Young Nerds in Love

This is a shade late for Valentine's Day, but that's only because my husband and I spent the day going about town and doing the sorts of things we love to do, topped off with a nice dinner.  And before you start leaving comments about how I'm going back on my word and writing a post about personal stuff instead of pop culture nonsense, you're wrong.  This is sort of a continuation of my "secret origin", so if you want more dirt on me, keep reading.

Back in 1992, I was a senior in high school, and frankly, I was miserable.  Back then, if you were a girl who was into comics and sci-fi/horror and cartoons and toys and had little-to-no interest in what was considered "normal" girly things, you were a freak of nature, just asking to be mocked.  Wearing glasses, carrying a few extra pounds, and having a preference for shorter hair didn't help much either.  I won't go into details as to what they did -- it was mostly verbal and emotional abuse, with the occasional physical fight tossed in to break up the monotony, along with one incident that bordered on indecent exposure -- but I will say that I put up with various levels of it for nearly a decade in four different school systems.  Anyhow, I would go to school every day and endure whatever torture du jour my peers thought up, then go back home and hide in my room and bury myself in the same fantasies that got me ostracized in the first place (I never skipped class: despite how much my sanity was crumbling, I had no desire to be held back and make this Hell last any longer than it had to).  I had two good friends in high school, both of whom were a bit odd like me, but they managed it better, and if not for them, my life would have turned out much differently.  For one thing, I would have never met my husband.

It was an afternoon in early March, right after school let out for the day.  My friend Jennifer had to pick up something she'd left back in the Drafting classroom, so I accompanied her.  After we got there, she started talking with a guy she knew about whatever project the Drafting students were working on, and while I waited for them to wrap it up, I heard the guy's brother -- who was also playing tag-along that day -- make a Star Wars joke.  Don't ask me what it was, I no longer remember, but I got the reference and I laughed.  This caught his attention, we talked ever so briefly, and then Jennifer and I left.  That was it.  No big hullabaloo, no fireworks, no crossing a crowded room and staring soulfully into each other's eyes.  But I did apparently make an impression on this guy, because he started following me around school...which made me nervous, because the only people who normally paid attention to me were the ones who seemed intent on driving me insane.  He learned my class schedule and would show up outside the door seconds after the bell rang (seeing as how he was two grades behind me and we shared no classes together, this was a pretty neat trick) usually with a new joke or other obscure reference at the ready, probably as a test to see if the first time was only a fluke.  It wasn't, of course, and as I slowly let my guard down, I learned that he got hassled just as much as I did.  His name was Jamin -- which took me a good long while to get correct -- and within a few weeks, I had a third friend.

Then the fallout began.  The kids who preyed upon me set their sights upon Jamin too -- I recall one of them calling out as we walked down the hall, "Hey, which one of you is the guy and which one's the girl?" -- and this scared me so bad that I told him at one point to stay away from me.  But he wouldn't let me go.  By the time Easter break came around, one girl I was on decent terms with convinced us that we should be an actual couple, and we agreed to it just to shut her up.  Not much changed for us at first -- it took until May for the awkward kissing sessions to begin -- but the most important thing to come out of our meeting was that we helped each other survive.  Neither of us was the lonely weirdo anymore, we each had someone to talk to and vent with.  Falling in love was the bonus.

There was a brief break-up (during which time we were still great friends), but we soon realized after trying to see other people how stupid we were and got back together again, finally getting married in 1998.  It's been a wonderful, worry-free marriage, full of goofy adventures and memories that "normal" people would shake their heads at in disbelief, because we haven't changed a bit.  We're still dorky lil' nerdlings that can lean on each other when the real world mocks us for what we enjoy.

Oh, as for what we did on Valentine's Day?  We stopped at some of our favorite collectibles stores and blew nearly 100 bucks on comics and DVDs.  Yes, we got got each other the usual flowers and cards and candy, but we wanted to do something fun too!

An Illustrated History of Jonah Hex (Part 3)

1977-1978: New Home, New Hassles

“THE WEIRDEST WESTERN HERO NOW IN HIS OWN MAGAZINE!” trumpets the cover of Jonah Hex #1 (dated March/April 1977).  At the time, there were only a handful of Western comics still being printed, and many focused on a rotating stable of characters (or even worse, were padded out with reprints from older, now-defunct Western titles).  Starting up a brand-new Western comic based around one solitary character with a new story each and every issue may have been seen by some in the industry as a huge mistake.  But as five years of appearances in All-Star Western and Weird Western Tales proved, Jonah was more than up to the task.

For his first self-titled issue, Michael Fleisher and Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez send Jonah Hex to Whalenburg, Tennessee in the spring of 1874.  Tommy Royden, the son of a wealthy plantation owner, had been kidnapped over six months ago, yet there’s been no ransom and no trace of the boy has surfaced.  After two weeks of westward tracking, Hex comes across a boy-fighting troupe run by a man named Blackie LeClerc, who ain’t above taking a whip to the young’uns.  After making it clear that he's not fond of such things, Jonah inquires if they know anything about the missing boy.  Both LeClerc and his boys claim ignorance, but later that night, one of the boys sneaks into Hex’s room and tells a different story: Tommy hadn’t been kidnapped for ransom, but to replace another boy who’d died in a fight.  Sadly, Tommy himself died in the same manner that very afternoon, and after leading Hex to the local undertaker to confirm this, he and Hex are ambushed by LeClerc and his partner, who shoot them both.  The boy dies, but Jonah’s only grazed, so LeClerc tosses him into a coffin and nails it shut, figuring Jonah will die before he escapes.  Of course, we all know Jonah’s made of sterner stuff than that.  He soon tracks the skunks down and, since he doesn’t know which one did the actual kidnapping, decides the best way to settle it is have LeClerc and his partner participate in “a little friendly fight!  You know, like the kind you make those boys have!”  The two men duke it out until they stumble off a cliff, and though LeClerc manages to hang on for dear life, his victory doesn’t last long:

The 1-page epilogue that follows does little to lighten the already-downbeat ending.  When Jonah arrives back at the plantation with Tommy’s body, he finds that his employer (who was ailing at the beginning of the tale) died in the interim.  After laying the small coffin at the feet of the man’s widow, he rides off without taking any of the reward (and it was a hefty sum: $20,000 to be exact...a crazy amount of money both then and now, but Fleisher tended to make the bounties much larger than what would have been realistic for the late-1800s).  Looking back, it’s a terribly depressing story to start out on, but I do ask that you remember it well, as this will become relevant again further down the line.

Two months later, we get the first installment of a storyline that will run for nearly a year-and-a-half.  Jonah Hex #2 begins with the lawmen of the town of Wyandotte accusing Jonah of robbing a store, and before he can get a word in edgewise, they beat the holy Hell outta Jonah and drag him to jail...only to find that it was a diversion set up by Ned Landon, a member of the U.S Secret Service.  The government desperately needs Jonah’s help, and after a bit of negotiation, Landon tells Hex about El Papagayo, a ruthless bandito who wants to overthrow the Mexican government, which apparently has folks in Washington worried.  Not wanting to be openly involved, they’ve instead chosen Hex to perform some covert ops for them, supplying him with a cache of guns to sell so he can cozy up to Papagayo and learn what his plans are.  Hex agrees and rides off to Mexico, guns in tow.  After impressing the bandito with both the ordnance and his own gunfighting skills, he and Papagayo actually get along pretty well...until El Papagayo’s men discover that all the firing pins have been removed from the guns Hex brought, rendering them useless!  Jonah escapes the furious banditos by the skin of his teeth and, figuring this all to be a set-up by Landon, rides back to Wyandotte.  Once there, he learns the lawmen who hauled him in on that fake robbery charge are dead, and the whole town thinks Jonah’s the one who did it -- once again, Jonah escapes, but now he has a triple-murder charge hanging over his head and no idea why.  In truth, Landon’s the one who killed the lawmen, and the last page shows him meeting up with a certain someone at an old barn to discuss how things went:

Yes indeed, the man with the eagle-headed cane is back, and this time, Turnbull is not going to be content with merely killing Jonah Hex: he wants to make sure the man’s reputation is destroyed along with him, giving him no safe harbor as he runs from every lawman in the West.  In JH#3 (July/Aug. 1977), we learn that a $10,000 bounty has been placed on his head (again, crazy-high amount, but Jonah’s dangerous enough to justify it), and after being shot by a pursing posse, Jonah finds shelter in the home of a blind Quaker, who refuses to turn Jonah in even after he discovers the truth about him.  Of course, one good turn deserves another, and Jonah drives off a passel of men trying to drive the Quaker off his land.  Unfortunately, Hex catches another bullet by the end of the tale, and he has to flee once more as the local sheriff comes after him.  Riding through the wilderness, Jonah’s too focused on his injuries to notice that there’s someone on the rocks above him with a rifle...someone who looks like...Jonah Hex?!?  What the heck?  Did Fleisher just introduce a twin brother or something?  What’s going on here?

Luckily, we don’t have wait long to find out: not only does JH#4 pick up just moments after the last one ended, but it’s cover-dated September 1977 -- starting now and for the next seven years, Jonah Hex is a monthly title.  As for our second Hex, he turns out to be a master of disguise called the Chameleon (no, this isn’t some lost Jonah Hex/Spider-Man crossover, though that would’ve been fun, eh?).  Another agent hired by Turnbull, the Chameleon is masquerading as Hex in order to further discredit our hero.  After robbing a stagecoach and murdering one of the passengers, he ambushes Hex and shoots him off his horse.  Laying by a creek half-dead, Jonah is eventually found by a young lady named Joanna Mosby, who helps him back to her cabin.  As Jonah’s recuperating in another room, the Chameleon shows up again, this time disguised as a wounded veteran looking for a handout -- as Joanna fetches him some food, he hides the loot from the stagecoach robbery in the cabin, then later switches up his garb to rat out Hex’s location to the authorities.  Jonah escapes again and finally gets on Landon’s trail, which leads him to that old barn we last saw at the end of JH#2.  He finds Landon’s body (which by now is weeks old...gross!) as well as Turnbull (has he been sitting there this whole time with the corpse?  Double gross!) who spills the beans about the whole set-up right before his manservant Solomon conks Hex out with a shovel.  Coming to hours later, he races back to Joanna’s place and finds that she and the Chameleon have been in cahoots this whole time!  Sadly, she’s seen the Chameleon’s true face, so he decides to set the cabin on fire to kill both her and Hex.  Too bad he didn’t count on Jonah’s fancy footwork (take note of where the gun hits...owie!):

Hex and Joanna escape the blazing cabin, and though she says that she genuinely loves him, the man ain’t buyin’ it, giving her a good slap in the kisser before riding off.  Moments later, we find that Jonah’s been cleared of the stagecoach-robbing charge: an artist on the stage did a sketch of the robber, and while the Chameleon made himself up to look like Hex, he put the scar on the wrong side of his face (a touch that may have slipped by some readers upon first perusal), therefore confirming that he was an imposter.  Hex is still wanted for murder, though, and worst of all, the Chameleon survives the fire, horribly burned and swearing vengeance upon Hex!

After this issue, the crazy Turnbull-backed shenanigans suddenly drop off, though Jonah’s “fugitive on the run” status still gets worked into each story.  To that end, JH#5 (a reprint of All-Star Western #10) gets a new framing sequence by Garcia-Lopez.  The opener shows a posse in pursuit of Hex crossing paths with a woman on a buckboard.  Turns out this is same lady Jonah helped in his debut tale (named Mrs. Thornton here), and when they ask if she’s seen him, she replies, “Ah ain’t laid eyes on thet man in more’n five years, sheriff!”  The comic then rolls into “Welcome to Paradise” proper, exactly as it was the first time around (though there are a few coloring changes, such as Mrs. Thornton and her boy are now redheads instead of blonde).  When the tale is through, we get a final page with the sheriff saying that Hex is now a wanted killer, and he tells the woman, “You see any sign of him, you let out a loud holler, hear?” before riding off.  Cut to Jonah poking his head out from beneath the tarp covering the buckboard -- he’d been hiding there the whole time -- and thanking the woman for the assist.  She in turn thanks him for what he did all those years ago: saving her life and paying off the farm.  After the anger she’d shown him when they parted ways originally, this scene is rather touching, especially in light of the mess his life had become.  It’s a reminder for both us and himself that he is a good man, he just has very rotten luck...and that luck extends to the departure of Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez as series artist after this issue.  As with Mrs. Thornton, he will turn up in Jonah’s life later on, but for now, we must bid Joe Orlando’s “secret weapon” a fond farewell.

Ernie Chan joins up with longtime Hex artist Noly Panaligan for JH#6, in which Jonah impersonates a U.S. Marshal who died trying to bring him in (it wasn’t his fault, I swear!) as well as JH#7, while Chan gets an assist from Vicente Alcazar on JH#8.  These latter two issues are a landmark in Jonah’s life, as they reveal another large chunk of his mysterious past.  The present-day anchor is Jonah being hired by a Mr. Vanden (who is aware of Jonah’s fugitive status and doesn’t care a whit) to find his kidnapped daughter.  He wants Hex because he’s an expert on Apaches, and as the story rolls into a flashback, we find out why.  Back in July 1851, Jonah was a boy of thirteen and living with his abusive, drunken father.  The elder Hex sells booze illegally to a local Apache tribe, and one day, in order to raise a grubstake so he can get in on the California gold rush, he decides to sell his son to them as well so they can use him for slave labor -- he claims that he’ll come back for the boy, but this is clearly a load of hooey.

After two years, Jonah manages to shake off his slave status by rescuing the tribe’s chief from a vicious puma, and they accept him as a full member of the tribe.  Unfortunately, the chief’s son, Noh-Tante, isn’t so happy about this, nor about the fact that Jonah keeps making eyes at a girl named White Fawn.  When they’re both sent out on a test of manhood -- stealing horses from a nearby Kiowa camp -- Noh-Tante betrays Jonah and leaves him to be killed by the Kiowa.  He’s saved by an unlikely source: a band of mercenaries hired by the Army to wipe out Indians.  When Jonah tries to stop them from slaughtering children, however, the mercs fill him full of lead too.  His second savior comes in the form of a trapper who finds him amongst the dead and nurses him back to health.  Months pass before Jonah’s well enough to return to the Apache encampment, but they’re long gone by the time he arrives.  There’s a quickie glossing over of the next 12 years, taking us up to 1866, a year after the Civil War ended: discharged from the Confederate Army and wandering the West, Jonah stumbles across his old tribe.  He tells the chief of how Noh-Tante betrayed him, and the chief decides this must be settled by trial-by-combat.  Armed with tomahawks, Jonah and Noh-Tante go at it, but Jonah’s weapon was rigged to break.  Deciding that one dishonorable move deserves another, Jonah pulls out the knife he keeps hidden beneath his coat collar and stabs Noh-Tante.  Not knowing about the rigged tomahawk, the chief sides with his dead son and punishes Jonah for cheating:

So now you know: Jonah’s scar is the result of a red-hot tomahawk to the face (which, according to one doctor, would cause some serious problems for his right eye, not to mention his ripped-open cheek ).  The story then returns to present times, and it turns out the Vanden girl was kidnapped by the same Apache tribe that Jonah belonged to.  They capture him and, since he was banished from the tribe, plan on killing him at sunrise.  However, White Fawn frees Jonah and the girl, but the chief in turn kills her when they try to escape -- Jonah has no choice but to shoot the chief dead in order for him and the girl to get away.  As with the Fort Charlotte two-parter in WWT#29-30 and the “fugitive” storyline this tale is embedded in, it all boils down to yet another false accusation, as well as rejection by a father figure (in this case, his actual father is part of the equation), and in the long run, events like this have to color how Jonah thinks of himself.  Michael Fleisher has commented that someone like Hex must have a certain amount of self-hatred to do what he does because, as a bounty hunter, he’s putting his life on the line constantly.  To be sure, coming from an abusive household isn’t the best start for a boy (plus there’s no mention yet of his mother -- it’ll be many years before we find out why she’s no longer in the picture), and enduring slavery would just lower his opinion of himself even further.  But Jonah did manage take away one very important lesson from all this: he learned how to endure.  Between what the Apache did to him and the unknown torture his father already put him through, there’s little the world can throw at Jonah that he hasn’t already experienced.  And of course there’s the more practical lessons in the form of hunting, tracking, and fighting skills that he picked up during his years with the Apache (which would have been honed razor-sharp by the time the Civil War ended).  So much of what makes Jonah Hex the man he is can be traced back to his Pa trading him away for a stack of pelts.  Without that event, he’s nothing.

We get another two-parter in JH#9 &10 (with art chores done by Chan & Danny Bulandi on the former and Garcia Lopez on the latter), wherein Jonah’s hired by the Mexican government to escort a fortune in gold bullion across bandito-infested territory.  And where there’s banditos, there’s El Papagayo, who wants revenge on Hex for the stunt he pulled in JH#2.  “For almost eight months I am lying awake nights dreaming about how I am going to kill heem!” says Papagayo...which leads us to a problem with this whole “Hex as fugitive” story.  Aside from his initial tracking down of Landon, we’ve seen Jonah do absolutely nothing to prove his innocence.  Admittedly, this can’t be an easy task, what with how neatly Turnbull set him up, but you’d think after eight months of this, Jonah would’ve at least attempted it.  Of course, if we go back to Fleisher’s reasoning of “self-hatred”, maybe Jonah thinks he deserves this treatment on some level, so he’s not trying very hard.  Either way, he misses the perfect opportunity to get his life back in JH#11 (April 1978).  Jonah rescues a young woman who’s being assaulted by a nasty card-sharp and his cronies, and not until afterwards does Jonah realize it’s Joanna Mosby, who’s been following him for months.  Too bad the reunion is short-lived, as the skunks soon bushwhack Jonah, tie him to a hitching rail, and go to work on him with a sledgehammer:

There’s a heck of a tale behind that scene: in an interview from The Comics Journal #56 (June 1979), Fleisher tells us that he’d scripted it so the bad guys “place [Jonah’s] hands on a hitching rail so that...his hands are gripping the hitching rail.  Then the script called for the bad guys to take railroad spikes and hammer them through Jonah Hex's hands into the wood...Now, the artist [Rich Buckler] took this story and he changed the position of Jonah Hex so that his back was to the hitching post.”  Which is how it appears in the comic, except there’s no spikes to be seen.  The Comics Code Authority saw the original art and said it looked like a crucifixion, which made it sacrilegious and therefore had to be changed.  “Not because the spikes were so brutal, you understand, but because religious people might be offended,” Fleisher comments.  “What the Code said to us was that only Christ could be crucified.  By that reasoning, you presumably couldn't show the two thieves who were crucified alongside Christ in a comic book because they weren't Christ either.  Be that as it may, I never meant the scene to look like a crucifixion.”

Back to our story: the next scene shows Jonah all bandaged up (spikes or no, his hands ain’t gonna be in good shape), and Joanna’s taking care of him.  She tries to explain about the whole incident with the Chameleon, but Jonah blows her off, and as far as we know, that particular subject never comes up again.  As I was saying before, it’s a missed opportunity: she knows about the stagecoach setup, so why didn’t Jonah grill her about what else she might know?  He says later on in the tale that he can’t fully trust her, so I suppose that’s his reason for not pursuing the issue further.  This distrust of Joanna inadvertently leads to her death at the hands of the same guy who busted up Hex.  It also leads us back to that Comics Journal interview, where Fleisher talks about writing “a story in which a woman whom Jonah Hex loves dies in his arms and Jonah Hex in the first moment of grief kisses her on the mouth after she's died.  I thought it was a very powerful moment in the story.  Now the artist was very uncomfortable with this.  He took the story and brought it in to the editor -- he'd written a whole new ending for it.  In his ending, Jonah Hex picks up the girl, carries her to the, graveyard, and buries her, or something.  Fortunately, in the case of that particular story the editor insisted that the story be redrawn to meet the requirements of the original script.”  Though Fleisher doesn’t mention the artist or issue, the “uncomfortable” scene matches the end of JH#11.  If you couple this comment with the other made in that same interview (along with noting that the inks for the issue are credited to “Dick Giordano & Friends”, implying that there was a scramble to get this one in the can) it seems as though Fleisher and Buckler had quite a few differences of opinion regarding the content of the story, though when I met Rich Buckler in 2006 and asked him about it, he couldn’t recall any problems of the sort, so it’s one man’s word against another here.

Those searching for more “fugitive” action in JH#12 will be disappointed, as there’s not even a brief mention of Jonah’s troubles in this story.  This Vicente Alcazar-drawn tale focuses instead on Hex looking for a friend lost in the Louisiana bayou and running afoul of some swamp folk (a theme we’ll revisit nearly three decades later).  It’s possible this may have been written before the current storyline was cooked up and held in reserve as a fill-in in case Fleisher fell behind, a theory lent credence by the fact that the next three issues aren’t written by Michael Fleisher at all!  Instead, David Michelinie (who Fleisher had brought to DC four years previously, after coming across his writing samples in Joe Orlando’s slush pile) stepped up to pen a trio of tales that not only contribute to the “fugitive” storyline, but also deliver the same high caliber of action that we’ve come to expect from our favorite bounty hunter. In JH#13, Jonah is blackmailed by a Pinkerton agent into helping him find out who’s been blowing up railroad lines in the area -- if Jonah refuses, the Pinkerton will haul him in and collect that $10,000 bounty.  This turns into a huge double-cross by the Pinkerton, who ends up killing a boy in the process...and if there’s one thing you should never do in Jonah’s presence, it’s harm a little kid!

In JH#14, Michelinie introduces us to “The Sin Killer”, an old friend of Jonah’s who has made it his life’s mission to kill bounty hunters...Jonah Hex included!  His final tale in JH#15 has Jonah working in a carnival under the moniker “The Crimson Pistolero”, wearing a bandana over his face so as to hide from the authorities (though why he didn’t think to change out of his Confederate duds is beyond me).  Because of his scars, the “special” people who work in the sideshow welcome Hex as one of their own, until they think he’s responsible for the death of the carnival’s owner.  When the real culprit is found, Jonah helps the sideshow members dispense their own kind of justice before hitting the trail once more (though this certainly won’t be the last time Jonah has a run-in with circus folk).

Fleisher returns for Jonah Hex #16 (September 1978), with the cover boasting that it now contains a “full length 25 page story!” (as opposed to the 17 pages of previous issues).  The extra pages might explain Fleisher’s brief absence, especially considering this issue also brings the “fugitive” storyline to a close.  It starts with Jonah being captured by a local vigilance committee, and after letting them know how he feels about the situation, they hang Jonah from a tree and leave him to slowly strangle to death.  Luckily, a man by the name of Tobias Nostrum and his black assistant Joseph happen along and cut him down.  No fan of vigilantism, Nostrum saved Hex so he could be turned over to the proper authorities.  When Jonah tells Nostrum about how he was framed, another stroke of luck pops up: Nostrum is an inventor of sorts, and is familiar with the still-nascent science of fingerprinting, as well as the process of identifying the distinctive marks left on bullets when fired by certain guns.  He can prove Jonah Hex is innocent!  Unfortunately, Joseph is killed by a mysterious figure when he goes out to chop wood.  By the end of the issue, we’ll discover that it’s the Chameleon, but I’m letting you in on the secret early because of the ludicrousness of what transpires throughout the story.  Please keep in mind, it’s 1875 (the year given last issue), and all the Chameleon has to work with is the makeup techniques available at the time (mere putty and greasepaint, going by what the man said in his first appearance).  Despite this, he manages to impersonate Joseph in the presence of his own employer, even accompanying him and Jonah to Wyandotte, where the three dead lawmen are buried (Nostrum needs to recover the bullets that killed them).  I can allow for the Chameleon’s impersonation of Hex in JH#4, as he wasn’t doing it in front of folks that knew the gunfighter (and he didn’t do it perfectly either, if you recall), but changing yourself from white to black, then standing in the midst of someone who should notice if something was amiss?  Admittedly, Nostrum did say he was absent-minded, but that’s pretty darn sad if he can’t tell the difference.

While Nostrum and Hex collect evidence, “Joseph” slips away and changes his disguise to that of a pretty young lady, then pays a visit to the sheriff to alert him that Hex is in town.  They capture him, and while Jonah awaits his turn in court, Nostrum keeps working, going so far as to locate Ned Landon’s body in the old barn -- turns out the bullets embedded in the lawmen match up with the gun in Landon’s pocket.  An acquittal is all but guaranteed for Hex...too bad the Chameleon stabs Nostrum right before the trial!  Now impersonating Nostrum (again, this is a bit of a stretch) he gets on the stand and tries to convict Jonah with a damning testimony, but the real Nostrum stumbles in and manages to blow the Chameleon’s cover before dropping dead of his wounds.  Furious, the Chameleon pulls a gun and rips off his makeup, ranting like a madman until Jonah whips out his handy-dandy hidden knife and shuts him up:

And that’s it.  After fifteen issues of non-stop action, Jonah’s troubles are all resolved rather succinctly in one page.  Overall, the “fugitive” storyline is burdened somewhat by too much padding -- about half of the issues in this arc could be removed without effecting  the plot -- but on the other hand, we did get Jonah’s “origin story” in the midst of all this craziness, along with a new bad guy in El Papagayo, who will turn up to menace Hex for years to come.  Most importantly, Jonah Hex as a title survived the “DC Implosion”, but that doesn’t mean this ol’ bounty hunter gets to take a break.  Right around the corner lies one of the busiest periods of Jonah’s life...along with the end of it.

ERRATA: An image problem in Part 1 has been corrected, and in Part 2, more details have been added regarding Russel Carley's role in the early Fleisher stories.

<< Part 2 | Index | Part 4 >>
Appendix A  |  Appendix B