Just in time for your New Year's Eve book-burning party...



Get down to Aco Hardware right now, 'cause you know this ain't gonna last long!

Merry Christmas, y'all!

Just a quick note to wish you and yours a joyous holiday, and to warn those of you that are following my "Illustrated History of Jonah Hex" posts that the next one won't be up until February.  I've been delaying work on it, as I was hoping to interview David Michelinie about his 3-issue stint on the title, but I cannot seem to track the guy down (at least so far as Internet searches go...if anybody out there knows how to get a hold of him, let me know!).  There's a couple of other interviews I'm currently doing for this project that'll turn up in the near future, but since the Michelinie issues are to be covered in Part 3, my lack of success in that area kinda loused up the schedule, and I reckon I'll just have to do that part as best I can without the insider info I was hoping for.  So whist I bang away at my keyboard and play catch-up, gaze upon this lovely image from DC's 2009 Christmas card by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez...man o man, I'd kill to see him do one more full-length Hex story!

It's not my fault, I got sucked in.

Had the day off today, and instead of doing constructive things like writing, cleaning the house, or reading a good book, I wasted far too many hours on the Internet jumping from one link to the next until I was at Catandgirl.com watching this video that made me laugh my butt off for no good reason.  I can't even remember what website I started at now, but the end result was good, I think.

Be careful out there, or the Internet will steal all your time next.  In fact, if you're reading this blog, it's probably too late...sorry.

Time to ruin the Christmas Pageant!

This is a new one on me.  My husband heard from someone at work that there's more lyrics to that old "Jingle Bells" parody we all learned as kids.  You know the one...

"Jingle bells, Batman smells
Robin laid an egg
The Batmobile lost a wheel
And the Joker got away!"

I picked this up at some point when I was still in the single digits, and my husband never heard it until The Simpsons did it in the late '80s, but neither of us was aware of a second verse.  So I did what we all do these days: I Googled it.  Turns out there's over a dozen varieties of this song, some with a Batman theme (which appears to have started around the same time as the Adam West TV show), others focusing on Santa and his gang, and a lot of 'em involving guns, busted skis, and bleeding to death.  Real holiday spirit.  Anyways, if you'd like to learn new ways to drive people crazy when you're out caroling, click here and scroll down the massive list of alternate lyrics.  Consider it an early Christmas gift.

An Illustrated History of Jonah Hex (Part 2)

1974-1977: Losses and Gains

“I begged Joe Orlando to let me write the series,” Michael Fleisher told reporter Mike Browning in Back Issue #42 (Aug. 2010).  Orlando, who edited Jonah’s stories in Weird Western Tales, had worked quite a bit with Fleisher already, so this wasn’t exactly a call out of the blue.  Nor was Fleisher one who needed to beg for work: he’d already done a series of Spectre tales for DC’s Adventure Comics, as well as three volumes of The Encyclopedia of Comic Book Heroes (which, for their time, were so exhaustively researched that they’re still being published today).  But when he found out that creator John Albano was leaving Hex behind, Fleisher was “very eager” to fill his dusty cowboy boots.  “I read the Albano issues and the idea of the character was somehow exciting for me, and when Albano dropped out of it I was overjoyed.  There was something about it that struck home for me, and I wanted to do it very much.”  Having grown up on a steady diet of Saturday matinee Westerns, Fleisher more than familiar with the genre, and was just as adamant as Albano and DeZuniga that Jonah Hex wouldn’t be a squeaky-clean gunslinger, because “the idea that you’re facing someone with a gun and you sort of have a moral code that prohibits you from actually hitting them with bullets is just so stupid.  Nobody would do that.  I liked it that Jonah Hex was serious.”  That seriousness showed in Fleisher’s first issue, Weird Western Tales #22, dated May/June 1974, as the bodies are falling left and right throughout (and not always due to Jonah’s gunplay).

Before we go any further, we should note the contributions of Fleisher’s friend, artist Russell Carley, who is listed in WWT#22 as “art continuity" (though DeZuniga is doing the actual art), then as “script continuity” all the way up to WWT#26, after which his name disappears from Hex lore.  Fleisher explains in an interview with The Comics Journal that “when I first began to write comics regularly, I really had no experience in coming up with the plots for example, or in breaking down the stories.  Those were both intimidating things for me to do.  So Russell and I would get together and we would work out a plot together.  We'd sit together on a Saturday afternoon and we would throw ideas back and forth and we would produce a plot.  And when I'd gotten the plot okayed, Russell would take the plot and he would make a breakdown of it -- that is, he would take sheets of paper and divide them into panels, and he would describe in each panel, very briefly, what was to take place, and then he would give me these pieces of paper and I would write the script.  When we started out we wanted to say, ‘Story by Michael Fleisher and Russell Carley,’ but Joe Orlando felt that we should distinguish between what he did and what I did...there was no standard title in comics for what Russell was doing, so we made up a term.”

The process Fleisher describes sounds like a variation on "the Marvel method", as well as bearing a strong resemblance to what John Albano himself did with the first Jonah Hex script.  No matter how they arrived at the finished product, the transition from Albano to Fleisher is nearly seamless: Jonah’s just as coarse as ever when dealing with “civilized” folk, and the touches of deadpan humor that peeked through in previous Jonah Hex stories are evident here as well, such as when an illiterate bumpkin asks Hex for his autograph, and he signs the paper “Buffalo Bill”.  The only sour note is an unfortunate bit of stereotyping on the part of the main bad guy, a huge African-American named Blackjack Jorgis, who repeatedly talks about how much he likes “watermelly”.  But what’s most notable about Fleisher’s debut is what he introduces to Jonah’s world in general: continuity.  Aside from the “Ironjaws Trilogy” of WWT#12-14, all Hex stories up to this point have been interchangeable, with no need to read them in a specific order, nor has there been much reference to his life before he became a bounty hunter, aside from the occasional acquaintance who’d turn up only to die by the end of the story (which also occurs here, the victim in question being a sheriff named Hank Brewster).  From this issue onward, however, we’ll begin to see ever larger swatches of Jonah’s past, and the seeds that are sown throughout these 20 pages will bear fruit for decades to come.

The glimpses into Jonah’s past begin when he hitches a ride on a passing stagecoach, and one of the other passengers (who bears a striking resemblance to Lee Van Cleef) recognizes him from an old photograph he’s carrying, which shows a much younger an unscarred Jonah standing in front of a Confederate flag.  Later on, the man meets up with a group of former Rebs and tells them about his encounter, who declare that they would’ve won the Civil War “if’n it hadn’t’a been fer vicious men the likes’a Jonah Hex!”  These men ride out and end up saving Hex from Blackjack’s gang...only to declare that they’re going to hang him themselves!  Jonah manages to give them the slip for a while, but by the end of the issue, there’s a nasty four-on-one shootout, and Jonah is nearly killed by an ex-Reb who decides to speechify a bit before finishing him off:

Jonah’s a traitor?  What the heck did he do?  We won’t get any answers here, as Hex promptly shoots the Reb and shuts him up.  On the very last page, however, we witness a scene between a colored servant and a man holding an eagle-headed cane -- we never see the man, but it appears that he wants Hex to be dead just as badly as those Confederates did.  In addition to the “traitor” subplot, we get reference to both Jonah’s disfigurement and his father, courtesy of an offhand exchange between Hex and Brewster.  We get no real details about either (Jonah gruffly cuts off Brewster’s inquiries the moment he makes them), but still, after 12 issues, this is the most we’ve ever learned about Jonah Hex, and we get it all in one gulp.  Overall, I dare say what Fleisher does here is the antithesis of what Albano ever had planned for the character, as he and DeZuniga almost seemed to pride themselves on revealing nothing about Jonah’s past.  That may have been one of the factors behind DeZuniga’s departure after WWT#23, the plot of which revolves around an assassination attempt of President Grant.  We also get more clues as to the identity of the mysterious man with the eagle-headed cane: apparently, he’s an important man in Washington, one of “the nation’s leading captains of industry and commerce” (no run-of-the-mill baddies for Jonah Hex, no sir!), and whatever it is that Jonah’s guilty of, it involved this man’s son.  Suffice it to say, Jonah manages to escape another attempt upon his life, but he later gets caught in an explosion while foiling Grant’s assassins, and on the last page, Jonah’s essentially declared dead!  He’s not, of course (the blurb at the bottom of the page even advertises Hex’s next adventure), but it’s an odd note for Tony DeZuniga to go out on: “killing” your creation as you part ways with him.

Noly Panaligan takes up the artist’s reins with WWT#24, making him only the second interior artist to draw Jonah Hex (a few other artists besides DeZuniga -- such as Luis Dominguez -- had already done various covers featuring him).  This story picks up not long after the previous issue, and we learn that, while Hex may have survived the explosion, it has rendered him temporarily blind.  Don’t worry, folks, he’ll be fine by the end of the tale.  We don’t hear another peep about the man with the eagle-headed cane or Jonah’s supposed treachery, though, and over the next few issues, that subplot is barely mentioned.  Not to say that the stories aren’t noteworthy: WWT#26 gives us a third Hex interior artist by the name of Doug Wildey (his only time on the character), and more importantly, it’s the very first rendition of Jonah’s now-infamous tagline, seen here in the upper-lefthand corner:

In later years, some people will mistakenly attribute this tagline to John Albano, but Michael Fleisher alone is responsible for it...though he does admit to cribbing the “acrid smell of gunsmoke” portion from (naturally) the TV show Gunsmoke.  Whatever the source, the entire paragraph sums up Jonah quite well, and it’s stayed with him ever since, his own warped version of Superman’s “Truth, justice, and the American way,” or Spider-Man’s “With great power comes great responsibility.”  WWT#27 focuses upon early attempts at getting women the right to vote (which Jonah isn’t in favor of at all, but the suffragettes pay him good), and WWT#28 is a tale based upon the true story of the Jake Hauschel gang, plus it’s the first time we get George Moliterni on the book -- he and Noly Panaligan will share art duties for the next few issues, each of them taking a turn on a two-parter running through WWT#29 and 30, wherein the subplot started in #22 over a year ago finally comes to a head.

It begins with a teenager confronting Hex out in the street, calling him a traitor and swearing that he’s going to kill Hex for letting his father die at Fort Charlotte.  The bounty hunter blows him off, and the boy tries to shoot him, but only succeeds in spooking Hex’s horse, which promptly whacks Jonah in the head with one of its hooves and knocks him unconscious.  We are then witness to a device that Fleisher will use many times over the next ten years: the flashback to Jonah’s past.  We learn how Jonah was friends back in1861 with a fellow Confederate named Jeb Turnbull, whose father, a wealthy Virginia plantation owner, is the man with the eagle-headed cane that’s been trying to kill Jonah over a decade later!  We also learn that Jonah is more of a “state’s rights” kind of Reb, and after the Emancipation Proclamation is passed, he makes a decision:

Jonah travels alone to Fort Charlotte  and, since he feels it’s “a point of honor tuh surrender tuh th’ top man”, sneaks into the C.O.’s quarters to do so!  We then find out that Hex is a lieutenant with the 4th Cavalry, and while he’s willing to turn himself in, he won’t betray the rest of his unit and give their location.  Unfortunately for him, the Yankees figure out for themselves where the Rebs are, and after they’re all captured, the C.O. “thanks” Hex for his help in front of all his friends.  This and the massacre that soon follows as the Confederates try to escape the fort is the reason why the elder Turnbull and so many others want Jonah Hex dead: his desire to no longer be a part of the War inadvertently led to the deaths of nearly three dozen people, including Jeb Turnbull.  After he wakes up from this issue-long flashback, Jonah finds the vengeful teenager again and lets him have his “showdown”, even going so far as to fall over in the street and feign death so the boy can have some closure.  But what of Jonah himself?  An incident such as the Fort Charlotte Massacre is sure to weigh upon a man’s conscience, and as the issue closes, the reader can be sure of one thing: under Fleisher’s tenure, there will be little allusion to Jonah Hex as some supernatural creature.  He’s a human being, with a soul scarred worse than his face.

The next issue has Jonah traveling to Virginia, ready to set things right between himself, Turnbull, and the few soldiers who survived the massacre twelve years earlier.  What he gets is more hate, more death threats, and one of the best splash pages ever.  To top it all off, Jonah is ambushed and forced to sit through a mock trial, with Turnbull as judge and his former friends as jury, who quickly find him guilty as sin.  Deciding to execute him by firing squad at dawn, they lock Hex up in a shed for the night, but he soon escapes, only to be confronted by Turnbull’s colored servant, Solomon, who’s holding a shotgun on him.  Lucky for Hex, Solomon is a kind-hearted sort, and actually listens to Jonah’s explanation of what really happened at Fort Charlotte.  Jonah manages to sway Solomon, but when Turnbull shows up, he won’t listen to anyone, and as he charges Jonah in a fit of rage, the bounty hunter (who refuses to fight Turnbull) steps out of the way, causing Turnbull to accidentally impale himself on an upturned pitchfork.  The reader (and possibly Jonah himself) is led to presume that Turnbull is dead, but in a few years, we’ll learn different.

After this high-point of a storyline, Jonah’s remaining appearances in Weird Western go back to basics, with no more massive reveals regarding his past.  Instead, we get tales like WWT#31, wherein he’s tricked by a dying friend into fighting him for the amusement of the townsfolk, and a two-parter in WWT#32 and 33 has Jonah trying to rescue a businessman’s daughter, who was kidnapped by an Indian named Joe Bigfoot looking for vengeance against the businessman for poisoning his tribe.  The latter story stands out not for its plot, but for the artist: Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, who was still getting his feet wet at DC in 1976, having come to New York barely two years before with the phone number of Hex cover artist Luis Dominguez in his pocket (the two men had never met, but with both of them being from Argentina, they had some mutual friends).  Dominguez showed him the ins and outs of the city, as well as introducing him around the halls at DC Comics -- on his first day there, Garcia-Lopez met editor Joe Orlando, who would soon come to call the artist his “secret weapon”.  After numerous inking jobs, he was given a few Jonah Hex scripts to do, and the result is drastically different from every other Hex story up until then.  Whereas Tony DeZuniga started the mandate of “filthy and dirty” when it came to Hex, and both Noly Panaligan and George Moliterni carried on in that same fashion when they took over, Garcia-Lopez’s rendition is incredibly vibrant, with crisp lines and dynamic poses in nearly every frame.  And instead of the constant shadows the other three artists use, it seems like he’s gone to great pains to highlight every detail possible, both in terms to character expressions and backgrounds.  In short, he treats Jonah Hex in the same manner as he would DC’s spandex-wearing crowd, and the result is striking:

Moliterni is back on the job for the single-issue stories in WWT#34 and 35, and for a blink-and-you-miss-it moment, Weird Western Tales is cancelled once again!  My notation of it here is mere formality, though, as the book was revived so quickly there was no interruption in its bi-monthly schedule.  When it returns with WWT#36 Jonah faces Joe Bigfoot once more, a yarn handled by the triple-threat art team of Bill Draut, Oscar Novelle, and Luis Dominguez (his first time on interiors, but certainly not his last).  Something else returns in WWT#37: Jonah’s pimp hat, last seen in WWT#19!  It makes little sense for it to suddenly turn up after three years, but there are two possible explanations for it, the first being that the artists -- Rich Buckler and Frank Springer -- may have used outdated materials when looking for references to Jonah’s look.  The second possibility is that the story might have been among the first written by Michael Fleisher when he got the gig (which was rather close to the pimp hat’s last appearance) and had simply been held in reserve for all those years in case they needed a fill-in.  The latter seems most likely, especially considering that the artwork is below the quality we’re used to on the title, and a real shock if you’ve ever seen how good the art from either Buckler or Springer usually looks:

  The story itself is an interesting take on Jonah’s normally-gruff attitude, as he takes a young man under his wing and trains him in the ways of the gun in order for the young man to avenge the death of his parents.  It turns out to be set-up of sorts in the end, but keep that plotline in mind, as a variation of it will resurface in Jonah’s life a few decades later with much different results.

As 1976 comes to a close, the news breaks that Weird Western Tales #38 (dated Jan./Feb. 1977) will be Jonah Hex’s last issue, and its headlining slot taken over by a new character called “The Savage” (soon to be known as Scalphunter).  But fear not, fans, for in two short months, Jonah will be back on the stands in his very own self-titled magazine, courtesy of the "DC Explosion" (which would turn into the infamous “DC Implosion” by the beginning of ‘78).  Yes indeed, Jonah Hex has finally hit the big time, with even bigger adventures on the horizon.

<< Part 1 | Index | Part 3 >>
Appendix A  |  Appendix B