An Illustrated History of Jonah Hex (Part 10)

1984-1985: Last Days of an American Gunfighter

Things were hopping in the DC offices back in 1984: the company was gearing up for its 50th anniversary celebration next year, with lots of projects being created specifically for that event.  A fellow by the name of Bob Greenberger had just rejoined DC around that time to help with a few of them, and though his name isn’t one normally associated with Hex history, you’ll find out later that he had a front-row seat in regards to a big change in the bounty hunter’s life.

Before we get there, however, we have to go through a slew of small changes, starting right on the opening page of Jonah Hex #84 (May 1984): Jonah’s over at the local gunsmith shop replacing his prized Dragoons, which he’d tossed into a lake during the previous issue...though he’s reluctant to admit it.  “Ah just kinda had one nip too many, thet’s all!” he tells the gunsmith.  “An’ first thing Ah knowed, they’d kinda dropped in!”  Jonah is probably still coming to grips with the stupidity of his actions, seeing as how he’s owned those Dragoons since JH#18, but he eventually settles on replacing them with a Colt Peacemaker and Smith & Wesson Schofield .45 (but not until he’s made a few modifications).

Some time afterward, Jonah receives a telegram from the wealthy Mr. Sterling, offering him a job down in New Orleans.  Jonah arrives two weeks later, just as Mardi Gras is about to begin, and his told by Mr. Sterling that he fears his daughter, Adrian, may be kidnapped during the festivities, and wishes Jonah to act as bodyguard for Adrian and her fiancé, Clifford Mapely, who believes the bounty hunter’s presence to be unnecessary.  Despite Clifford’s objections, Jonah escorts the couple to a party, where the other guests proceed to ridicule Jonah to his face.  As you can imagine, Jonah doesn’t take this very well:

Clifford is aghast at Jonah’s actions, but Adrian stands up for him, saying as they leave the party, “And what exactly should he have done, Clifford?  Just stood there and taken that awful abuse--”  Her words are cut short as three men in skeleton costumes jump off a roof and attack them.  One of the attackers shoots Jonah while the other two grab Adrian -- Clifford flees during the commotion, leaving his fiancée and their unconscious bodyguard to fend for themselves.  When the attackers decide to finish Jonah off, Adrian bluffs them into thinking that he’s her fiancé, and Clifford was the bodyguard.  Figuring on a bigger payday, they kidnap both of them and stash the couple in a wine cellar somewhere within the city.  When Jonah wakes up later, Adrian confesses to him why she lied: She apparently fell in love with Jonah the moment she laid eyes on him!  Though surprised by this turn of events, Jonah frees himself and Adrian from their bonds, and together they take out the kidnappers.  After turning them over to the authorities, Jonah escorts Adrian home, where she tells the shamefaced Clifford that she never wants to see him again, then walks off arm-in-arm with Jonah!  Of all the relationships our hero has been involved in, this one seems the most mismatched -- he doesn’t have much in common with this gal and her high-society world -- but that may be what’s causing Jonah to stick around, the fact that this one is so different from what’s he’s previously gone through.

Speaking of previous relationships, we get a glimpse of them in this issue.  First is a brief scene between Mei Ling and Jeremiah Hart, where she chews him out for giving her son Jason a gun carved out of wood (perhaps a nod to the “Wooden Sixgun” tale in JH#27?).  Later, we look in on Emmylou Hartley, who’s still being held captive by bandits.  The leader, Brett, has kept her tied up and locked in a closet for the past few weeks in an effort to soften her up.  Whenever she begs to be let out, Brett tells her that it’s not his fault she’s tied up, but her own, and that, if she’d just promise to not try to escape every chance she gets, he’d gladly untie her (a textbook example of brainwashing).  It’s not until JH#85 that Emmy’s spirit becomes broken enough for her to give in when they ask her to help with a bank robbery (more on that later).

Meanwhile, Jonah’s spent the past two weeks playing socialite with Adrian, who’s set the two of them up in a house left to her by her grandmother.  She’s managed to gussy him up “like a blasted chimpanzee” (as Jonah puts it), and though he still seems fond of the attention she lavishes on him, he seems to have lost his taste for the non-stop partying.  As they get ready for yet another soiree, Clifford barges into the house and tries to get revenge on Jonah for taking Adrian away from him, an action that Jonah quickly makes him regret.  A spurned suitor is the least of Jonah’s problems, though, for unbeknownst to him, Quentin Turnbull has set yet another assassin on the bounty hunter’s trail: a masked man in Confederate togs called the Gray Ghost (no relation to either Colonel John S. Mosby, who bore the same moniker, nor the character from Batman: The Animated Series).  It’s said he was a Confederate officer whose family was slain by Union troops, and when the War ended, he refused to surrender, choosing instead to hunt down those he believed to be traitors to the Cause...and his newest target for vengeance is Jonah Hex!

That night, as Jonah and Arian ride home from the party, they come across a nicely-dressed man alongside the road, who tells them that his horse broke its leg, leaving him stranded in the middle of the night.  They offer him a ride in their buggy, and “Mister Gray”, as he’s calling himself, is grateful to take them up on it.  Whatever plan the Gray Ghost has in mind is soon scuttled when a trio of men nestled on a ridge further up the road suddenly begin firing upon the buggy, clipping “Mister Gray” in the head.  Hex takes up a rifle and opens fire, killing one of them, but the other two get away -- we later learn that these men were hired by the Clifford to eliminate Jonah so he can get Adrian back.  Unaware that there’s still a snake in their midst, Jonah and Adrian take the injured “Mister Gray” back to their home, and soon they all turn in for the night.  Before Adrian joins Jonah in bed, however, she decides to check in on their guest, only to find the Gray Ghost brandishing a gun in her face.  He shoots the woman, then goes after Jonah, who’s already out of bed and armed -- they briefly exchange gunfire in the stairwell before the Gray Ghost decides that it would be best to retreat at the moment.  Unfortunately for him, his exit is spotted by Clifford’s hired men, who mistake the man in Confederate gray for Hex and fill him full of lead!

The issue ends with Mr. Sterling and Jonah speaking with a doctor, who tells them that Adrian will recover from her wounds in a month or two, while reassuring them that the Gray Ghost is most certainly dead...though the reader soon finds out the Gray Ghost handsomely paid the doctor to lie.  This won’t be the last we see of him, but it will be two months before we see Jonah Hex in any capacity, as readers of the time learned when they reached that issue’s letter column.  “Writing these lines is a bittersweet experience for me,” Michael Fleisher said in a note that took up three-quarters of the page, “for reasons that will soon become apparent.”  He went on to inform readers that JH#85 marked his 100th Hex tale as writer (17 issues of Weird Western Tales, 81 of 85 issues of Jonah Hex, and the stories included in the Jonah Hex Spectacular and Super-Star Holiday Special) and his third as editor.  He spoke of his deep love for the character, and of the fans who’d stuck by Hex through thick and thin.  “In a comic book market increasingly dominated by costumed flying men, we have, together, managed to keep alive the spellbinding legend of one flawed, ordinary, extraordinary man,” he wrote.  “Whatever the future brings us, we’ve accomplished something together we can always be proud of.”

Then came the bitter part of his note: After seven years of monthly adventures, Jonah Hex was becoming a bi-monthly title again.  Fleisher told readers this was due to the burgeoning direct market (AKA comic book stores), which had a different sales demographic than, say, a spinner rack at the local drug store.  “Jonah has always been very strong on the newsstands, but in the comic shops, well, to be frank about it, he’s never been entirely comfortable squeezed in among all those flying men,” he wrote.  In DC’s eyes, a book that couldn’t perform well in both markets at once wasn’t worthy of monthly publication.  In an effort to turn the tide, Fleisher asked readers to not only buy Jonah Hex comics at their local shop, but also to introduce the character to friends in order to increase readership.  And two months later, Dick Giordano’s “Meanwhile” column, which was printed in all DC titles (including JH#86), featured a sidebar called "Spotlight on...Jonah Hex", praising the title’s uniqueness in the mainstream comics market (it’s uncertain whether Giordano or Fleisher was the author of this sidebar).

                                                                                                                            

As for the story presented in JH#86, life goes on as normal (or at least as normal as Jonah’s life gets).  He’s still in New Orleans, and still getting into brawls with anyone who pokes fun at his relationship with Adrian.  Even Adrian’s father is objecting to the affair: he must’ve had Jonah’s past investigated, for he tells Adrian that “the man’s married to a Chinese woman out West!!”  Adrian knows about this, but states that Jonah is no longer married to Mei Ling, then goes on to tell her father that neither she nor Jonah is entirely sure as to their feelings for each other:

Meanwhile, Jonah is out riding, probably trying to sort out in his mind the same issues Adrian is talking over with her father, when a familiar figure appears at the end of the plank bridge he’s crossing.  Holy Hannah in the mornin’!  He’s alive! Jonah thinks just as the Gray Ghost opens fire.  Earlier in the issue, we saw the Ghost stumble home, where his son, Jeremy Ashford, was waiting for him -- not only does the Gray Ghost now have a surname, but it looks like at least one member of his family survived the supposed massacre.  Still in bad shape from the gunshot wounds he suffered last issue, he spends a week recuperating before riding out again to finish the job he started.  He nearly succeeds this time around, peppering the bridge and Jonah with so many bullets that both fall into the water below.  Jonah manages to escape, but when he gets back to the house he’s sharing with Adrian, he finds that his foe beat him there, and managed to snag Adrian when she got home earlier.  Luckily, the Gray Ghost was kind enough to leave a note on the mirror as to where they’ve gone (which inadvertently leads to Tony DeZuniga drawing the scar on the wrong side of Jonah’s face).  When Jonah arrives at the slaughterhouse, the Ghost immediately pounces, leading to a three-page brawl and includes both men falling from a loft, as well as trading bullets at close range.  In the end, Jonah rescues Adrian, but the Gray Ghost vanishes once more, much to Jonah’s consternation.  “Whar in the Sam Hill is he?!?” he shouts when he goes to look for the body, only to find a couple of bloodstains on the floor.

Perhaps his foe’s seeming inability to die is one of the motivations behind Jonah suddenly deciding to leave New Orleans in JH#87, though he has another that he lays out for Adrian, namely how he’s beginning to feel “like some rich girl’s lap dog, goin’ out tuh fancy dress-up parties ever’ night.”  Jonah knows that a life of pampered luxury is not for him, just as he knows that Adrian would never be comfortable with him out on the trail, far away from “all them fancy dress shops an’ yore daddy’s heaps of money!”  It’s a low blow, but Jonah may have done that on purpose: considering that the Gray Ghost has already attacked Adrian twice to get to him (and the first attack injured her so badly she now has to walk with a cane), he might be trying to break her heart so that she’ll stay away from him, lest a third attack leave her dead.  If that was his intention, he did a damn lousy job of it, as we’ll discover later.

Around the same time, far from New Orleans, Emmy is having man troubles of a different sort.  She did indeed assist Brett and the other two gals, Camille and Sandy, with the bank robbery last issue, and though all the women were disguised as men, some people got a glimpse of Emmy’s face when her bandana fell down during a struggle with a bank customer, which led to Brett shooting him.  Now Brett thinks Emmy owes her for saving her hide, and he’s not above forcing himself upon her to get what he wants.  He keeps telling her how she’s a member of their “little family” now, and going by the way Brett cozies up to Camille and Sandy later on, this family is rather close, if you catch my drift.

Back on Jonah’s end of things, the bounty hunter has managed to hitch a ride on a freight train headed west.  Seeing as it has no passenger accommodations, he’s riding up front with the engineer and brakeman, so Jonah gets a perfect view of the dynamite a gang of outlaws laid on the tracks!  Though he survives the explosion that wrecks the train, he still has to hightail it into a nearby swamp in the hope of losing the outlaws.  What follows is typical “Hex versus a passel of skunks” action, with Jonah using the swamp to his advantage to take them out one by one, even going so far as to fill a covered pit with punji sticks:

After finishing off the last of them, Jonah hauls their carcasses to the nearest town, where the sheriff shows him the newest wanted poster to come in...and it just so happens to bear Emmylou’s face!  As if this wasn’t trouble enough, the readers find out elsewhere in the issue that the Gray Ghost (who was indeed fatally wounded) has managed to hang on long enough to pass his legacy onto his son.  The young man swears an oath to carry on his father’s cause, up to and including the death of Jonah Hex.  The subplots get even more complicated from here, to the point where they can’t fit the Gray Ghost stuff into the next issue.  Instead, JH#88, titled “The Saloon Girl and the Outlaw Queen”, focuses on Emmy and Adrian, who’s decided to travel west in the hope of finding Hex once again.  Before we reach her, though, we get a scene with a group of train robbers that’ve decided to use the wanted poster of Emmy to their advantage: the leader buys a blonde, pigtailed wig and forces of the younger gang members to wear it, the notion being that any job they pull will be blamed on Emmy’s gang instead.  As (mis)fortune would have it, the first train they decide to rob under this scheme is the one Adrian is traveling on.  During the trip, Adrian has struck up a conversation with a former tavern gal named Temple Starr.  Unlike Adrian, Temple is running away from a man, not after one, and she shows Adrian the man’s picture in an engraved locket he gave her.  In a contrived sequence of events, Adrian asks to try on the locket just as the robbers burst into the passenger car, killing Temple and striking Adrian in the head with the butt of a gun.  This results in Adrian losing her memory and (thanks to the engraved locket she was still wearing) later being led to believe that she’s actually Temple Starr!  Though Jonah later rounds up the robbers, he never learns of Adrian’s mishap, and aside from a couple of brief scenes in the next issue of an amnesiac Adrian working in a saloon, we'll neither see nor hear of the poor gal again.  For all we know, she spent the rest of her days waiting tables, unaware that she’d left friends, family, and riches behind in New Orleans.

After the false lead caused by the train robbers, Jonah finally manages to catch sight of Emmy with Brett and his gang.  He follows them into the town of Red Dog, where they try to rob the assayer’s office.  Not believing that Emmy could be a willing participant in all this, Jonah busts open the back door with the intent of rescuing her, and gets a nasty surprise:

Brett, Emmy, and the others get away clean, and the readers spent two months wondering whether or not Jonah survived.  It turned out that, while Jonah didn’t lose his life, he did lose Tony DeZuniga, who left the title after this issue.  There’s a strange symmetry to this, for when DeZuniga departed last time (after Weird Western Tales #23), the last scene he’d rendered was of Jonah “dying”.  As to why he left this time around, I was able to pose that question to him via a mutual friend back in 2006, and his reply was simple: his contract with DC had expired, and the company decided not to renew it.  Though we can’t say for certain why DC made that decision, the most likely reason is that, by this point in time, the company had already determined that Jonah Hex was to be cancelled.  As Fleisher had told readers months earlier, overall sales weren’t what they used to be, and with Crisis on Infinite Earths -- DC’s huge 50th anniversary event -- just around the corner, the time had come for sweeping changes across all titles.  To paraphrase the old tagline, worlds would live and worlds would die, and Jonah Hex’s world had fallen squarely on the “die” list.

This didn’t mean Fleisher was going to let Jonah go down without a fight, not after over a decade of writing a character that he identified with so strongly.  If the direct market didn’t favor Westerns, then he’d think of a different genre to slip the bounty hunter into.  This is where Bob Greenberger comes into the picture: as an editor for both CoIE and The History of the DC Universe project, as well as researcher for the 26-volume Who’s Who series, Greenberger was privy to much of the behind-the-scenes action during the mid-1980s.  I spoke with him at length on the subject in 2012, and he said this portion of our tale actually begins a few years before Jonah’s impending cancellation.  “In 1982, when Mad Max: Road Warrior was being brought to the United States after playing to huge box office in Australia a year earlier, several DC execs, including special projects guru Joe Orlando and his editor Andy Helfer, attended a screening. Andy was arguably in favor of licensing it for comics and Orlando, I was told, didn’t think DC should spend the money, just rip it off.”  Swiping a good idea from another medium and using it in a comic book wasn’t exactly a new notion: if you’ll recall, Jonah himself first came about as a riff on the Clint Eastwood spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s-70s.  Greenberger believes that Helfer, who was acting as “keeper” for Michael Fleisher in regards to his various projects, brought up the idea of dropping Jonah Hex into a Mad Max kind of setting (Fleisher credits his own viewing of the movie as inspiration, and it’s possible that Orlando, being a longtime friend of Fleisher’s, may have contributed to the idea as well).  Another thing to consider was the four-books-a-month contract that Fleisher was locked into at the time -- with Jonah Hex cancelled, another project had to be created to fill that hole -- so he was given the go-ahead to move Jonah to a whole new playing field, “with the out being that we knew he’d come back [to the Old West] so he could be stuffed,” Greenberger said.

With the destination set, all they needed to do now was build the road that would get Jonah there.  First priority was getting a new artist, and Mark Texeira was chosen for the task.  A relative newcomer to the comics industry, he’d worked mainly in the commercial art field before landing a few jobs on licensed comic titles and the occasional fill-in -- illustrating Hex’s upcoming adventures would be his first long-term gig, starting with JH#89.  This issue is less action-packed than usual, and for good reason: Jonah’s got “a king-sized hole” in his chest thanks to Emmy, and the doctor who patched him up has left him in the care of a Mrs. Crowley, who runs the local boardinghouse.  She’s been ordered to make sure that Jonah actually rests up for the foreseeable future, indulging in neither strenuous activity, spicy foods, nor any smoking or drinking.  In short, Jonah’s in Hell, and his need to rebel against Mrs. Crowley’s strict adherence to the rules causes him to sneak out one night and go to the nearest saloon, with comedic results:

The following afternoon -- with his porch privileges intact -- Jonah is sitting outside with Mrs. Crawford when Jeremy, the Gray Ghost’s son, rides up in plainclothes.  He’s come to avenge his father’s death, but he’s unaware of what Hex looks like, only that he’s staying at the boardinghouse.  Suddenly, Jonah catches glimpse of a rifle barrel from across the street: the loudmouth from the saloon last night has come gunning for him, and Jeremy’s about to get caught in the crossfire!  Jonah jumps off the porch, knocks Jeremy flat, then guns down the would-be assassin.  Jeremy’s gratitude quickly turns to dismay when he learns the man who saved his life is Jonah Hex, but that doesn’t stop him from putting on the Gray Ghost uniform and sneaking into Jonah’s room that night.  The bounty hunter is unaware of the intrusion, as he’s wrapped up in a nightmare where his ex-lovers come back to kill him.  While he tosses and turns, Jeremy stands over him, ready to put a bullet in Jonah’s brain, but he soon decides this is too cowardly an act, and instead waits until morning to face Hex like a man, unmasked.

Finding him out on a porch swing, Jeremy sits down across from Jonah and tells him who he is.  Jonah says he already knows, as he spied the uniform inside Jeremy’s bag when he saved him from getting shot.  Jeremy then draws his gun and holds it inches from Jonah’s face, but the bounty hunter doesn’t flinch, he simply says, “Yuh want muh two cents, boy?  Don’t do it!”  What follows is probably the most intense scene in a Jonah Hex tale ever:

Jonah’s calm demeanor causes Jeremy to lose his nerve, and the young man runs off.  Once he’s out of sight, Jonah breathes a sigh of relief, then reveals that he’d been holding a cocked pistol beneath the blanket on his lap the entire time.  Moments later, Jeremy, who can’t live with the shame of letting down his father,  puts his own pistol to his head and kills himself, bringing an abrupt end to the Gray Ghost saga (at least for the next few decades).

Around this point in history, we hit a somewhat muddled patch.  We know that work on Jonah’s new series was proceeding apace behind the scenes (as evidenced by the tiny ad slipped into that issue’s letter column), while at the same time, the events of Crisis on Infinite Earths were effecting nearly every DC title to varying degrees, from the simple presence of red skies up to being directly tied into the larger story.  According to Mark Texeira, he’d drawn a story back in 1985 that not only would’ve linked CoIE with Jonah’s title, it would’ve been the cause of him getting stranded in the future!  He’s related the tale to a few people over the years (including myself and journalist Michael Browning), giving a summary of what he can remember drawing: Jonah is riding through a snowstorm, apparently lost.  There’s a scene where, desperate for food, he digs beneath the bark of a tree and eats bugs.  The story ends when a bright white light appears before Jonah (similar walls of light are prevalent throughout CoIE) and he rides into it -- the first issue of the new series would have begun with Jonah riding out of that white light and arriving in the future.  Texeira claims the pages were completed and ready to print, but no story matching his description was ever printed, nor have the pages themselves ever turned up on the collector’s market.  When I brought up the tale of the missing pages to Greenberger, he said that he couldn’t verify their existence, but did offer an explanation as to why the story might have been abandoned: There was a mandate from DC at the time that all titles would feature the Monitor (one of CoIE’s big movers-and-shakers) in some capacity, so it’s possible that Fleisher had included the character in the story, but the idea was rejected after the art for the story had been completed.  As Greenberger put it, even though DC’s decision to send Hex into the future coincided with CoIE, the company “never intended to use the Crisis as the vehicle for his relocation.”  The fact that JH #90 is included on official lists as a tie-in book (even though it doesn’t feature the Monitor nor any other references to CoIE) lends credence to the “rejected story” theory, as they may have forgotten to remove it from the list after it was scrapped.

Despite all that hullaballoo, Jonah did actually participate in the Crisis, just not within his own title.  Crisis on Infinite Earths #3 (June 1985) features a scene where Hex, Bat Lash, Scalphunter, Nighthawk, and Johnny Thunder meet up with some modern-day superfolk and fight off the Anti-Monitor’s shadow-demons.  The most notable thing about the scene is the date: 1879, four years after the “current” time in Jonah’s own title, as well as a year after the events of Justice League of America #198-199, which Jonah makes reference to when he sees John Stewart is wearing a Green Lantern uniform.  Sadly, this was Jonah’s only real part in the Crisis, though he had cameos in issues #4-5, and was on the cover for #7.  There were also CoIE flashbacks featuring Hex in Green Lantern #195-196 (Dec. 1985-Jan. 1986) and Swamp Thing #46 (March 1986), but he added nothing to those particular stories.

Back in Jonah’s title, the end was slowly creeping up on him.  The final three issues were drawn by Gray Morrow, who’s probably better known for his work on another DC cowboy -- Greg Saunders, the original Vigilante -- but he’d also done a cover or two in the past for the bounty hunter.  It’s uncertain why Texeira didn’t close out the series, though we can speculate that his schedule was possibly full due to work on the new Hex title (and again, if a completed story had been rejected, drawing a whole a new one would put him behind), so Morrow was brought in to pinch-hit, with Texeira contributing to two of the covers.  There’s a feeling in these tales of Fleisher just biding his time until the end, shoehorning scenes that are relevant to the current storyline into scripts he perhaps had laying around.  It’s not to say these three issues are bad, they just mostly come off as “business as usual”.  JH#90 revolves around a young woman named Silver Ames, who’s decided to become the fastest gun in the West, and she’s got it in her head that the best way to do it is to kill everyone who’s faster than her.  When we meet her, she's just tracked down Jeremiah Hart, the second-fastest gun in the country according to folks.  I’m glad to tell you that the colorist finally got it right and made Jeremiah dark-haired again with tan-colored buckskins, but we don’t get to enjoy it for long because Silver shoots Jeremiah in the back when he refuses to draw on her.  We later see Mei Ling sobbing over Jeremiah’s dead body, and though it’s a terrible note to leave the poor gal on, this is the last image we’ll have of Mei Ling for the next 26 years.

Meanwhile, Jonah’s recovered well enough that he can go searching for Emmy again.  It’s a darn shame he doesn’t know Emmy just escaped from Brett’s clutches, as he could’ve saved himself a lot of grief out on the trail: first Jonah gets caught in a rockslide (which kills his horse), then he gets mauled by a mountain lion (which tears his Confederate coat to shreds).  By some miracle, he makes it to a farmhouse, where the owner lends him a horse.  This is where Jonah’s luck finally turns good again, as he just misses being hit by a “shootin’ star”:

Not giving the strange incident a second thought, Jonah heads back to town to get patched up by the doc (as well as borrow an ugly purple shirt, which would look great with the “pimp hat” he got from that other doctor over a decade ago).  A telegram is waiting for him (from Mei Ling, perhaps?) telling him about Hart’s murder, and just as he reads it, Silver Ames herself shows up, demanding a shootout.  Knowing what she’s capable of, Hex shoots her down before she can finish her three-count.  His attitude about it may seem blasé, but who knows how many times he’s gone through this same scenario...and unlike Jeremy Ashford, who was reluctant to kill when the time came, it didn’t appear that any amount of talking would make Silver back down.

JH#91 introduces yet another love interest for Jonah, and they’re not subtle about it either, showing Jonah in a lip-lock right on the cover, which imitates a Neal Adams Superman piece from 1971 (note that Jonah's boots are depicted here with flat heels and no spurs).  Jonah runs into Carolee while he’s out looking for Emmy (there must be a really fast tailor back in Red Dog, because he’s wearing his Confederate coat again), and she tells him a sob story about wanting to join the rodeo that just came into town.  Well, it just so happens Jonah knows one of the guys working that rodeo, and he says he’ll see what he can do about getting her a job.  Carolee is so overjoyed by the news that she pulls him down for a roll in the hay right then and there...which wouldn’t be so bad if she wasn’t seventeen and he wasn’t pushing forty!  Jonah is quite aware of how wrong this relationship is, but he doesn’t seem too eager to fight it.  However, it does turn out to be a good thing that Jonah’s hanging around the rodeo, as there’s a few former employees that’re fixing to destroy it.  While tracking them down, they ambush him, and though Jonah manages to kill one before the rest run off, the dead body vanishes in a beam of light while Jonah’s back is turned -- since he didn’t witness the event, Jonah doesn’t make the connection between this disappearance and the incident at the farmhouse, but the reader may have by now.

Back at the rodeo, Jonah decides the best way to smoke these skunks out is to make them think he’s moved on, so he raids the costume tent and disguises himself as a rodeo clown.  This has to be one of the most embarrassing points in Jonah’s career, especially when he’s forced to enter the ring and distract a bull.  As if that wasn’t humiliating enough, he also spies Carolee cozying up to the owner of the rodeo.  The only good thing to come out of Jonah’s greasepaint adventure is that he catches the bad guys before they can do any more damage.  The issue ends with Jonah punching a mirror in a fit of rage, and who can blame him?  Think of what’s happened to Jonah in the past year: He spent months in a hellish prison, he lost his wife to another man, he went on a major bender and had to go to a temperance farm to dry out, he burned through three girlfriends (the last one being more than half his age), and then there’s all the usual crap he has to suffer through on a daily basis like getting shot and stabbed and beat up and what-have-you.  It’s been a long time since Jonah’s had so much go wrong in his life all at once, and going by the ad in JH#91’s letter column, the new life waiting for him will be just as rough.

When we reach Jonah Hex #92 (dated August 1985), the cover says it all: “GUT-WRENCHING FINAL ISSUE!  Will it also be Jonah’s last gunfight?”  To tell the truth, the overall issue is far from gut-wrenching.  The story flips between scenes of Jonah protecting a young orphan girl who witnessed a murder, and scenes of Emmy on the run from Brett (just as she’s been doing since JH#90).  The parts with Emmy have the pace of a slasher film, as Emmy keeps thinking she’s reached a safe place, only to have Brett turn up and set her running again.  Meanwhile, Jonah seems to make a quick bond with the girl, Cindy, who’s quite eager to help out the bounty hunter, despite his best efforts to keep her safe.  There’s a point where Jonah actually considers taking Cindy under his wing, at the very least so he could “have somebody tuh talk to all thet time Ah spend on the trail,” and from the way things look after Jonah picks up his $5,000 bounty, it really does seem as though that’s where the story is heading, so it’s a shame when her definitely-not-dead parents suddenly show up to collect her.  Turns out Cindy is a habitual runaway, and perhaps Jonah sensed that, deep down, because he leaves the little girl with her folks with only a “So long, now!” tossed over his shoulder.  Still counting his bounty money, Jonah heads for the Red Dog Saloon, and that’s where Emmy finally finds him...as does the mysterious beam of light that’s missed him twice before:

And just like that, in the summer of 1985, the very last Western on the comics market came to an end.  The heyday of four-color cowboys had long since passed, and it would be decades before publishers would offer up multiple Western-themed titles again (though only a handful compared to the old days).  Along with the loss of an entire genre, readers would also be deprived of any knowledge as to what happened to Emmy after Jonah vanished: like Adrian Sterling, there has never been another mention of Emmylou Hartley in all the years since her last appearance.

As for Jonah himself, he would be given one last chance at survival, far from the genre that birthed him.  In a comics shop full of superheroes, Jonah needed a miracle in order to stand out amongst them.  What he got was HEX.

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Appendix A  |  Appendix B