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)

2 - Losses and Gains
(Text updated November 1, 2024)

 Michael Lawrence Fleisher was born in New York on November 1, 1942, at the height of the Golden Age of comics.  An avid reader, he collected virtually every appearance of Superman and Batman, plus he indulged in Westerns both on the comics page and the big screen, attending double-features every Saturday with his father.  In his teens, he made the decision to become a novelist, but after multiple rejections in college, a brief marriage, and a stint with an insurance broker, he instead found himself working as a writer for Encyclopedia Britannica.  It was there in 1969 that, after seeing a joke entry one of his colleagues wrote up about Clark Kent, he came up with the idea for The Encyclopedia of Comic Book Heroes, a massive project released in three volumes beginning in 1976 (Fleisher claimed to have enough material to fill another five volumes, but those books never manifested).  This work alone would have been enough to forever enshrine Fleisher’s name in comic-book history, but for him, it was a mere warm-up.  In an article he wrote for Amazing World of DC Comics #12 (July 1976), Fleisher said that the seven years he spent exhaustively researching for the project ate up so much of his time and resources that “I ran completely out of money to live on, and when my landlord began threatening me with eviction, I became a DC writer to stave off starvation.”

Some of that might be exaggeration on his part, but it is true that, during Fleisher’s period at the DC offices combing through their extensive archives, he began pitching in here and there, proofreading stories and helping conduct tours of the offices.  He also became good friends with editor Joe Orlando, who eventually hired him as an assistant editor, thereby starting Fleisher on the road to scripting new adventures as opposed to just chronicling what had come before.  Originally, he was paired with more-experienced comics writers as he learned the ropes (this included Orlando himself, as the two co-wrote a series of Little Orphan Annie newspaper strips in 1973-1974),  but that didn’t discourage him from reaching for the brass ring when the opportunity arose.

“I begged Joe Orlando to let me write the series,” Fleisher confessed in Back Issue #42 (Aug. 2010) in regards to how he ended up becoming Jonah Hex’s main writer after John Albano’s departure.  As Orlando put it back in AWODCC#6 when discussing why he gave the position to newcomer Fleisher as opposed to comics veteran Arnold Drake, “I based my choice on the feeling that Michael brought the same raw, gritty quality to the scripting that I looked for in the art.”  Fleisher’s enthusiasm for Hex probably helped as well, for he was “very eager” to work on Weird Western Tales.  Fleisher told Back Issue that “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.”  Fleisher was also just as adamant as Albano and Tony DeZuniga that Jonah Hex not be portrayed as 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 (May/June 1974), which hit the stands at the same time as Adventure Comics #433, the third installment of Fleisher’s 10-issue run on the Spectre and the first time that title got saddled with the “Weird” prefix, making it the fifth DC anthology under that particular banner (the word would be dropped after #437).  On both titles, Fleisher was aided in his writing by Russell Carley, who was listed in WWT#22 as “art continuity” (though DeZuniga did the actual art), then as “script continuity” all the way up through WWT#26.  As for what Carley’s job actually entailed, Fleisher spelled it out plain in an interview for The Comics Journal #56 (May 1980): “Russell Carley is a fine artist, a painter, who’s a very close friend of mine, and 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 bears a resemblance to “the Marvel method” of comics scripting, and it would explain why Carley’s name only turns up alongside Fleisher’s in comics databases, as well as the various jobs he’s listed as having, including assistant editor on some DC horror titles written by Fleisher.  After 18 months, Fleisher felt confident enough to go solo, and Carley’s name disappeared from comics history.  Exactly how much he contributed to Fleisher’s early Hex plots is unknown, but it’s for certain that, in terms of Jonah’s characterization in WWT#22, the transition from Albano to Fleisher was nearly seamless.  The bounty hunter comes off just as coarse as ever when dealing with “civilized” folk, and there’s touches of deadpan humor 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” (even in 1974, this would’ve been cringy).

The most notable thing about Fleisher’s debut is what he introduces to Jonah’s world in general: continuity.  Except for the “Ironjaws Trilogy” of WWT#12-14, all Hex stories up to that point were interchangeable, with no need to read them in a specific order, nor had there been much reference to his life before he became a bounty hunter.  Rather like the Spaghetti Western archetypes who’d inspired his creation, Jonah Hex was originally designed to be a mysterious figure.  From this issue onward, however, we would begin to see ever larger glimpses of Jonah’s past, and the seeds that were sown throughout these 20 pages would bear fruit for decades to come.

The story begins simply enough: after his horse is killed while rounding up a couple of owlhoots, Jonah is on foot when a stagecoach passes by and picks him up.  Among the passengers on board is a deputy who’s guarding the aforementioned Jorgis, as well as a fella named Frank (who bears a  striking resemblance to Lee Van Cleef).  Though he doesn’t say so aloud, Frank recognizes Hex from an old photograph he’s carrying, which shows a much younger and unscarred Jonah standing in front of a Confederate flag.  We’ll learn later on the significance of this, but first, members of Jorgis’s gang ambush the stagecoach to rescue their leader, killing the deputy and the stagecoach drivers in the process.  Before they take off, Jorgis takes a little time to beat the crap outta Hex due to him wearing Confederate gray, but thankfully, the bounty hunter recovers enough to bring the stagecoach and surviving passengers to a town called Hard Times, where Hex discovers the sheriff is his old friend, Hank Brewster.

As the two men talk, little nuggets of information about Jonah’s past are dropped, revealing that Brewster knew Jonah when he was a boy -- even making a reference to Jonah’s father, which the bounty hunter brushes off -- and Jonah in turn says that Brewster taught him everything he knows about gunfighting (a statement that Windy Taylor from WWT#13 might’ve made an objection to, had he been alive to hear it).  It’s also implied through their dialogue that it’s been at least 15 years since they’d last seen each other, and it was during that interim that Jonah’s disfigurement occurred, as Brewster begins to say that he’d “heard ‘bout them scars”, but Jonah snaps at him, “Drop it, Hank!”  This and the photo seen earlier may’ve led readers to believe that he was scarred during the Civil War, but it’ll be another four years before we learn the truth of the matter (coincidentally, we’ll also learn around that time why he’s so reluctant to talk about his dear ol’ Pa).

Meanwhile, Frank meets up with a group of former Confederate soldiers and tells them about his encounter with Hex.  For reasons unknown, they blame Hex and “vicious men” like him for the South losing the War, and now that they know where he is, they mean to head out and kill him!  Ironically, they come across Hex just as Blackjack Jorgis and his men get the drop on the bounty hunter, so they instead shoot the gang dead, thereby giving Hex a brief reprieve before they declare their intentions to hang him.  The only thing that deters them is the arrival of Brewster at the gang’s hideout with a posse.  Knowing they’re outgunned, the four vengeful ex-Rebs wait until the next day to send Jonah a message via Brewster -- along with the photo, now altered so that it better resembles the Hex of here-and-now -- for him to meet them out by the stockyards.  Jonah apparently understands what their beef is, but tells Brewster nothing, opting instead to go face them alone.  As is his way, the bounty hunter handily cuts down three of the ex-Rebs, but accidentally shoots Brewster when the older man shows up to help.  This inadvertent distraction allows the fourth ex-Reb to sink a couple of bullets into Hex, loudly declaring, “This is fer the Southland, yuh dirty traitor--!  Fer th’ good men whut shed their blood at Antietam an’ Gettysburg…”

All that speechifying allows Jonah enough time to grab his own pistol and kill the ex-Reb, thereby ending the battle.  After taking a moment to mourn the passing of Brewster, the wounded bounty hunter rides out of town, a single tear rolling down his scarred cheek.  From there, we cut to a scene set in an opulent room involving Black manservant named Solomon and his presumed employer, a white man who we never get a look at beyond his hand holding an eagle-headed cane.  It appears this mystery man wants Hex dead just as badly as those former Confederates did, but the why of it all is still unstated.  Despite that omission, this issue contains the most we’ve ever learned about Jonah Hex to date, and one has to wonder how closely Fleisher’s vision for Jonah’s backstory hewed to what Albano & DeZuniga had in mind.  Unfortunately, aside from one little tidbit that won’t be revealed for another 36 years, there’s no clue as to what the duo would’ve had in store for the character if their collaboration continued.

WWT#23 opens with a trick Jonah will use many a time over the course of his career: dressing a person -- in this case, an already-dead one -- in his Confederate-gray coat to use as a decoy to draw out an owlhoot.  Once his quarry is captured, he heads to Point Pyrrhus to collect his bounty, wherein he learns that President Grant will soon be stopping by the town on a whistlestop tour.  Later on, Hex is paid a visit by a Secret Service agent named Fenton, who has learned of a possible assassination attempt on Grant when he arrives.  Knowing of Hex’s reputation, Fenton wishes to enlist his services to help stop it.  In doing so, “You’d earn your country’s undying gratitude,” Fenton says, to which Hex replies that “durin’ the War ‘twixt th’ States Ah had just ‘bout as much’a muh country’s gratitude as Ah could stand!  Damn near killed me, all thet gratitude!”  When Fenton mentions the $500 payment he’d receive, Hex sings a different tune, promising “tuh serve muh country proudly!”

Meanwhile, we get more scenes featuring Solomon and the man with the eagle-headed cane, who we learn is one of “the nation’s leading captains of industry and commerce”.  Turns out that not only will this man be travelling with President Grant on the train to Point Pyrrhus, but he has an assassin of his own in town, ready and willing to kill Hex in revenge for that the bounty hunter apparently did to the man’s son (we’ll have to wait a few more issues before the identity of both father and son are revealed).  The two plots collide less than an hour before Grant’s train pulls into the station.  Fenton and Hex track down the would-be presidential assassins, who get the drop on both men.  As they’re held at gunpoint, the assassins rant about how Grant is “cozyin’ up to the South” -- the sight of Jonah’s gray coat and hat just fuels their ire -- and even brag about all the riflemen they have set up near the station. It soon reaches a point where Fenton and Hex boldly rush their captors, resulting in Fenton’s death, which Hex immediately avenges with a hail of bullets.

With time running out, Jonah crosses paths with the sheriff and tells him of the assassination plot, only to discover that the lawman has been paid “good money” to kill him!  Jonah manages to get away from the sheriff and continue on his mission, taking out the riflemen by any means necessary.  A stray shot by one of them just so happens to eliminate the sheriff, while another wielding a Gatling gun greatly wounds Hex, who lobs a bundle of dynamite at this final assassin just as Grant’s train nears the station.  Ironically, we discover all of Jonah’s heroics were unnecessary, as Grant’s itinerary has changed and the train speeds right past Point Pyrrhus, allowing the man with the eagle-headed cane only a glimpse of what he presumes to be Hex’s dead body sprawled out near the tracks (he silently reminds himself to send the sheriff a check later on for his services).  Even the townsfolk who later find him believe the bounty hunter is not long for this world, and as they carry him over to the doctor’s office so some attempt can be made to save his life, a couple of kids descend upon Jonah like vultures, plucking coat buttons and a busted pistol off of his person as souvenirs.

The end of the story has such a finality to it that the note at the bottom of the last page declaring that “THE ADVENTURES OF JONAH HEX CONTINUE IN THE NEXT ISSUE OF WEIRD WESTERN TALES” was likely put there to reassure anxious fans…though it makes no mention of the fact that there would be someone missing from WWT the next time it hit the stands.  Despite sticking around for two issues after Albano’s departure, Tony DeZuniga had finally decided to move on as well, with Marvel soon making great use of him on both their superhero titles and licensed properties.  However, his association with the bounty hunter was far from over, and their paths would cross again in the near future.

His fate now solely in the hands of Michael Fleisher, Jonah Hex would continue to soldier on, ornery as ever, while a variety of artists would do their best to fill DeZuniga’s shoes.  The first was one of his fellow Filipinos, Noly Panaligan, who’d been hired by DC after DeZuniga encouraged Joe Orlando and Carmine Infantino to visit the Philippines and take a look at the wealth of artists there.  Between newcomers like Panaligan and those already established Stateside like DeZuniga, Alfredo Alcala, and Nestor Redondo, a “Filipino Wave” soon washed over the 1970s American comics scene, and anthologies like Weird Western Tales were all the better for it.  While Panaligan’s style differed from DeZuniga’s, his first Hex outing in WWT#24 followed the “filthy and dirty” mandate previously established, as well as keeping up the fine level of detail fans had come to expect.

The issue begins two months after the incident in Point Pyrrhus, and Jonah is still recuperating from the numerous bullet wounds he’d received, one of which damaged his optic nerve so badly he’s been rendered temporarily blind (reckon being so close to that explosion didn’t help things neither).  The townsfolk are eager to toss him out on his ear, though, since word has gotten around about his infirmity and many an owlhoot has come a-lookin’ to make a name for themselves.  Lucky for Hex, his ears are in better shape than his eyes, so he’s managed to get the drop on all of ‘em.  Still, the doctor can’t deter the townsfolk any longer, so after advising Hex to keep the bandages over his eyes for at least another week, the bounty hunter hits the trail alongside an unnamed, down-on-his-luck Shakespearian actor who’s also worn out his welcome in Point Pyrrhus.

Well aware that the bad guys won’t stop coming just because he’s left town, Jonah uses the actor as a lookout, having him call out distance and direction on targets in the hope that Jonah can take care of any problem before it gets too close. Their system is put to the test nearly a week later, when a pair of outlaws track them down as they cross a river on a ferry raft.  Jonah manages to kill one as they escape, but he later loses his guns when the ferry gets wrecked.  As they dry out that night next to a campfire, both aware that the final outlaw will likely find them soon, the actor silently hatches a plan: once he’s certain that Jonah’s eyesight has recovered enough, the actor knocks the bounty hunter out, takes his uniform, and uses theatre makeup to impersonate Hex, riding a horse right out into the open to draw the outlaw’s fire.  The sound of guns rouses Hex, allowing him sneak up on the outlaw with a knife.  Unfortunately, it’s too late to save the actor, who dies in Jonah’s arms with a quote from Hamlet upon his lips.

The one thing missing from this issue was any mention of the man with the eagle-headed cane and Jonah’s supposed “traitor” status, as if Fleisher suddenly forgot all about that subplot.  It’s also missing from WWT#25, wherein Hex tangles with a grifter who’s fleecing travelers that wish to pass through a quicksand-laden area unscathed.  We do get a little more info in WWT#26, thanks to a scene where the man with the eagle-headed cane visits his son’s grave in Virginia, during which he hands his servant Solomon a letter addressed to the railroad-robbing Gallagher boys.  The still-unnamed man promises them ten thousand dollars if they kill Jonah Hex (word must’ve gotten back to him that Hex wasn’t as dead as he looked), but the one hitch in this proposal is Hex’s current incarceration, as the authorities think he’s in cahoots with the robbers!  Ben Gallagher sweet-talks a young woman -- whose family considers the Gallaghers heroes due to their dislike of railroaders -- into helping them spring Hex, only to find out the truth when Ben turns his guns on Jonah and declares that they’ll soon “collect our bounty from a certain rich gent in Virginia whut wants Hex dead!”  The family tussles alongside Hex to take out the Gallaghers, and when he later leaves their homestead with the robbers in tow, Jonah thinks, One of these days a’fore Ah git too much older…Ah’m a-gonna have tuh visit Virginia again!  Yes, sir!  Ah shore do miss Virginia!

In addition to advancing the “traitor” subplot, WWT#26 is notable for being the only Hex story illustrated by the legendary Doug Wildey -- who was no stranger to the Western comics, having worked in genre for decades -- as well as for containing the first appearance of Hex’s now-infamous tagline, which was tucked away in a little text box next to the story’s title on the splash page: “He was a hero to some, a villain to others, and wherever he rode people spoke his name in whispers.  He had no friends, this Jonah Hex, but he did have two companions: One was Death itself…the other, the acrid smell of gunsmoke...”

Though it would briefly -- and erroneously -- be attributed to John Albano two decades down the line, Michael Fleisher alone was responsible for coming up with that tagline...though he did admit in his interview with Back Issue that he may have cribbed the “acrid smell of gunsmoke” portion from (naturally) the TV show Gunsmoke.  To be sure, it summed up Jonah Hex quite well, and the tagline would stick with him throughout Fleisher’s tenure and beyond, with slight variations cropping up here and there (such as a comma sometimes appearing between “rode” and “people”).

Noly Panaligan returns for WWT#27, which focused 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 had Argentine artist George Moliterni illustrating a tale based upon the supposedly-true story of the Jake Hauschel gang.  The two men would tag-team on the next two issues, with Panaligan drawing WWT#29 and Moliterni handling WWT#30, altogether making for a two-parter that finally brought the “traitor” subplot to a head.

WWT#29 begins in Red Rock, Texas in 1875 -- a year that will eventually become infamous in Hex history thanks to Fleisher -- with a teenager confronting Hex out in the street, swearing that he’s going to kill the bounty hunter for letting his father die at Fort Charlotte.  Jonah blows him off, and the young man tries to shoot him, but only succeeds in spooking Hex’s horse, which promptly whacks Jonah in the head with one of its hooves.  The head wound puts him into a state of delirium, and as the town doctor tends to him, the reader is witness to a flashback to Jonah’s past, a device that Fleisher would use many times over the next ten years to fill in the bounty hunter’s backstory.  Starting off in Christmas 1861, we learn that a young, unscarred Jonah was close friends with a fellow Confederate named Jeb Turnbull, and that Jeb’s father, a wealthy Virginia plantation owner, is the man with the eagle-headed cane we’ve been getting glimpses of since WWT#22 (check out Appendix A for more info on this scene).  We soon skip ahead to January 1863, after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect.  One night, while sitting around a campfire, Jonah confessed to Jeb that he “cain’t go on killin’ Yankees when they’s fightin’ tuh give th’ Black folks their freedom, an’ we’s fightin’ tuh preserve a world whut’s prob’ly better off dead an’ done with!”  Since he could no longer justify fighting for slavery, nor turn against his fellow Southerners, Jonah told Jeb that he was going to surrender himself to the Union forces at nearby Fort Charlotte -- Jeb was shocked to hear all this, but nonetheless wished his friend well.

Feeling it was “a point of honor tuh surrender tuh th’ top man”, Jonah snuck into the commanding officer’s quarters at Fort Charlotte to do so.  We soon learn that Hex was a lieutenant with the 4th Cavalry, and while he was willing to turn himself in, he refused to betray the rest of his unit and give their location.  Unfortunately, the Yankees figured out for themselves where the Rebs were, due to some red clay found on his horse’s hooves (a common feature in many places down South, but apparently rare enough around Fort Charlotte that they could pin it down to a certain area).  After his unit was captured, the C.O. -- a captain who would go unnamed for 35 years -- “thanked” Hex for his help in front of all his friends and offered him a reward (the captain’s way of getting back at Hex for sneaking into the fort).  Hex belted the captain for implying he was a traitor, but the seed had already been planted in the minds of his fellow Rebs, with one man using the n-word in regards to whom he thought Jonah actually cared about.

Thrown in solitary and separated from his men, Jonah managed to escape thanks to some loose floorboards, then set the others free as well, all of them unaware that the captain had arranged for such lax security so that he had an excuse to kill them as they escaped!  In the end, nearly three dozen Confederate soldiers -- including Jeb Turnbull -- were cut down by Gatling guns as they fled Fort Charlotte, with Hex being one of the few to escape with his life (though he took a moment to kill the captain before departing).

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 young man can have some closure.  But what of Jonah himself?  The Fort Charlotte Massacre obviously weighed upon his conscience, especially since it came about due to him trying to be on the right side of history.  It also had to be galling for him to learn back then that there were bigots on both sides of the War, as over the course of the flashback scenes, Jonah saw both the elder Turnbull and the Yankee captain fling the racial epithet “darkie” directly at Black people (I imagine the CCA was okay with such language within the context of this story).  To be sure, the encounter in this issue proves to be the final push to do what he was thinking about three issues earlier, as WWT#30 shows us that Jonah has traveled from Texas all the way to Richmond, Virginia, ready to set things right between himself, Turnbull, and the few soldiers who survived the massacre twelve years earlier.  What he gets once he arrives in town is more hate and more death threats, while the reader gets the phenomenally-rendered image of Jonah smashing a saloon mirror with a bottle in a fit of rage.  Things don’t improve much when Hex is ambushed and forced to sit through a mock trial, with Turnbull as judge and his former friends as jury, all of whom quickly find him “guilty as Hell”.

Deciding to execute him by firing squad at dawn, they lock Hex up in a shed on Turnbull’s property for the night, but he soon uses a pitchfork to cut through the rope binding his hands, then gets to drop on the guard outside the shed.  Before he can make a clean getaway, though, he’s confronted by Solomon, who’s holding a shotgun on him.  Luckily for Hex, the man is a kind-hearted sort, and actually listens to Jonah’s explanation of what really happened at Fort Charlotte, which is more than his fellow Rebs were willing to do during the “trial”.  Jonah manages to sway Solomon, but then Turnbull shows up, swipes the gun away and, ignoring the pleas from his servant, makes ready to shoot Hex.  Grabbing the pitchfork, Jonah knocks the shotgun out of Turnbull’s hands, then tosses aside his own weapon to show that he means no harm.  The gesture means little to Turnbull, who charges at Jonah, but the old man trips and accidentally impales himself on the discarded pitchfork.  The story ends with Jonah riding away and Turnbull cradled in Solomon’s arms, giving the appearance to fans (and possibly Jonah himself) that Turnbull is dead, but in a few years, we’ll learn different.

The story presented to readers in these two issues not only built upon the groundwork laid by John Albano and touched upon by Arnold Drake in regards to Jonah seeing non-whites (specifically Indians in the previous cases) as equal to himself, it also reflected Fleisher’s own involvement in the civil rights movement of the 1960s (a fact that makes his racist portrayal of Blackjack Jorgis in WWT#22 all the more perplexing), as well as his involvement with the antiwar demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.  Over the years, Fleisher would remark that he felt a personal connection to Jonah Hex, so it makes sense that he would bestow anti-slavery tendencies in the former Confederate, along with making sure that any depictions of the Civil War he penned would show the unvarnished truth about the horrors of war (a quality shared with many DC war titles at the time, which were sometimes emblazoned with the phrase “Make War No More”).  There were still some unanswered questions, such as why Hex joined the Confederacy in the first place if he was opposed to slavery, but one thing was for certain: under Fleisher’s tenure, there would be little allusion to Jonah Hex as some kind of supernatural creature.  He’s a human being, with a soul scarred worse than his face.

After this storyline, Jonah’s remaining appearances in Weird Western were less earth-shattering, with no more massive reveals regarding his past.  Instead, we get tales like WWT#31 -- illustrated again by Moliterni -- wherein Jonah is tricked by a dying friend into fighting him for the amusement of the townsfolk, and a two-parter in WWT#32-33 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 holds a special place in Hex history for two reasons, one more obvious than the other.  The first was that it had originally been written for a standalone 50-cent giant, which would have included an El Diablo tale and some other reprints along with the double-dose of Hex.  Unfortunately, the looming threat of another paper shortage caused DC to cancel the one-off issue along with a few others, allowing them once again to focus their resources on more-profitable titles.  Luckily, Weird Western Tales itself was spared this time around, and the already-written story repurposed for its pages.

The other reason was that it marked the first time Jonah Hex was drawn by the now-legendary 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, so 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 in the office, he met Joe Orlando, who would soon come to call the artist his “secret weapon”.  After numerous inking jobs, Garcia-Lopez was given a few Jonah Hex scripts to do, including what would become WWT#32-33, and the result was 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 every artist that came after him up to that point carried on in the same fashion, Garcia-Lopez’s rendition was incredibly vibrant, with crisp lines and dynamic poses in nearly every frame.  And instead of the constant shadows the other artists used, it seems like he went to great pains to highlight every detail possible, both in terms to character expressions and backgrounds.  In short, he treated the bounty hunter in the same manner as he did the members of DC’s spandex-wearing crowd, and the result was striking.  In the years that followed, Garcia-Lopez would not only cement the look of the company’s major characters on virtually all of its merchandise thanks to his work on the DC Comics Style Guide, he’d also be recognized as one of the best artists to ever take on Jonah Hex, surpassed only by DeZuniga himself.

Moliterni was back on the job for WWT#34, which features a dime novelist willing to pay $1,000 for Hex’s life story (the fella turns out to be a duplicitous sort, which likely explains Jonah’s attitude towards writers in other stories years later).  The issue also sports a cover by Ernie Chan, who originally started his American comics career as an assistant to fellow Filipino artist Tony DeZuniga before branching out on his own (due to an error on his birth certificate -- and therefore all of his other official documents -- Chan was originally credited as “Ernie Chua”, though the paperwork would finally be corrected after he became a U.S. citizen in 1976).  Chan also provided the cover over Moliterni’s interiors for WWT#35, where Jonah visits a town that’s turning quite a profit from unscrupulous public hangings.  Immediately after that issue, Weird Western Tales was cancelled for a second time (reckon the same paper shortage that killed Hex’s 50-cent giant was the likely cause), but in this instance, the title was revived so quickly there was no interruption in its bi-monthly schedule.  When it returned 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 returned 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 it’s possible that the artists -- Rich Buckler and Frank Springer -- may have used outdated materials when looking at references for Jonah’s appearance.  Another possibility is that the story might have been Michael Fleisher’s try-out script that won him the writing gig over Arnold Drake -- which would have occurred around the same time as the hat’s last appearance -- and that, after being illustrated, the story was simply held in reserve for all those years in case they needed a fill-in.  The latter seems most likely, especially considering that the artwork was below the quality normally seen on the title up to that point, and a real shock if you’ve ever seen how good the art from either Buckler or Springer usually looks.

  Whatever the reason, the hat disappears over the side of a cliff by Page 7, but it certainly won’t be the last time readers will see that unusual fashion accessory.  The story itself is an interesting take on Jonah’s normally-gruff attitude, as he trains a young man in the ways of the gun in order for him 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.

Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez came back to illustrate Weird Western Tales #38 (January/February 1977) as Jonah is hired to hunt down and kill a white wolf that is blamed for the death of a banker.  While tracking it down, Jonah gets a couple of arrows stuck in his hide thanks to some Crow Indians, but luckily, he’s saved by both the wolf and a mountain man called Bearclaw Jackson who keeps it as a pet.  Jackson takes Hex back to his cabin so he can tend to those arrow wounds (using the method seen in Clint Eastwood’s Two Mules for Sister Sara for one of ‘em), then explains that he witnessed the banker’s death, and his furry friend was framed by some sheep ranchers who murdered the banker during a robbery.  Hex talks Jackson into coming to town in order to finger the culprits, and the ranchers aren’t too happy they got found out.  Seeing its master threatened, the wolf attacks one of the ranchers, killing him, but Jackson takes a bullet in order to protect the wolf from the others.  As the wolf runs away, Hex guns down the rest of the guilty ranchers, then takes Jackson back to his cabin so he can die in the mountains.  The final panels show Hex pulling a blanket over Jackson’s still body, then blowing out a lantern as the wolf howls outside.  One has to wonder if the incident made Jonah reflect upon the days he spent riding with his own wolf companion, Ironjaws, who died saving Jonah’s life back in WWT#14.

That somber ending is tempered a bit with the news that Jonah’s next adventure wouldn’t be within the confines of Weird Western Tales, but rather his very own self-titled comic!  You can thank DC publisher Jeanette Kahn for the move, as she was a fan of Hex and felt it was important to offer a variety of genres for readers, as opposed to just wall-to-wall superheroes.  This move was just one of many undertaken by Kahn over the course of the next year to expand the company’s profile with both comics fans and the general public (which we’ll go into further in the next chapter).  The only downside of Jonah’s promotion to a solo act was that WWT was cancelled once again…or at least it was until Sergio Aragones, co-creator of Bat Lash, suggested to Joe Orlando that a new character should attempt to fill Hex’s rather large boots.  Thus the letters page announced that the next issue would unveil “a NEW LOOK and a NEW STAR!  The SAVAGE will be blazing a trail to your doorstep on December 30th!”  The solicit that ran in the “Direct Currents” section of Amazing World of DC Comics #13 gave the full name of this character as “Sam Savage”, but not only would the first name be changed to Brian by the time the issue saw publication, the overall name of the feature would become “Scalphunter” due to the existence of His Name is…Savage, a 1968 graphic novel by Gil Kane & Archie Goodwin.

Such transitional bumps didn’t bode well for the future of the title, but the goings-on of Weird Western Tales were no longer of any concern for ol’ Jonah.  In two short months, he’d be hanging his Confederate-gray hat in a home tailor-made just for him.  Yes indeed, Jonah Hex had finally hit the big time, with even bigger adventures on the horizon.

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

If you hear any helicopters overhead this Thanksgiving, RUN!!!

I wanted to put up the actual video clip of the infamous "Turkey Drop" from WKRP in Cincinnati (which may be an unknown show to some of you, as I don't think it's been shown in reruns for at least a decade), but alas, YouTube has failed me insofar as quality goes.  However, this animated version I found gives us the pleasure of seeing simulated turkey carnage!

Anyhow, Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

An Illustrated History of Jonah Hex (Part 1)

Introduction

In the world of comics, Jonah Hex has always been an oddity.  The Western genre he usually inhabits is constantly declared to be “dead”, yet he’s had his own title in every decade since his creation.  His sales figures have always been notoriously low, seemingly an indicator that no one cares for the character, yet whenever there’s a mention of the Old West within a DC comic book, he’s there more often than not, sometimes as the sole representative of the entire era.  And at a time when the trend is leaning towards updating or streamlining classic characters to make them more appealing to a modern audience, Jonah Hex unabashedly remains rooted in the 19th Century, and worse yet, his attire usually consists of a uniform that is viewed by many as racist.  He’s a surly, murderous drunkard with a nightmarish visage, attributes that seem to go against every notion of mass-market appeal and longevity, yet here he is, decades later, still sitting pretty in a world full of capes.

What follows here is neither a running tally of everything Jonah Hex, nor a summary of virtually every comic he's appeared in, though you’ll get a healthy dose of both along the way.  This is more like an unauthorized biography, focusing on the stand-out moments in his life, both on the page and behind the scenes.  You’ll get a glimpse of firsts, lasts, and what-might-have-beens.  You’ll learn the names of those who had a hand in his creation, as well as those who helped him live as long as he has without forgetting where he came from.  You’ll also see things that are probably best forgotten, but I’m going to drag them out into the light one last time, because sometimes it’s good to remember the mistakes we’ve made.  It’s what makes us human, and as you’ll find out, Jonah Hex is one of the most human fictional characters out there.

1 - Birth of a Bounty Hunter

(Text updated November 1, 2024)

In the early 1970s, comic-book cowboys were beginning to ride off into the sunset.  The number of Western titles being offered by various publishers in the United States was on the decline compared to previous years, with an average of 5 titles on the newsstands every month at the beginning of 1971 (a marked decline from two decades earlier, when roughly 50 Westerns were published in January 1951 alone).  The genre’s dominance in other media was dwindling as well: in 1959, there were 29 different Western TV shows strewn across the various networks, prompting the Emmy Awards to create a one-time “Best Western Series” category to deal with the problem, yet by 1970, only three of those shows -- Gunsmoke, Bonanza, and Death Valley Days -- remained on the air, along with a few newer Westerns like Here Come the Brides, Lancer, The Virginian, and The High Chaparral.

One of the exceptions to the downturn at this time was at the movie theatre, thanks to Sergio Leone’s “Dollars Trilogy” featuring former Rawhide star Clint Eastwood.  Its success led to the worldwide popularity of the subgenre commonly known as the Spaghetti Western (though some prefer the less-derogatory Western All'italiana, Italo-Western, or Euro-Western), the style of which soon bled over from the quickly-shot international productions and into Hollywood, which was already moving away from depictions of the clean-cut Roy Rogers/Lone Ranger type of cowboy on the big screen.  Spaghetti Westerns were violent, morally ambiguous, and not afraid to show how unfair life could really be: not everything in the world was easily separated into black hats and white hats, sometimes there was lots of gray.

Unfortunately, due to the Comics Code Authority’s stringent guidelines encompassing nearly every title published, those gray areas were hard to depict in comic books, at least prior to 1971.  Fueled in part by the efforts of Marvel Comics legend Stan Lee -- a former Western hero himself, thanks to his appearance on the cover of 1950’s Black Rider #8 dressed as the titular character -- the CCA revised its guidelines that year for the very first time, allowing comics companies operating under the CCA’s watchful eye a little more freedom than they’d been allowed since the Code’s inception in 1954.  While this revision is mainly remembered for allowing comics to present stories about “socially relevant” topics like drug addiction, there were a few other notable changes.  Unsavory depictions of government and law enforcement officials were now allowed, so long as these corrupt individuals were “declared as an exceptional case and that the culprit pay the legal price.”  A criminal lifestyle could be glamorized so long as “an unhappy ends results from their ill-gotten gain.”  Lawmen could now die if the story ended with their murderers being brought to justice. The rules regarding marriage, sexual relations, the portrayal of family life, and the depiction of physical deformities were relaxed somewhat, as were the restrictions on certain horror tropes.  Even use of the word “weird” was given the green light.  While far from perfect, the 1971 Code revisions can be seen as one of the first bricks in the foundation of what was to come at the end of that year.

Another brick had been laid months prior, when DC decided to relaunch All-Star Western, a title that had been cancelled back in 1961 after 10 years on the racks (not counting the 11 years it had previously existed as All Star Comics -- birthplace of the Justice Society of America -- before shifting its focus from superheroes to cowboys).  Considering that the first volume debuted such frontier heroes as the Trigger Twins, Strong Bow, Super-Chief, and Madame .44, one has to wonder if fans at the time were disappointed that All-Star Western (volume 2) #1 (August/September 1970) only contained a pair of decade-old Pow-Wow Smith stories reprinted from Western Comics (which had been cancelled around the same time as ASW’s first volume), along with a single-page text story by Gerry Conway (under his given name of “Gerard”).

Thankfully, the ad for the next issue promised that “THE BEST IS YET TO COME!”  And indeed, ASWv2#2 gave us the first appearances of “Outlaw” Rick Wilson and the supernatural horseman El Diablo.  While El Diablo’s legacy would eventually reach all the way into the 21st Century, Rick Wilson was one of many Western characters whose fame never went any further than the handful of stories they appeared in.  In fact, the only reason I’m bringing him up here is due to a certain pair of creators who worked on the feature, starting with the artist on the first “Outlaw” story, Tony DeZuniga.

Born in Manila on November 8, 1932, DeZuniga had worked in the Filipino comics industry for many years before coming to DC in 1970, where he quickly proved himself adept at depicting both romance (inking Ric Estrada’s pencils in Girl’s Love Story #153) and horror (full pencils and inks on Gerry Conway’s tale in House of Mystery #188) prior to landing the “Outlaw” assignment.  Working on Westerns was a natural for DeZuniga: in a 2004 article about his work, he mentioned that “I was seven years old when my dad took me to a Western.  He saw me drawing the cowboys the next day and brought home boxes of paper.  I was lucky to be encouraged by him.”  It certainly paid off, as DeZuniga’s incredibly-thin linework allowed him to render even the smallest details with perfect clarity, a marked difference from the heavier inks of Gil Kane and Jim Aparo, who illustrated the “Outlaw” stories in ASWv2#3-4 and #5, respectively.  DeZuniga returned to the “Outlaw” feature in ASWv2#6 (June/July 1971), which would now star a new character due to Rick Wilson’s arc wrapping up in the previous issue.

The artist would also be working with a new writer, as Robert Kanigher bowed out and John Albano stepped in.  Born September 12, 1922, Albano’s scripting duties at DC up to this point had been on humor titles like Date with Debbi, Binky’s Buddies, and Angel and the Ape, the latter of which also utilized his skills as a cartoonist (coincidentally, his art also appeared in HoM#188 as a single-page strip called “Cain’s Game Room”).  According to his grandson, Jared Vian, Albano even worked with fellow artist and ASW editor Joe Orlando on creating the classic Sea Monkeys ad that graced many a comics page in the 1970s, though as Vian put it, their collaboration was likely not always smooth, since apparently Albano “drove the poor guy crazy because he always turned his shit in after deadline.”  When Orlando called the house, Albano would have his daughter fib that he wasn’t home, and if the editor did get him on the line, “[Orlando] would ask him what the story was about and he would make something up on the spot.  Then he would hang up and be like ‘Damn!  Now I have to write a story about XYZ,’” Vian said.  After a long walk with the dog, though, the story would come together in his head and he’d get it down on paper.  Despite how haphazard this sounds, Albano was talented enough to win the 1971 Shazam Award for Best Humor Writer, not to mention that Orlando trusted him with revamping the “Outlaw” feature.

Back in 1968, Orlando had been one of the people responsible for ushering the infamous gambler/womanizer Bat Lash into the world, and he felt the time was right to shake things up in the Western genre again, this time with Billy Jo, a young woman dressed like a man -- earning them the moniker “Billy the Kid” -- who is searching for their father’s killer.  There were a few humorous moments slipped into the tales Albano wrote for ASWv2#6-8, but overall, his work was filled with both drama and poignancy, along the sort of twist endings he would come to be known for, and DeZuniga rendered it all with his impeccable style, dressing Billy Jo in a loose buckskin coat to help conceal their feminine figure.  Looking back with five decades of hindsight, an argument could be made that Billy Jo was one of comicdom’s first transgender characters (a word that came into existence only 6 years prior), though it’s unlikely this was the intent, since the CCA still had a rule in place bluntly stating that “sexual abnormalities are unacceptable.”  In any case, it’s obvious that the two men clicked on a creative level from the beginning, but sadly, the stories weren’t well-received.  In an interview printed in Amazing World of DC Comics #6 (June 1975), Orlando said it failed “because the hero turned out to be a girl and there was reader resentment of that.  Little boys don’t like their heroes kissing girls in Westerns and they especially don’t like their heroes when they turn out to be women.”

Like Rick Wilson before them, Billy Jo -- along with the “Outlaw” feature -- quickly faded into comics history, which was bad news for the title.  Despite all the new characters already created, All-Star Western was still slipping in reprints on occasion.  In fact, due to a production delay on the issue, ASWv2#9 consisted entirely of stories from the 1950s-60s, with the only new material being DeZuniga’s cover.  If the title was to survive, something truly special would have to be brought to its pages, and an American humorist and a Filipino artist would be the unlikely source.  The final bricks were in place, and the work of building a Western legend could begin.

According to Orlando, “John came in with the idea of doing a bounty hunter…an anti-hero.  I didn’t mind the bounty hunter part, but I wanted to establish that he was still a good person…mean because he had been screwed at one time.”  DeZuniga concurred that Albano came up with the initial idea, for as he explained it to Michael Browning in Back Issue #12 (Oct. 2005), “John Albano, when we talked together, he was telling me, ‘Hey, Tony, let’s get away from like the Rawhide Kid and all those Western super-heroes because, you know, they’re shooting the guns out of the hands of the bad guys and all that.’  And I said, ‘I agree.’...Even the towns in those days, they weren’t all asphalt roads.  They were dirt roads.  The cowboys really dressed really, really rugged -- I would say filthy and dirty -- and I liked doing it that way.”  Thanks to the CCA’s recent loosening of certain guidelines, the idea of bringing those Spaghetti Western sensibilities to comics was now possible, and the two men were eager to do it.

Likely owing to his cartoonist background, Albano hand-drew the first script starring their new creation onto looseleaf paper, complete with dialogue balloons, sound effects, and panel layouts that DeZuniga would follow to the letter.  That script still survives, revealing to us that the character was initially dubbed “Cody Corbert -- better known as…THE COBRA”, but by the fifth page of the script, Albano began referring to him as “JONAH HEX”.  This was one of the few alterations made to the story, which opened with the same narration as the final published version: “Cold-blooded killer, vicious, an unmerciful hellion without feeling, without conscience -- a man consumed by hate, a man who boded evil...”

As Albano worked on the script, DeZuniga submitted a few sketches of what this “Jonah Hex” fella should look like, with the one of a man with a hideous scar dominating the right side of his face being the most favored, though Albano questioned why the character in the sketch was dressed in a Confederate coat and officer’s hat.  As DeZuniga explained in Back Issue, “I said he was a Johnny Reb who was blown up by a cannonball.  I said, ‘He’s a comic book character and nothing’s impossible.’  But they said okay and they really liked the concept of that face.”  He also remarked in other interviews that the idea for the single flap of skin connecting Jonah’s upper and lower jaw came from anatomy illustrations showing the underlying musculature of the face.

According to DeZuniga, there was one other element added at the request of Carmine Infantino, who was head publisher for DC at the time: he wanted Hex to be bulky, “like the Incredible Hulk”.  Orlando claimed that Infantino went so far as to do some sketches of what he wanted to see, which were then passed on to DeZuniga.  Though this idea was slowly phased out of Hex’s design, it’s most obvious in the promo ads that ran in both Our Army at War #240 and Batman #237 a month before his debut, which featured a “proto-Hex” with wild hair, a fanged visage, and a body like a linebacker.  “HE’S WILD…HE’S SAVAGE…HES COMING IN THE NEXT ISSUE OF ALL-STAR WESTERN On Sale Dec. 7th”, the ad touted, pounding even harder on the idea put forth in both Albano’s words and DeZuniga’s design that Jonah Hex was a monster terrorizing the citizens of the Old West.  Perhaps that’s why this bit of opening narration from the original script didn’t make the cut, as it would’ve made readers second-guess themselves before the story even began: “That was Jonah the gunfighter, but what about Jonah the man?  Was he really a wild, immoral, and incorrigible savage who had best be kept forever isolated from civilized human beings...?”  Despite being left out of his initial appearance, that question underpins virtually every Jonah Hex story ever told.  Albano & DeZuniga (along with all the creators who will follow them) would constantly put Jonah in situations where he could be an “incorrigible savage” one minute and a rather tender-hearted sort the next.

“Welcome to Paradise” -- Hex’s debut story in All-Star Western (vol. 2)  #10 (cover-dated February/March 1972) -- opens with shot of him riding into the town of Paradise Corners with two dead bodies dragging behind his horse, his mere presence intimidating just about everyone he comes across.  One of the few exceptions is a little boy who accidentally trips him up when the bounty hunter runs out of a saloon after a fleeing outlaw: Jonah threatens to whup the boy, and the boy threatens to get his pa to whup the man right back (this will prove important later).  Immediately after, Jonah heads to the blacksmith to fetch his horse, only to find it getting whipped by the man, who gets knocked out in one punch by Hex -- one could see this as the bounty hunter letting out his frustration on the first available target, but it’s also the beginning of a decades-long trend wherein Jonah tends to strike back at anyone who’d dare hurt an innocent animal.

By nightfall, Hex has tracked the outlaw to a cabin where he meets up with his boss, Big Jim (who looks like Lee Marvin in some panels).  When the underling goes out to fetch some water, Jonah confronts him, leading to the first time the reader sees the scar on Hex’s face -- prior to this, every shot of his face was either covered in shadow or angled so that you could only see the left side.  In an interview for Comic Book Artist #1 (Spring 1998), Orlando stated that “John and I had rules about Jonah Hex.  You were only supposed to see his face when he was terrorizing somebody.”  He then lamented that, as time went on, the premise was dropped “and Hex went around looking like the Phantom of the Opera all the time”.  For that very first story, though, saving the reveal of Hex’s true visage until the moment he lights a match for his smoke is incredibly effective.

As Hex guns down the outlaw, Big Jim escapes, so the bounty hunter pursues him to a farmstead, where Big Jim takes a woman hostage.  As Jonah starts to say that he doesn’t care what happens to the woman, the boy from town suddenly appears, begging Jonah to save his mother.  Seems all that talk yesterday about the boy’s pa was a fib, so Jonah drops his gun so Big Jim will let her go, then the second the man turns his back, Jonah pulls a knife out from under his coat collar and throws it right between Big Jim’s shoulder blades, killing him.

After all these scenes of Hex acting like a gray-clad angel of death, the next couple of pages take a different turn.  As Jonah makes ready to haul the dead outlaws back to town for the reward, the boy invites him to stop by later for some of his ma’s apple dumplings, which the bounty hunter surprisingly agrees to.  Then, after collecting said reward from the town leaders, he asks about the boy’s father and finds out that not only is he dead, but his widow owes $300 in back taxes, so Jonah pays for them out of his own bounty money without a second thought.  The “unmerciful hellion” has decided to let his guard down, but it comes back to bite him when he inquires about an apparently-empty house on the outskirts of Paradise Corners, telling the town leaders that this seems like a nice place to settle down.  “Uh -- that house was sold -- er -- just this morning,” one of them stammers, followed by the assertion that there are no houses available in the entire territory.  Jonah takes the hint right quick, declaring that he wouldn’t want to die in this place, much less live in it.  Things don’t get much better when he returns to the farmhouse: the widow tries to blow Jonah’s head off with a rifle because she doesn’t like that her boy has taken a shine to Hex.  Instead of trying to smooth things over by pointing out his altruism, he simply acts like the mean-spirited bastard everyone assumes he is, going so far as to declare that he hates the boy “like poison” when the youngster tries to run away with him.  The story ends with Jonah shattering the town’s welcome sign with one punch as he heads out.

As we’ll learn in the years to come, Jonah’s attitude at the end isn’t just a flash of anger in the moment, but rather a defense mechanism he’s developed when dealing with most of humanity, as more often than not, whenever the bounty hunter makes a new friend or we’re introduced to an old one, that person will either be dead or a new enemy by the end of the issue.  Jonah likely believes it’s better to let everyone hate you from the outset than to risk heartbreak.  Another aspect featured in this first outing that will wax and wane over the decades is Jonah’s implied “supernatural” nature.  With a name like Hex and a face like a hell-spawn, it seems an unavoidable notion -- to be sure, one of the outlaws in this tale is convinced that Jonah isn’t human, and Big Jim gets spooked so bad at one point that he shoots a tree stump -- but other than unerring tracking skills, Jonah never displays any unearthly powers, so you could write their behavior off as a lack of nerve.  Viable excuses like that constantly cropped up in Albano’s Hex stories, leaving it up to the reader to decide if Hex was indeed a demonic force or just a very skilled hunter of men.  The closemouthed position that his creators continually took in those early tales regarding both Jonah’s past and his scars only served to add to the mystery.

Jonah lets his guard down again in ASWv2#11, as he’s not only led to believe that the young man he rescues from a group of cattle-rustlers is innocent, but that the man’s wife is actually his sister, thereby allowing her to charm Hex into helping them.  The “lighting a match to reveal Jonah’s face” gag is repeated here, this time to let the woman “know whut kind’a critter yo’re huggin’”, after which he turns away and pulls his hat low, muttering about how “repulsive” he knows he is.  Reckon her betrayal just one page after she kisses him probably reinforced all those negative thoughts he has about himself (which we’ll discuss further down the line).

With Jonah’s third appearance came a slight change, as All-Star Western was re-titled Weird Western Tales starting with issue #12.  DC was grouping quite a few anthologies under the “Weird” banner around this time, beginning with Weird War Tales in 1971 and followed by the debut of Weird Mystery Tales and Weird Worlds not long after ASW’s title conversion.  Now that “weird” was A-OK with the CCA, Orlando said that he’d “started using the word and Carmine [Infantino] decided that ‘Weird’ sold anything.”  While the content of this first story under the new name isn’t all that weird, it does feature the first twist ending for a Hex tale, which starts off in an amusing fashion: Little Fawn, the young daughter of a Pawnee chief, becomes separated from her tribe and, after she and her pet timber wolf, Ironjaws, come across Hex bathing in a mountain stream, Little Fawn grabs his gun and demands that he help her get home!  Though they have a mishap with a rickety bridge, Jonah gets the deed done, bringing her back to her grateful father.  The girl suddenly falls ill right afterward, and the chief explains to Hex that a man named Craig -- whom Jonah had a run-in with earlier in the story -- gave the tribe some blankets infested with smallpox in the hope of wiping them out.  The chief fears that Jonah might also become ill, but the bounty hunter replies that he’s already had a cowpox vaccination, so he volunteers to fetch a doctor and bring him back to treat the tribe.

Mounting up on his horse -- named General here for the first time -- Jonah spends the next couple of days searching for help.  Considering that we’ve already seen two instances where Jonah’s attempts at compassion have backfired on him terribly, it may’ve seemed odd to the reader that he’d go to such lengths to help this little girl, much less her whole tribe, but we’ll learn in later years that Jonah has a certain affinity for both children in need and Native Americans.  Sadly, neither fare well in this story, for when he finally returns to the Pawnee village with medicine, all of them are dead: once the smallpox had sufficiently dwindled their numbers, Craig’s men finished off the rest with bullets.  Staggering through the village, Hex finds Ironjaws standing guard over Little Fawn’s lifeless body.  Jonah cradles the child in his arms for a moment, promising that he’ll look after the wolf, and after he buries her, Hex’s face twists into a snarl as he swears that “the man thet was responsible fer this…will pay!  By God, he’ll pay!”

When Hex tracks down Craig, he discovers the man’s plan worked too well, as everyone in town now has smallpox, Craig included.  Noting that he’s not “uncivilized”, Jonah offers Craig the bottle of medicine he’d brought for Little Fawn…and shatters it to pieces with a gunshot the second Craig raises it to his lips (this method of revenge will come up again many years later).

Now accompanied by a furry sidekick, Jonah travels all the way up to Wyoming in WWT#13 to visit Windy Taylor, an old friend who -- according to Windy himself -- taught Jonah how to shoot in the first place.  This is one of the few hints Albano & DeZuniga offered up in regards to Hex’s past, but we don’t get much beyond that, as the story focuses on a rich man named Fenrick who wants to add Windy’s ranch to his own vast land holdings.  Hex tangles with some of Fenrick’s men -- one of whom believes Jonah is not only immortal, but can “cast spells” over people, once again implying that the bounty hunter is something more than human -- but Hex isn’t fast enough to save Windy from getting killed by Tod, Windy’s own son!  Seems the young man felt his father had always treated him poorly, so he cut a deal with Fenrick, and when he goes to collect, Tod gets greedy and kills Fenrick as well.  Hex and Ironjaws soon pick up on Tod’s trail, though, and the bounty hunter avenges his old friend’s death in a permanent fashion.

Things take a sad turn in WWT#14, which also brings about an alteration in Jonah’s duds for the very first time.  The story begins with Ironjaws suffering from a rattlesnake bite, and after Jonah leaves the ailing wolf in a doctor’s care, he’s ambushed by two outlaw brothers out for revenge.  They haul him out to the desert, strip him down to his blue jeans, then tie him up to die under the blazing sun.  Luckily, Ironjaws somehow makes its way out to the desert to chew away the ropes binding Jonah, but then the poor animal dies from a combination of snakebite and exhaustion.  It was sad that the wolf’s time in Hex’s life was so brief, but according to Jared Vian, there was a simple reason why: Albano couldn’t figure out how to keep working Ironjaws into the stories, so he decided to kill the wolf off.

To be sure, losing Ironjaws upsets Jonah just as badly as Little Fawn’s death did.  “Blazes!  Ah never felt more in a mood for killin’ than Ah do now!” he bellows, then stalks back to town and demands the doctor give him some clothes and a gun so he can go hunt down the skunks responsible.  When he leaves the office, Jonah has inexplicably acquired a new Confederate coat (maybe the doc just happened to have one laying around?) but the rest of his outfit is brand new: the gun holster rig has flipped sides, going from his left hip to his right (in both cases, the spare revolver is tucked under his belt), and his trouser legs are now tucked into his boots, which have brown cuffs with rawhide stitching and silver conchos on either side.  The “classic” Hex look is now solidified…with one exception, for while he’s got another rebel-gray coat, his officer’s hat has been replaced a blue-black hat with a tiger-striped band, like he’s some sort of crazy cowboy pimp.  Luckily, this wardrobe malfunction doesn’t throw off his game one bit, and the issue ends with Jonah leaving one of the outlaws -- who’d been mauled by a rabid mountain lion -- to die in the desert, with the body of his dead brother draped over him.

At some point before his change in attire, Jonah took part in an odd little adventure which wouldn’t see the light of day for another four years, when it was finally printed in Amazing World of DC Comics #13 (Oct. 1976).  In the early ‘70s, as editor Paul Levitz explained in his preface to the piece, DC was in the process of cooking up a humor/horror mag to add under their “Weird” banner.  By 1972, they were calling this still-unpublished title Zany, and one of its features was to be parodies of their own DC characters.  Sadly, by the time this magazine -- now and forever known as Plop! -- hit the stands in 1973, that particular idea had been scrapped, but not before Albano & DeZuniga finished a four-page Jonah Hex story.  The result is something you have to see to believe, as it puts the bounty hunter in satirical situations like riddling him with arrows from head to foot (followed by him covering his wounds with dozens of Band-Aids) and galloping around on a stick horse.  I chalk it up to Albano’s cartoonist background that he so effectively knocked the piss out of his own character without being mean.

The existence of the Zany parody also speaks volumes as to how popular Hex became in such a short period of time, especially when you consider that -- according to Tony DeZuniga in a 2010 interview -- Joe Orlando had initially only commissioned five stories for this new character.  Luckily, letters of praise for both Jonah Hex and the creative team began to pour in right away, and Orlando noted in the lettercol for WWT#15 that sales on the title were on the rise ever since the bounty hunter’s debut (he also explained the noticeable absence of Hex in that issue was due to Tony DeZuniga being in the midst of moving house, so they decided to give Jonah some time off rather than bring in another artist).

Perhaps this sales spike was what inspired DC to roll out two more Western titles in early 1973, both named after stars from the original iteration of All-Star Western, specifically Johnny Thunder and the Trigger Twins.  However, both filled their pages with reprints, which is likely one of the reasons why neither lasted long: Trigger Twins consisted of a single issue and Johnny Thunder put out three before getting cancelled.  E. Nelson Bridwell -- who edited both titles -- admitted in Johnny Thunder #3 (July/August 1973) that the latter had received only five fan letters so far, all of which were printed in that issue’s lettercol, which led Bridwell to muse that “maybe today’s Western readers go more for the Jonah Hex type than the clean-cut range riders of the past.”

Jonah gets back in the saddle -- still wearing that “pimp hat” -- with WWT#16, backing up a sheriff whose bumbling exterior hides a thieving heart.  In WWT#17, he finds himself working for “The Hangin’ Woman” Judge Hatchett, who mercilessly hangs both the guilty and innocent in order to maintain an iron grip over the townsfolk.  After her sons murder a man to take possession of his farm, his little boy comes looking for revenge, and the sight of them preparing a noose for a child drives Hex to dispense his own brand of justice upon the Hatchetts, with the wheelchair-bound matriarch meeting an end worthy of a pre-Code EC comic.  By WWT#18, Jonah has taken over the entire issue, not only starring in his first 23-page story, but also earning his very own logo on the front cover, which was printed larger than the magazine’s actual title, rather like how Batman’s name usually overshadows Detective Comics.  Though the occasional backup would still appear in Weird Western Tales, there was no doubt that, overall, it belonged to Jonah Hex now.  Another landmark moment came in the form of the cover artist, Luis Dominguez, whose rendering of a monstrous “wolf boy” menacing Hex made him the second person to officially draw the bounty hunter, and this most certainly wouldn’t be the last time the Argentine artist would do so.

More landmarks would follow in WWT#19: it was the first Hex story to contain a date -- August 1867 -- as well as the first to make reference to his service in the Civil War, with the opening narration pondering, “When the smoke of battle had cleared at Gettysburg… Vicksburg… Chattanooga… Chickamauga… Manassas… and Chancellorsville, was this the warrior who still stood -- alive and unscathed?”  In the decades to come, speculation on Jonah’s presence at these battles and many others would continue to arise (see Appendix A  for a comprehensive list), but sadly, John Albano would not be around much longer to add his input on this matter.

Around the same time as Jonah Hex’s debut, a years-long series of mergers and acquisitions was finishing up, leading to DC Comics falling under the umbrella of the newly-created Warner Communications Inc. -- which also contained Warner Bros. Pictures -- in February 1972.  One of the first things this new company did was assess which comics properties could be spun off into other media like movies and TV.  While the transition from comics to live-action is almost a given in our current world of cinematic universes, that was far from the case in the early 1970s, so it’s likely that this assessment, coupled with Hex’s overnight popularity, is what led to a dispute between Albano and DC in regards to the film rights for Jonah Hex.

According to Jared Vian -- whose grandfather once showed him paperwork regarding this, but it has since been lost -- Clint Eastwood’s production company, Malpaso, was apparently interested in this potential Hex movie, which would’ve been a match made in heaven, considering Eastwood and Spaghetti Westerns in general were one of the inspirations for the character.  But considering how few rights comic-book creators had at the time (a situation that has improved only marginally in the decades since), Albano was likely cut out of any movie discussions, not to mention any profits such a movie would generate.  Things got heated enough for lawyers to get involved, and though Albano did receive an unknown sum because of it, the situation would cause him to be relieved of his position as writer on Weird Western Tales.  We can presume this incident also killed the movie deal before it really had a chance to get anywhere, though this would be far from the last time that Hollywood would come a-callin’ for the bounty hunter.

Not willing to lose their star character, Joe Orlando was faced with the task of finding a new writer who could deliver that same gritty quality the fans were clamoring for.  The first to try out for the position was Arnold Drake, who’d been working in the comics field since the 1950s, and had co-created many long-lasting DC characters like Deadman, the original Doom Patrol, and the humorous duo of Stanley and His Monster.  His contribution to the Hex mythos in WWT#20 fit in nicely with the previous Albano tales, showing off both Drake’s writing talents as well as how quickly Jonah’s character quirks had become cemented in place (it also featured the return of Jonah’s Confederate officer’s hat, completing the “classic” Hex look).  Drake even built upon Jonah’s preference to Indians over white folks: when a U.S. cavalry major says that a recent skirmish might bring about a change in the government’s “liberal Indian policies”, Jonah replies, “Which one d’ya mean -- takin’ their lands, killin’ their braves -- or maybe starvin’ their squaws and papooses?”  Discussion of said skirmish also brings about another nod to Jonah’s wartime service, with the bounty hunter stating that he’d already fought his war, referring to it as “the blue agin’ the gray”, and that it seems to him that “a man shouldn’t make a hog of hisself” by getting involved.

Most notable about the story is Drake’s introduction of a bordello owner named “Widow” Eileen Lacey (she ain’t no widow, folks, she just calls herself that to sound respectable), whom Jonah knows from a run-in at a Dodge City saloon.  The exact nature of their previous relationship is unknown, but the two are close enough to share a kiss and a bit of a flirt not long after their reunion…and the biggest surprise of all is that she survives at the end, making her one of the few figures from Jonah’s past to do so.  Unfortunately, this would be Drake’s only time writing Hex, and Eileen Lacey never turns up again, so what exactly occurred in that Dodge City saloon will remain a mystery.

Albano’s final Jonah Hex story appeared in Weird Western Tales #21 (January/February 1974), and it’s just as strong as the one he introduced the bounty hunter to the world with.  After killing one outlaw and capturing three others, Hex is beset by a snowstorm, forcing him to stop with his prisoners at a farmhouse owned by a widow and her daughter to wait it out.  Coincidentally, the daughter had a secret relationship with one of the outlaws, Roy, so she helps him escape…but before they leave together, Roy beats Jonah senseless with a fireplace poker.  The widow spends the next week caring for Jonah (as well as the other outlaw, who’d been struck down by a fever, the third having died right as they reached the farmhouse), and she certainly has her work cut out for her, because we soon learn that ol’ Jonah has a tendency to talk in his sleep.  In this case, he’s having nightmares about being back in the War, thrashing about in bed as he hollers at his men to charge the enemy.  The scene is accompanied by a brief flashback to a wartime image of Hex on horseback, his face unscarred as he waves a saber and gallops into battle.  As noted earlier, Albano & DeZuniga preferred to leave the origin of Jonah’s scars a mystery (the “blown up by a cannonball” notion never making it into any story), so this panel is first time they even acknowledge that Jonah wasn’t just born ugly.

Hex eventually recovers and sets to ride off in search of Roy and the widow’s daughter, but not before the old woman cautiously inquires whether Hex was wounded in the War.  He blows it off by saying that “the War’s over now and best forgotten!”  As he rides away, though, the widow silently reflects that it truly isn’t over for him: No, you still hear the roll of the drums…the bugle still sounding the charge…so long as there is an enemy for you to engage, you’ll ride on…

As to be expected, Hex catches up to his quarry two days later, ensnaring Roy in a noose and strangling him to death before returning the wayward daughter home.  When they arrive, though, they discover that the fever-stricken outlaw had recovered enough to stab the widow and escape.  Instead of immediately jumping on his trail, though, Hex fetches a doctor, then sticks around until he’s certain the old woman will survive.  These actions -- along with learning that Hex ponied up $400 for a children’s hospital fund in order to get the doc out there promptly -- cause the daughter to give Hex a bit of a dressing-down, pointing out that the merciless, unfeeling manner he’s been projecting the whole time doesn’t match with his altruistic acts.  Rather than own up to the fact that he actually has a heart, he spurs his horse General and rides off, locating the other outlaw four days later and gunning him down without a word.

Overall, this was a fine story for creator and creation to part ways on, and with the hindsight of knowing that this was Albano’s last Hex tale, the widow’s musings feel like his way of acknowledging that the character would indeed “ride on” without him.  What had started as an attempt to bring the sensibilities of the Spaghetti Western anti-hero to the comics page had succeeded spectacularly, but as with most things involving Jonah Hex, there was a cost.  The writer’s tenure at DC went on for a few more years before he moved on to work for other comics companies like Archie and Atlas/Seaboard, splitting his time between humor and horror.  It should also be noted that, despite Albano’s departure from Weird Western Tales, his son, John Albano Jr., would continue to work uncredited on the title as a colorist until WWT#37.

Despite solicits in the issue saying otherwise, the title was briefly cancelled after WWT#21, one of nine lower-tier books that DC saw fit to sacrifice due to a nationwide paper shortage in the Fall of 1973.  This move enabled the company to allocate resources to other titles with higher profit margins so they could more easily ride out this lean period.  This marked the first time Jonah Hex got the axe, and the book’s return four months later would mark his first resurrection (four other cancelled titles would return in the summer once the shortage was over).  Coincidentally, this also heralded the entry of the new writer that Joe Orlando had chosen to succeed John Albano, one whose contributions would define the character for generations to come.

| Index | Part 2 >>
Appendix A  |  Appendix B