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.

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Appendix A  |  Appendix B