlaw,

They'd never come to see me in this dive;

Where bikers stare at cowboys

Who are laughin' at the hippies,

Who are prayin they'll get out of here alive.

The loudmouth in the corners gettin' to me

Talkin 'bout my earrings and my hair.

I guess he ain't read the signs that say I've been to prison,

But someone ought to warn him

Before I knock him off his chair.

'Cause my long hair just can't cover up my redneck.

I've won every fight I've ever fought.

And I don't need some turkey telling me that I ain't country.

Sayin' I ain't worth the damned 'ol ticket that he bought.

No dice. Not that Dog is above profanity - for all his Judaeo-Christian-New Age schmaltz he loves to swear broadly with the lads. Is swearing even anti-Christian? I don't know.

Both characters appeal to similar audiences, although David Allan Coe is actually beloved by hipsters (I have found this out in my travels) whereas Dog is not.

Will the two ever get together on a bailbondsman bounty-hunting adventure? You can imagine it - they would be wrestling Mexicans to the ground, their hair flying everywhere. Then David Allan Coe would dust himself off (like that scene in The Good the Bad and the Ugly when the man shouts "Hooray for Dixie!" and the Union soldiers brush the dust off their Union uniforms).

They should do a TV special.