1987-1992: Fragments
Jonah Hex has always been a wanderer. There were times during his first 15 years of
comic-book adventuring that he took up residence somewhere, like homesteading
with Mei Ling or hanging around New Orleans high society with Adrian Sterling, but
those periods would always be brief, and he'd soon find himself out on the
trail again. After the cancellation of HEX -- Michael Fleisher's attempt to
keep Jonah on comic-book shelves by giving him a sci-fi/superhero spin -- the
bounty hunter started to wander down a different sort of trail, one that
meandered through various titles as he struggled to find a home in an era that
was unfavorable to Westerns.
The first stop on that trail was Secret Origins #21 (December 1987), the very last Jonah Hex story
written by Michael Fleisher during his thirteen years with the character,
making his final tally a whopping 126, one of the longest runs for a writer on
a non-creator-owned comic. With a cover
by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez and interiors by Gray Morrow, "Requiem for a
Gunfighter" serves as an epilogue for both the character and Fleisher's "The
Last Bounty Hunter" from 1978's Jonah
Hex Spectacular, as it continues the tale of Jonah's stuffed corpse which,
by 1987, has taken up residence in Frontier City Amusement Park in Laramie,
Wyoming (roughly 50 miles away from Cheyenne, where Jonah died in 1904). Once again echoing the strange case of Elmer McCurdy, a film crew accidentally discovers the "statue" in one of
their shots is really a dead body, and a Princeton professor by the name of
Lawrence -- who is said to have written "the definitive book" on Hex,
and bears a resemblance to Fleisher himself -- verifies via photographs that
the body is indeed the long-lost corpse of Jonah Hex:
Once news of the gruesome discovery hits the press, a few
people with an interest in procuring Jonah's body step forward. One is them is Mr. Lewellyn, a collector who
will do anything to add the corpse of Jonah Hex to his private museum of Western memorabilia. Another is Tall
Bird, Jonah's widow: it was implied at the end of "The Last Bounty
Hunter" that she'd died in the fire with Professor Michael Wheeler,
Jonah's would-be biographer (seeing as they were both from Princeton, perhaps
the foundation of Lawrence's book came from work Wheeler had completed before
his death), but it appears that Tall Bird made it out alive, and now wishes to
cremate her husband, just as she'd planned to do eight decades earlier. Lawrence is asked by a representative of
Frontier City to verify that she is who she claims to be, so he flies out to Wyoming
and speaks at length with her. Tall Bird
is around 100 years old by now, but her memory is as sharp as ever, so after
convincing Lawrence of her identity, he inquires about some aspects of Jonah's
life that have gone unrecorded. When he
asks about the fate of Jonah and Mei Ling's son, Jason, she replies that
"his is a tale so fraught with horror that I have vowed to carry it within
me, in secret, to the end of my days."
Lawrence also brings up the events at the end of Jonah Hex #92:
While this scene helps to confirm that HEX remained in-continuity after its cancellation, it also neatly
avoids answering the question of how Jonah got back to the Old West: Jonah
didn't tell Tall Bird, so she can't tell Lawrence. Why Fleisher didn't slip in the answer right
there is puzzling, especially since the series ended 10 months earlier, but as
Bob Greenberger told me when we spoke back in 2012, "DC
doesn’t think enough about continuity conundrums such as how Hex returns to his
proper era...Everyone knows he got back and gets stuffed and no one is
bothering to tell the tale." That's
not to say that attempts to tell it
were never made, as we'll discover later.
Back to the issue at hand: Lawrence
continues to ask Tall Bird questions about what drove Jonah "to become the
most renowned manhunter of his age."
Now Tall Bird gets talkative, spinning a yarn about an incident that
occurred on Jonah's birthday as a boy (no specific year is given, but young
Jonah says it's Wednesday, and since we know his birthday is November 1st, my
perpetual calendar states that would make it either 1843 or 1848...knowing Fleisher's track record, he was probably
shooting for the latter). Jonah's father
presented the boy with a rifle, which came into play later that night when
Woodson went off on a drunken tear and began beating Ginny for supposedly
"slippin' around" instead of attending to her wifely duties. Jonah grabbed his new rifle, presumably with
the intent to shoot his Pa, but the man knocked his son to the floor before he
could do it (if you recall, young Jonah also got a hold of a gun way back in Jonah Hex #27, but kept it well-hidden
from his Pa...this incident here might be why).
The notion that Woodson Hex was a
abusive man is nothing new to Lawrence (or Hex fans), but when Tall Bird tells
Lawrence the rest of the tale the next day, as they stand before Jonah's
stuffed corpse, the significance becomes clear: after being scarred with the
"Mark of the Demon", Jonah went through what sounds like a bout of
depression, where "he drank hard and often, to relieve the gnawing pangs
of bitterness and defeat". Between
being shunned by his adoptive Apache tribe and ending up on the losing side of
the Civil War, not to mention all the other indignities Jonah had suffered in
his life by that point, the idea of him getting depressed and wanting to drink
himself to death is totally understandable.
One night, while in the middle of a heavy drinking binge, he came across
a man beating a woman in the street -- Jonah was so wasted, he thought the couple was his parents, so he shot the man in order to rescue his
"mother", not realizing until the deed was done that he'd made a
serious mistake. Lucky for him, the sheriff
showed up and told Jonah the man he shot was "Mad Dog" Lucas McGill,
a wanted outlaw with a sizable reward on his head, then handed Jonah a wad of
bills. "Reward?!?" Jonah
exclaimed, then dumped the money in the street and walked away as the people around
him scooped it up. It's not said
outright, but the implication seems to be that Jonah Hex only became a bounty
hunter in order to keep people from suffering the way he had his entire life,
and that any reward money he collected for his deeds was secondary to this
desire (I daresay this happened not long before the events of Jonah Hex #30-31 -- which features
Jonah's first true bounty hunt -- and the two incidents occurring so close
together helped Jonah make his career decision). As Tall Bird finishes her tale, Mr. Lewellyn
shows up with his two goons, ready to take possession of Hex's body, even if it
means shooting both her and Professor Lawrence.
Lucky for them, someone's got their back:
Just as with Lew Farnham's assistant
eighty-three years before, the stuffed and mounted corpse of Jonah Hex fatally
shoots Mr. Lewellyn, but unlike last time, it's a little hard to write this off
as accidental. Tall Bird described Jonah
earlier as a "restless spirit", and this seems to confirm it. To be sure, Lawrence is convinced: "By
tomorrow morning, we'll have you out of here forever, Jonah! I-I promise you that!" he says over his
shoulder as he and Tall Bird are escorted out of the park by police...but did
he truly keep his promise? The final
panel is reminiscent of the one for "The Last Bounty Hunter", with Jonah
being left on his lonesome in the middle of an amusement park. The reader is left to presume that Jonah's
body will soon be put to rest, but think of the paradox such an action would
create: how can Jonah stumble across his own corpse in 2050 if it was cremated in
1987? As Peter Sanderson wrote in
SO#21's letter column, "there clearly is a great deal more of the saga
of Jonah Hex yet to be told." Sadly,
Michael Fleisher would no longer be telling that saga. He went back to college the same year HEX ended and, among other accomplishments, eventually earned a doctorate in anthropology from the
University of Michigan -- his last official comics credit was in 1995, for the
UK anthology 2000 AD. It seems that, without Jonah Hex around,
Fleisher lost interest in writing comics, and in more-recent interviews, his
memories of those days has grown fuzzy, meaning some unanswered questions from
his run (such as the final fate of Emmylou Hartley) will remain so.
After Fleisher's departure, it fell to
other writers to decide where Jonah would appear next, and in what era. One of the first to show interest was, surprisingly,
Alan Moore. In 1987, he submitted a
proposal to DC that, despite having never been used, has since taken on legendary status: Twilight of the Superheroes,
an epic tale which would have rivaled Crisis
on Infinite Earths in scope. The proposal itself is rather long and complicated, involving scores of DC
characters, so we won't be discussing it in-depth here, only highlighting a
passage that discusses the House of Tomorrow, one of the superhero factions that
comes into being on a possible future Earth due to the machinations of classic Legion of Superheroes villain the Time
Trapper:
"This
is the House built by all the various exiles from other eras who have been
trapped in this world by the Time Trapper's flux...since anyone passing through
that strip of the timestream at any time in the "future" or
"past" would be sucked into that time zone as well, there are a
paradoxical number of past and future selves of the various time-travelers also
caught there...It strikes me that amongst these travelers there might also be
Space Ranger and Jonah Hex. This might
even be an opportunity to return Jonah Hex to his original western continuity
where we know he will eventually end up according to previous DC history. It would also be convenient to explain the so
far unassigned radioactive hellworld that Hex's adventures have been set in as
one of the maybe-Earths that exist in the fluke."
This was only a proposal, of course,
and the finished product could have totally excised this idea, but intrigues me
that Alan Moore actually thought enough of Jonah's predicament to include a way
for him to escape it. Of course, Twilight of the Superheroes would never
come to be, so we can only speculate as to whether or not it would have been
the key to Jonah getting home. And while
we're on the subject of speculation, let me indulge in a bit of my own
regarding the four time-travel adventures Jonah took part in that were
published before and during the HEX series. By some strange quirk of fate, nearly all of
them are dated after 1875, the year Reinhold Borsten pulled him from. Continuity-wise, they couldn't have occurred
until Jonah had been returned home by whatever unknown method, meaning we can slap
an unofficial retcon on these tales and declare that Jonah Hex had previous experience with time travel during all of them!
First up is DC Challenge #2-3, where it's stated that the Jonah Hex seen there
was from 1876 (presuming this crazy tale is in-continuity), so he must've
lucked out and returned to the Old West not too long after he'd left. In those issues, Jonah reacts very badly here
to being dropped into another timeframe (namely 1985), but why would that be if
he's already had one time-trip? Maybe he's
suffering from some kind of post-traumatic stress from being in that "radioactive
hellworld" of 2050, and seeing
all them automobiles and 1980s fashion choices has set him off. If that's so, I'd say Jonah has got a decent
handle on it by the time Justice League
of America #159-160 rolls around.
There's no specific date given here, but since he hardly bats an eye at
the notion of the Lord of Time plucking him out of the Old West and forcing him
to fight strangers -- a scenario rather similar to what Borsten had in mind for
him -- while his fellow time-warriors in the tale appear rather shaken by it
all, I'd say this must occur post-HEX. By 1878, when Jonah has his second brush with
the Lord of Time in Justice League of
America #198-199, he's got so much experience with future-folk that even
Green Lantern shooting emerald bolts of light past his head causes him to do
little more than cuss the hero out,
and in 1879, he manages to keep the gawking to a minimum when he briefly gets
tangled up in the events of Crisis on
Infinite Earths. As
if these stories weren't odd enough reads the first time around, tossing in the
notion that it's all "been there, done that" for Jonah takes them to
a whole 'nother level.
Lest we forget, the events of "The Last Bounty Hunter" also take on a new spin: What was going through Jonah's mind in 1904 when Lew Farnham showed him the same outfit he found his corpse wearing? To be sure, Jonah is giving Farnham a deathly glare throughout the scene, right before Jonah tells Wheeler that they'd best get back to hunting "a'fore we do somethin' tuh these two lunatics we'd be sorry fer later!" Did he perhaps have to fight the urge to kill Farnham and his assistant on the spot in order to avoid the fate he knew was coming, or did he think walking away would be enough? When he told Tall Bird about his trip to the future, did he tell her about the corpse as well, perhaps insisting that his body be cremated once he passed on? Again, this is all speculation on my part, with no official weight behind it...though this won't be the last time we speak upon the subject of Jonah's fateful demise.
Lest we forget, the events of "The Last Bounty Hunter" also take on a new spin: What was going through Jonah's mind in 1904 when Lew Farnham showed him the same outfit he found his corpse wearing? To be sure, Jonah is giving Farnham a deathly glare throughout the scene, right before Jonah tells Wheeler that they'd best get back to hunting "a'fore we do somethin' tuh these two lunatics we'd be sorry fer later!" Did he perhaps have to fight the urge to kill Farnham and his assistant on the spot in order to avoid the fate he knew was coming, or did he think walking away would be enough? When he told Tall Bird about his trip to the future, did he tell her about the corpse as well, perhaps insisting that his body be cremated once he passed on? Again, this is all speculation on my part, with no official weight behind it...though this won't be the last time we speak upon the subject of Jonah's fateful demise.
Nearly two years passed before Jonah
appeared in a comic book once more, specifically Swamp Thing (vol. 2) #85 (April 1989).
While it can be read by itself, this tale -- written by Rick Veitch and
illustrated by Tom Mandrake & Alfredo Alcala -- was part of a yearlong
storyarc encompassing ST#80-90, wherein the plant elemental is falling backwards
through time, stopping in various eras along the way. This particular issue takes place on November
7, 1872 (just six days after Jonah's 34th birthday): Jonah and many other DC
Western heroes have been hired by Jason Blood and Otto Von Hammer (father of
"Enemy Ace" Hans Von Hammer) to take down Wise Owl and his pet demon
El Diablo. Little do they know that Wise
Owl has another mystical force under his sway, namely Swamp Thing, who impales a
bunch of nameless gunmen on what appears to be a thorn bush from Hell. Jonah survives through "dumb luck",
as he plainly puts it when Firehair and Hawk, Son of Tomahawk show up:
Jonah throws in the towel after this,
leaving Bat Lash, Super-Chief, Madame .44, and Johnny Thunder to take care of
Wise Owl (Jonah does show up later, playing cards with Lash as they wait to be
paid for their trouble). If you go
looking for this issue, I recommend picking up the entire arc, at the very
least to revel in the dozens of classic DC historical characters who show up
over the course of the story.
Jonah turned up again exactly one year
later in the Time Masters miniseries,
which revolves around Rip Hunter using time travel to fight the
Illuminati. Now, before we get into it,
I'd like to point out that Rip's life had intersected with the bounty hunter's
on one other occasion, albeit in a very oblique way. Just two months after HEX #18, it was revealed in the pages of
Booster Gold (vol. 1) #15 that
Reinhold Borsten's time platform -- the very device that dragged Jonah Hex from
1875 to 2050 -- somehow survived the destruction of the Needle, and was used by
Rip Hunter in the year 2462 to return himself, Booster, and their friends to
their proper time. Jonah himself neither
appears nor is mentioned in the issue, but since there are virtually no other
references to Borsten outside of the HEX
series, it seemed worthwhile to note it here.
As for Time Masters itself,
Rip has no direct contact with Jonah: the closest he gets is in issue #2, when
Rip discovers a time-worn Polaroid of Jonah, Bat Lash, Scalphunter, and Rip's
friend Jeff Smith. In Time Masters #3 (April 1990), we learn
the photo had been taken in Oaxaca, Mexico on September 16th, 1874 (Rips says
the date is visible on a poster in the photo).
"That would be right before Porfirio Diaz got himself elected
president for the first time", he tells Jeff, though "right
before" in this case means 1877. Rip
believes Diaz was a pawn of the Illuminati, so he sends Jeff back in time to
kill the man before that can happen.
Jeff runs into the three gunfighters not long after he
arrives back in 1874. They've been hired
to protect Diaz, so Jeff gets friendly with them in order to get close to the
politician (Jonah also worked for Diaz in a roundabout way during Jonah Hex #9-10, which took place at some
unspecified point in Diaz's presidency).
Any delight in seeing three Western heroes in one story is ruined by the
poor characterization of Jonah throughout, while Scalphunter and Lash fare
better only by virtue of having fewer scenes.
When Hex sees Jeff -- a black man -- for the first time, he wonders
aloud if Jeff is a runaway slave (making Jonah sound like a stereotypical racist
johnny-reb), and later on, while standing guard for President Diaz, he's caught
napping on two occasions (and Diaz sneaks up on him, to boot!). What little gunplay we see from Hex is fairly standard, and the majority of his dialogue so generic they could've had an
anonymous cowpoke speak it and you'd be none the wiser -- there's very little
fire here, no growled lines or crass remarks, save for Jonah telling Scalphunter
at one point, "All I know is the pay's good. And if you don't ask questions, you kin live
to collect it." One has to wonder
if Jonah decided to cash in after he saw Jeff vanish in a flash of blue light
following the man's failed attempt to kill Diaz:
Since this happened a year before Jonah's own time-trip, did
the significance of what he saw occur to him after he ended up in 2050? In hindsight, writers Bob Wayne & Lewis
Shiner missed a real opportunity for a character moment here: had they instead set
this around 1876, when Diaz actually launched
the Plan of Tuxtepec in Oaxaca
(which led to him becoming president), Jonah would've known all too well
by that point what people vanishing in a flash of light means, not to mention
he'd recognize Jeff's Polaroid camera as a piece of future-tech the second he
laid eyes on it. The next scene could've
shown Jonah running out of that house like it was on fire, possibly dragging Scalphunter
and Lash right behind him, 'cause any place where time travelers hang out is a
place he doesn't wish to be. Of course,
going by the overall writing in this miniseries, I may be asking too much of
them.
Jonah managed to wrangle two separate appearances in 1991: a
ghostly, dialogue-free cameo in the fourth issue of the Books of Magic miniseries (February 1991), and an amusing four-page
scene in Justice League Europe Annual
#2, which tied into the Armageddon 2001 crossover event that year. During the
event, a time-traveling character named Waverider -- who was from a future
ruled by Monarch, a superpowered despot -- visited various heroes and, by touching
them, got a glimpse of where their lives might possibly lead them in 10
years. His hope was to find out which
hero would eventually become Monarch and stop him before he could kill all the
other heroes. A fairly straightforward
premise, but since this is a Justice League title smack in the middle of the
"Bwa-Ha-Ha era", writers Keith Giffen & Gerard Jones take it in
the craziest direction possible: every time Waverider touches one of the JLE
members, he sees nearly all them at some point in the past, or a point far
ahead of 2001. Rocket Red cavorting with
King Arthur around Camelot, Power Girl fighting alongside General Glory in
World War II, Crimson Fox getting hit on by Bat Lash in the Old West...by the
by, did I mention the scads of cameos in this story? Then Waverider gets to Metamorpho, and we're
treated to something we haven't seen in four years: the post-apocalypse future
of HEX as rendered by Giffen himself.
In regards to HEX,
Giffen was quoted in Back Issue #14
(February 2006), saying that he "never had much use" for the
character. "When they turned him
into the Road Warrior, I was really against that." But he consoled himself with the fact that it
was an opportunity to work with Michael Fleisher, whom he admired. For all his dislike of the notion, Giffen
obviously had some fun revisiting it: these four pages look better than what he
delivered in HEX (though that may be
the inker's doing), and Jonah's dialogue is humorous without being
out-of-character.
By the end of the story, we find out that the reason Waverider
saw all those JLE members scattered throughout history was because a time
machine stored in the basement of their headquarters would blow up in 2001...but
since this won't take place for another 10 years, Waverider is able to prevent
the explosion from ever happening by shutting down a spy camera planted on Power
Girl's cat, thereby creating a "butterfly effect". This means Waverider just rendered all the
previous scenes in the comic null and void, including Metamorpho meeting Hex
(sorry, folks, I know it's confusing, but it's the truth). Due to the way Waverider's powers work, he's
the only one who actually saw all those possible futures, so when he tries to
explain to them what he prevented, he's greeted with blank looks. "Never mind. Let us simply say that I have closed off an
unproductive loop of history," he tells them, "and spared you all some
difficulty." He's also
inadvertently closed off a way for Jonah Hex to get back to the Old West,
'cause you know if the Leaguers had shown up in 2050 to rescue Metamorpho,
Jonah would've insisted on hitching a ride.
The Armageddon 2001
event spawned another miniseries the next year, titled Armageddon: The Alien Agenda, where Captain Atom continued the
fight against Monarch, who'd been revealed as Hank Hall, AKA Hawk (a plot twist
that's a story in and of itself). As
you probably guessed from the title, the overall story involves aliens that wish
to destroy the Earth, so they talk Monarch into tracking down Captain Atom --
who's stolen their detonator -- as he flees through time. Armageddon: The Alien Agenda #3 (January 1992) finds Captain Atom
landing in the Old West, where he runs into a whole passel of DC Western
characters, including Hex, who's only a minor player here. The dialogue in the issue is mostly
tongue-in-cheek, and writer Jonathan Peterson accidentally calls Firehair
"Flame Bird", but we do get a great bar fight scene, rendered in fine
detail by Alan Weiss & Joe Rubinstein:
There is one tiny mistake near the end of the story that
puts a damper on things: during the slugfest between Captain Atom and Monarch,
a powerful alien gun is accidentally discharged at the ground, setting off an
earthquake, which soon ripples northward from the tiny desert town of Dry Gulch
towards the San Andreas Fault, "and thus San Francisco suffers its greatest
tragedy", according to the caption box on a panel that shows the bayside city
being torn to shreds. There's no date
given within the story itself, but the image and wording heavily implies this
to be the Great San Francisco Earthquake, which occurred on April 18, 1906...two years after Jonah Hex died. One could ignore how young the artists made
Firehair/Flame Bird look (when we saw him in Swamp Thing #85, he appeared to be in at least his 60s, befitting a
character originally based in the early 1800s) or even write the fella off as
Firehair's descendant, hence the different name, but putting a very-much-alive
Hex in a story set after he'd been stuffed and mounted is a bit harder to gloss
over. The best we can do is be glad they
didn't put a specific date on this, and keep in mind there had been other large earthquakes in the San Francisco area that preceded the 1906 quake, so maybe it's one of those instead.
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