An Illustrated History of Jonah Hex (Part 4)

4 - May You Live in Interesting Times
(Text updated April 1, 2026)

If a comic-book character’s popularity can be measured by how many issues they appear in during a given month, then Jonah Hex hit one of the highest points in his career in the midst of “The DC Explosion”.  During a two-month period, he was featured in not only his self-titled book, but one of DC’s flagship titles and his very own one-shot special.  Taken singly, each of these stories is an odd little side-trip away from his usual stomping grounds, and seeing them altogether on the newsstand must have presented a bizarre picture to any new reader discovering Hex for the first time.  Atypical stories or no, each of them would prove to be life-altering for our favorite bounty hunter on one level or another.

We’ll start off with Jonah Hex #17 (October 1978), drawn by Vicente Alcazar.  Jonah’s been lured to Charleston by a promise to $5,000, though when he gets there, he discovers that the money is to be payment for flying a hot-air balloon to Europe.  The inventor wishes to remain on the ground in order to drum up the proper press, and knows Jonah’s the sort of man who will do anything for the right price.  In this case, though, five thousand bucks ain’t it, so he refuses, which doesn’t stop the inventor from bashing Jonah on the head and forcing him into the balloon’s gondola.  He comes to as the balloon lifts off and manages to grab the inventor, but that action doesn’t turn out as planned, with the inventor plummeting to his death soon after.

Adrift in a balloon with no experience in how to control it, Jonah spends the next three days at the mercy of the winds, which carry him out over the Atlantic Ocean and all the way down to the coast of South America.  When he’s finally spotted by a ship, it blasts him out of the sky and takes him captive -- turns out this is a slave ship bound for Brazil, and they think he’s going to rat them out (slavery was on the decline in Brazil during the 1870s, but it wasn’t officially abolished until 1888).  After being thrown in with the “cargo”, Hex finds that the enslaved Africans were working on an uprising, led by their king, Mbwasi, who luckily for Hex speaks English.  Also in the hold is Cricket, a Black man tossed down there after disobeying the captain.  Unfortunately, when they break out of the hold and make their way up to the main deck, they discover Cricket was actually put down there as a spy, for he goes running to the captain the first chance he gets (also, just like with WWT#29, the Comics Code Authority lets the word “darkies” make it into print).  In the midst of a terrible storm, both sides fight it out, and the Africans eventually take over the ship, wiping out the crew in the process, along with Cricket and Mbwasi.

With no one left to control the ship, it soon crashes against the Tortuga shoals (though exactly which Tortuga shoals those would be is unknown, as many places in South America are known by that name and none appear to be located off the coast of Brazil).  Hex and a handful of Africans survive the wreck, and are soon rescued by a tribe of Blacks in canoes.  Now, this isn’t the happy ending it sounds like: At the beginning of the tale, Jonah overheard the slavers talking about a tribe of cannibals that lived on an island in the area, and when Hex sees their blue-painted faces, he realizes that’s who picked them up!  Jonah tries to warn the Africans, but since none of the survivors speak English, it’s no use -- the only good thing is that the Africans talk the cannibals into letting Hex go since he helped them escape.  Jonah is given a small canoe, and as he paddles away, we’re left to wonder if the Africans will end up on the menu.

Jonah’s Brazilian adventure continued in JH#18, which featured Val Mayerik and Danny Bulandi on art.  Now paddling his canoe up the Amazon, Jonah comes across a group of men torturing a native boy, so he jumps the guys and guns them down with their own pistols (Jonah lost his when the ship went down).  As he frees the boy, another native hiding in the trees zaps Jonah with a poison dart (that’s gratitude for ya), but he manages to stumble back to his canoe and escape before passing out.  Sometime later, he gets dumped into the water after his canoe tumbles over a waterfall, and his unconscious body washes up on the outskirts of a rubber plantation.  When Jonah recovers, he finds himself in the company of siblings Paul and Vanessa Venal, who own the plantation.  Hex is rather surprised that they know his name, and any sharp-eyed reader should be surprised as well: They claim to know it because his name was written on the sweatband of his hat, which was recovered along with all his other possessions when they found him...but Jonah lost all that stuff when the slave ship was destroyed!  Fleisher must’ve hoped the readers wouldn’t notice this continuity error, and would simply be happy to see Jonah in his Confederate duds again.

Of course, there’s still the matter of him being unarmed, but Paul soon remedies that by lending the bounty hunter some guns from his own collection, which leads to the introduction of something that would come to be considered part of the “classic” Jonah Hex look: A matched pair of ivory-handled Colt Dragoons.  Though there are errors in both the text and the art this first time out, it’s specified in the letter column of Jonah Hex #31 that these guns are meant to be Whitneyville-Hartford .44-caliber Dragoon pistols, manufactured by Colt Firearms back in 1848, with a limited run of only 240 (a few dozen are known to still exist).  It’s not only a rare handgun, but deadly as well, with a firing power that wasn’t surpassed until the invention of the .357 Magnum in the 1930s, so you know Jonah didn’t just pluck those things off the wall at random.

Not long after, Paul convinces Hex to help rescue some workers who were kidnapped by the local tribe, the Kre-Ena-Krore, though the reality is the Venals want the natives wiped out so they can acquire their legendary treasure.  What follows is a textbook lesson in the dangers that lurk within the jungle, like boa constrictors, quicksand, and bow-wielding natives who’d rather you not wipe them out.  Jonah eventually learns about the true purpose of his mission, as well as what this “treasure” really is: A hut full of shrunken heads!  Don’t worry, the Venals get what’s coming to them in the end, and Jonah rides off with those ivory-handled Dragoons still on his hips.  We can presume that the bounty hunter must’ve hightailed it for the nearest seaport and the first ship heading to the States, as he’s back home safe and sound by the next issue.  Looking back, it’s strange that Fleisher would go to all the trouble of inventing a way to get Hex down to South America, then only do two stories there.  It’s a bit of a letdown that we didn’t get more.

At the same time Jonah was wandering around Brazil, he also turned up in Justice League of America #159-160, marking his first guest appearance in someone else’s book...and if you’re one of those fans who likes to imagine that Jonah Hex exists in a universe separate from the DCU, please skip the next few paragraphs, because what follows here might make your brain explode.  This tale, written by Gerry Conway -- who’d also taken over penning Scalphunter’s adventures a few months earlier with Weird Western Tales #45 -- and drawn by Dick Dillin & Frank McLaughlin, starts at the annual JLA/JSA shindig.  After four pages of idle superhero chatter, we get an explosion, followed by three pages of the Lord of Time, the villain of our piece, telling us one of the most ridiculous setups you will ever read in a comic book.  Apparently, he’s created an ultimate supercomputer and programmed it to stop all of time, but after activating it, he realized that’s a very bad idea, and he can’t stop it from carrying out the program.  Only the combined might of the JLA and JSA can defeat the computer, but since he’s the villain, the Lord of Time can’t just ask for help, so he instead plucks five legendary warriors out of the timestream and has them literally crash the superheroes’ party, therefore tricking the superheroes into attacking the Lord of Time’s stronghold and destroying the supercomputer...and that, my friends, is the explanation for why Jonah Hex, the Black Pirate, Enemy Ace, the Viking Prince, and Miss Liberty are appearing in a JLA book.

After blowing the place to Hell and gone (and rendering a bunch of the superheroes unconscious in the process), Jonah and his new friends step back to reassess the situation, as none of them are aware of why they did it.  There’s some muttering about being compelled by an unknown voice, and overall, our time-tossed quintet is rather shaken by all of it...except for Jonah.  “Seems somebody, somewhere, up and yanked us away from our own business, with all the good manners of a slimy carpetbagger!” he declares, reloading his gun.  “I figger we owe that somebody for the inconvenience!”  If you believe in retcons, there’s a possible explanation for why Jonah is taking all this craziness better than the rest, and we’ll discuss it much further down the line in Chapter 12.  In the meantime, let’s focus on the fact that, as the issue progresses, these five people kick the collective asses of the JLA and JSA.  Okay, they did have augmented weapons supplied by the Lord of Time, and Jonah even gets a flying horse, but still, we’re talking five against twenty here (going by a head-count of who’s on the first page).  How insane is this?

Not as insane as the next issue, which would later be one of many DC issues reprinted by Whitman Publishing (but not the previous issue for some reason), which means JLA#160 was likely the first introduction to Jonah Hex for many young’uns in the late 1970s and early 1980s whose parents grabbed a Whitman polybagged pack of comics at grocery and drug stores across the United States.  And boy o boy, what an intro!  After the Lord of Time literally puts them on display right outside his stronghold in the year 3786 in order to lure the superheroes there, our five warriors decide they’re not gonna take this abuse much longer and storm the place themselves (I like to think that Jonah goaded the other four into it).  Once inside, they come face-to-face with both a Tyrannosaurus Rex (or “a toad-frog outta Hell”, as Jonah calls it) and a passel of lizard-men, all of which do what the superheroes couldn’t last issue, namely knock these five people flat, thus putting an end to Jonah’s direct involvement in this tale.  We do see a comatose Hex near the end, and there’s a throwaway line on the last page about how the League, after they defeated the supercomputer, returned the five warriors to their respective times, but other than that, those in search of cowpoke action need not concern themselves with the rest of this story.

As crazy as it all was, though, these two JLA issues set a bit of a precedent for ol’ Jonah, and within seven years, his involvement with both time-travel shenanigans and the long-underwear crowd would become part of his main storyline, as opposed to something special trotted out for guest-spots that could easily be ignored.  Love it or hate it, the notion of Hex comfortably mingling with superheroes across time and space starts here.

Another notable thing to be found in JLA#160 is an advertisement -- which also appeared in JH#18 -- for a new offering in DC’s Dollar Comics line.  Technically titled DC Special Series #16 but more commonly referred to as the Jonah Hex Spectacular (Fall 1978), this ad-free special boasted not only a 30-page Hex story, but two 17-page backups featuring Bat Lash and Scalphunter, plus an action-packed Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez cover and a black-and-white mini-poster by Luis Dominguez, making it one heck of a deal for just a dollar.  It’s the plot of the main story, however, that makes the Spectacular an unforgettable landmark in Jonah’s history.

“Well, the first idea I had was to do a story about Jonah Hex being old,” Michael Fleisher said in The Comics Journal #56 (May 1980).  “I've been trying to get DC to let me do a whole separate series about Jonah Hex as an old man.  I'm not having any luck.  But that was my idea to do a story about Jonah Hex in his 60s...and I knew that I'd already established, at least in my own mind, that Jonah Hex was born in 1838.  So I said, ‘Gee, 60s, what year would that be?’ and I found myself in the early 1900s.”

And that’s also where the reader finds themselves as “The Last Bounty Hunter”  opens in 1904, with a white-haired Hex still tracking down outlaws at the ripe old age of sixty-six.  The march of time has changed him a little -- instead of the aimless wanderer he was in the 1870s, he’s settled down in Cheyenne, Wyoming with a young Comanche gal named Tall Bird, and has to wear reading glasses when filling out reward vouchers -- but otherwise Jonah’s just as ornery and dangerous as always.  Unfortunately, the rest of the world is rapidly leaving him behind, a fact pointed out to him by Michael Wheeler, an American History professor from Princeton who wants to write a book about Jonah.  The idea that anybody would want to do such a thing intrigues the bounty hunter just enough for him to let the man stick around.

Wheeler spends months with Hex and Tall Bird, taking down all the details of the bounty hunter’s long life.  One afternoon, when the two men are out hunting, they encounter Lew Farnham, who runs a traveling Wild West show.  Seems he wants Hex to hire on with him so he can turn the old man into a cross between Buffalo Bill and a rodeo clown, complete with a white spangled outfit that bears Jonah’s name “emblazoned across the back in genuine simulated rhinestone diamonds!”  Not surprisingly, Hex turns Farnham down flat, walking away from the man with a grim look in his eyes.

Many days later, Hex and Wheeler return to the homestead and discover that Tall Bird has ben kidnapped by outlaw George Barrow, who lost four of his men to Hex at the beginning of the tale.  Wheeler bravely assists Jonah in rescuing her, but Barrow manages to escape.  Hex dismisses his wife’s worries about his own safety and sends her home, while Wheeler accompanies him to Cheyenne to collect the bounties on the remainder of Barrow’s men.  It’s morning by the time they arrive in town, and as they leave the sheriff’s office with the money, Wheeler excitedly points out a new-fangled 3-horsepower Oldsmobile parked out front (Fleisher and artist Russ Heath had a discussion about what type of automobile to use, and Fleisher said they went with a period-accurate one despite it looking “a little dumpy” compared to, say, a Ford Model T from 1911).

Having no interest in “them noisy contraptions”, Jonah instead sits in on a poker game at a saloon while waiting for Wheeler to get back from a joyride with the Oldsmobile’s owner.  The bounty hunter soon finds that he’s having a hard time focusing on the cards, so he removes his glasses to clean them off, just as George Barrow, eager for revenge, bursts in with a shotgun.  Caught off-guard, Jonah barely has time to draw his pistol when Barrow’s on him, bashing him in the face with the butt of the shotgun, then letting Hex have it with both barrels.  Wheeler returns in time to see the local law take out Barrow, but it’s too late for Jonah, who passes away in Wheeler’s arms after gasping out his final words: “It’s cold...”

Not a hoax, not a dream, not an imaginary story: Jonah Hex was shot dead by George Barrow in the Winter of 1904.  And as the reader is still trying to come to terms with this cold hard fact, the blows keep on a-comin’.  While Wheeler and Tall Bird are preparing a funeral pyre for Jonah’s body, Lew Farnham and his assistant show up to steal it.  Wheeler is shot in the struggle, Tall Bird knocked unconscious, and the cabin set ablaze to cover up the crime.  Farnham then takes the body to a taxidermist to have Jonah stuffed, mounted, and dressed in that godawful costume Farnham made for him.  Despite the indignities, Jonah does manage a spot of revenge from beyond the grave: As Farnham’s assistant tries to wedge Jonah’s gun into his hand, it goes off in the guy’s face (Farnham blames it on the gun’s hair-trigger, but doubt will be thrown on this assessment many years later).

As time passes, Jonah’s corpse is displayed in one town after the next, making oodles of cash for Farnham, who eventually gets his at the hands of a gang of robbers.  Then comes the final insult to Jonah’s afterlife, as the robbers take his body and sell it to an antique dealer, thus setting off decades of Jonah Hex being passed from one owner to the next, until it’s completely forgotten that he’s actually a preserved corpse and not some ugly statue (it’s very likely that Fleisher was inspired by the strange case of Elmer McCurdy, a train robber whose embalmed body was put on display starting in 1911 and eventually misplaced for decades before its rediscovery in December 1976, barely two years before “the Last Bounty Hunter” was published).  The final panel shows his body on display at an amusement park, looking rather pathetic as he stands in the rain, alone and forgotten.

“It made me very unhappy, that story,” Fleisher said in his TCJ interview.  “It made me very sad and upset.  The people who think that story is some sort of a sadistic toying with the reader are really wrong because I got very choked up writing that story, because it was the death of a character that I really loved -- not only loved, but I feel is really me.”  It also may have never been published if Larry Hama -- editor for both this and Jonah’s regular title at the time -- hadn’t supported it.  Keep in mind that not only does this story kill off a major character (not unheard of at the time, but still unusual), but one that will still be appearing in a monthly title once this story is over with.  Fleisher dared to tell the readers how the saga of Hex’s life was going to end long before that saga was even close to wrapping up.  The fact that, technically, every Jonah Hex story is a flashback makes such a thing possible (remember, this is a Western character living well over a century in the past), but there were some in the comics industry who felt this particular revelation would dull the sense of danger in subsequent Hex stories, since the readers now knew how he was really going to die.  In response, Fleisher pointed out that people had no trouble reading Superboy stories when they knew good and well he was going to grow up to be Superman.

Fleisher also related how many people at both DC and Marvel (for whom he also did freelance work) were praising him for it.  “I saw when I was at Marvel a few weeks ago, a British fan magazine, whose readers had selected ‘The Last Bounty Hunter’ as the best story of the year, tied with Superman Vs. Muhammad Ali.”  Unfortunately, I’m uncertain as to which publication Fleisher is referring to here: I did look up the UK’s Eagle Awards for that year in case that’s what he was referencing, and did find nominations for both Jonah Hex (for Favourite Comic Magazine) and Superman Vs. Muhammad Ali (for Favourite Single Story), but they didn’t appear in the same category together…and for the record, both titles lost in their respective categories to the X-Men.  However, I can confirm that the story was “honored” with a three-page parody in The Buyer’s Guide for Comic Fandom #257 (October 20, 1978) by writer/artist Eddie Eddings.  Titled “The Death of Jonah Hoax”, a cartoony version of our favorite bounty hunter spins tall tales for the fella writing down his life story (to be clear, Jonah was never a merman, nor did he work as a lion tamer or take a cruise to Tahiti...though the supposed fib that he’d met aliens would turn out to be true much later in Hex history!).  Overall, it’s on caliber with what John Albano & Tony DeZuniga delivered in their Zany parody a few years prior.

The reception wasn’t all praise and playful jabs, however, as Fleisher went on to say that “there were people who felt angry” in regards to him daring to kill off Hex in such a manner.  “‘How dare he write about a death that's not valiant? Jonah Hex could die, but at least he should die saving a whole city,’” Fleisher said, summarizing the small number of negative letters received for the story, followed by him stating that he didn’t think a person like Jonah Hex would die in a heroic fashion, even if some folks felt that Jonah’s fate in “The Last Bounty Hunter” was pointless.  “You live by the sword, and you die by the sword,” he said plainly, later comparing what happened to Hex to the death of Wild Bill Hickok, who was murdered in 1876 when, in a rare lapse of judgement, he sat with his back to the door of the No. 10 Saloon in Deadwood, allowing Jack McCall to sneak up and shoot him unawares.  “And if you have a psychological bent, you have to say, ‘Why on this occasion did this person do something -- a person who’s at home in this violent milieu -- why did he do that?’  Well, part of him must have thought it was over, and he wanted to go.  And I thought that, to me, it was right that that would happen.”  Such thinking follows a rule Fleisher said he adhered to in his writing: The characters should always be the most important thing in a story, and that an action scene should be sacrificed from a overly-long script before a character moment is.

Before we move back to Jonah’s “present-day” adventures, let me take a moment to talk a little more about Russ Heath.  While his career ran the gamut from war to humor to horror, his first work in the comics industry was on Westerns for Timely Comics in the 1940s.  His deftness at depicting that genre came naturally to him, owing to his father having worked as an honest-to-goodness cowboy, who then passed down to his son a knowledge of practical skills like roping, riding, and shooting, as well as pointing out the inaccuracies in Western serials.  Heath’s keen-eyed attention to detail comes through loud and clear in “The Last Bounty Hunter”, as the art throughout the story was so beautifully rendered, and the expressions so genuine (especially Wheeler’s as he holds Jonah’s dead body), that it gave an already-great story the extra push it needed to be...well, spectacular.  Heath was such an integral part of this story’s success that, 23 years later in Starman #74, James Robinson called upon Heath to illustrate the death of another Western character, Brian Savage aka Scalphunter.

Unbeknownst to some, there was another Fleisher/Heath collaboration which never saw print: Samples for a Jonah Hex newspaper strip.  If you recall, Fleisher worked with Joe Orlando on a brief run of Little Orphan Annie strips early in his career, and Heath did art for various strips both before and after his Hex stint, so the duo was familiar with the demands of newspaper comic strips, which for decades had been seen as a more prestigious line of work than comic books.  According to the listing for the original art -- two daily strips and one Sunday strip -- on the Heritage Auctions website, the material dates back to “circa 1985”, so it may have been an attempt to duplicate the success of The World’s Greatest Superheroes, a strip starring Superman and other JLA members which ran in newspapers across the U.S. from 1978 to 1985.  Sadly, the Hex strip was never picked up by the syndicates, but like the failed attempt at a Jonah Hex movie in the mid-1970s, it speaks to how popular the bounty hunter was at the time that DC tried to launch such a project.

One month after we learned of Jonah’s eventual demise, JH#19 hit the stands, with Vicente Alcazar once again at the drawing table, and Jonah looking hale and hearty as he plays bodyguard for the Duke of Zarkania, who he later discovers ain’t really worth guarding.  Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed a few changes, however, the majority of which were on the cover.  Firstly, cover artist Luis Dominguez had begun adding a “7” to Hex’s coat collar, just as Alcazar had been since JH#13 (Dominguez also included it in the mini-poster he drew for the Jonah Hex Spectacular), and secondly, the price had dropped down to 40 cents, while the story inside was now only 23 pages.  After a mere three months, DC had gone from “Explosion” to “Implosion” thanks to something beyond everyone’s control.  For a two-week period in January-February 1978, the Eastern United States was slammed by a pair of massive blizzards, causing life to grind to a halt.  In New York -- the headquarters for both DC and Marvel -- planes couldn’t land, meaning finished comics pages sent in the mail by artists living in the Philippines couldn’t be delivered, and the trucks filled with comics that had managed to be printed under these conditions couldn’t head out to distributors due to an average two feet of snow burying the roads.

In May of that year, right before the DC Explosion rollout began, those dismal sales numbers from the previous winter fell into the hands of the execs at Warner Bros., and they were not happy.  “When Warners saw those numbers, they decided to take a look at the overall numbers for the last few years,” Mike Gold said in an interview that ran in Mediascene #31 (May-June 1978).  “They finally came to notice the trend we’ve always been aware of: Over a ten-year period, DC has been selling fewer individual books, and compensating by putting out more titles; and that sales vary with the seasons.”  Add in the massive amount of overhead carried by DC, plus a distribution system that boiled down to flooding the newsstands with product in order to retain a foothold in that limited space (comic shops were still few and far between at the time), and Warners decided to put the kibosh on Jeanette Kahn’s new publishing initiative just as it was hitting the shelves.  Multiple titles, both old and new, were cancelled, and those that survived saw their page-counts trimmed.  Reprint titles like Western Classics were an easy cut, while “The Deserter” almost had an 11th-hour reprieve as its own title when Showcase was cancelled, only to get the axe before the first issue could be released (in order to preserve copyrights, many of these “Imploded” stories and covers were printed in the extremely-rare and never-distributed Cancelled Comic Cavalcade, with “The Deserter” in issue #1 and the unused Western Classics covers in #2).  The blizzard affected Marvel’s bottom line as well, but they deleted titles in a much-quieter fashion, with their two remaining Western titles -- Kid Colt Outlaw and Rawhide Kid -- getting put out to pasture as 1979 began.

Though Jonah Hex and Weird Western Tales survived the Implosion, they didn’t do so unscathed.  The backups in WWT were scrapped beginning with issue #50, derailing Cinnamon’s comic-book career just as it was beginning, but instead of assigning those extra pages to Scalphunter, his tales remained 17 pages long for the remainder of the title’s run, thereby charging readers 40 cents for the exact same amount of story that had only cost 35 cents pre-Explosion.  Jonah fared a little better, as his page-count was still higher than it had been, but one has to wonder how many stories were already in the can prior to the Implosion which then had to be trimmed by 2 pages to fit the new mandate.  At the very least, JH#19 was likely trimmed, as the Heritage Auctions website has a listing for an alternate Dominguez cover -- fully dressed and with a 50-cent price tag -- showing a completely different image than what was eventually printed.  Instead of Hex causally leaning against the doorframe and looking at a panicked Duke, who is tied to a chair with a bundle of dynamite strapped to his chest, the alternate has Hex bursting through the door to find the Duke’s cousin, Lucien, surrounded by crates of dynamite, plus a stick of the explosive jammed into Lucien’s mouth for good measure.

In JH#20, both Hex and the reader get a good shock as Jonah’s father turns up!  It’s been nearly 25 years since Woodson Hex dumped his son with the Apache, and the old man’s just as scheming as ever, this time playing the inside man on the robbery of a stagecoach carrying $250,000 in double eagles.  Jonah’s not aware of this, of course, and nearly gets killed by Pa for his trouble.  After escaping the little death-trap Pa and his cohorts set up, Jonah tracks them down and finishes them off, save for his father, who collapses for reasons unknown.  He rushes the old man to a doctor and, after many minutes of pacing in the waiting room, the doc comes out and tells Jonah that Woodson is dying of a heart attack.  The elder and younger Hex talk for a while -- probably the most civil conversation they’ve ever had -- and Pa passes on before he can tell Jonah where the money’s hid.  The doctor takes care of the funeral arrangements, and as Jonah makes ready to ride off, he asks if, deep down, Jonah really loved his father.  “Ah hated thet old man, Doc!” Jonah replies.  “Hated his guts!  But when yuh get down to it...Ah guess a man ain’t got but one Pa!”

Too bad his Pa is the type who’ll pay off a doctor to lie to his son: Woodson Hex is actually alive and well, and now $250,000 richer.  JH#21 picks up just three days later, as Woodson is spending money like water, which catches the attention of some ne’er-do-wells.  They rough him up until Woodson tells them that he’s only got “a few pocketfuls” of coins...and his son, Jonah Hex, has the rest!  The fellas then track Jonah down and try to persuade him with a crowbar, but they soon realize they’re not getting anywhere, so they decide to step it up a notch and haul Jonah out to an old sawmill, where they’re also holding Woodson.  After tying both men to the waterwheel, they set it in motion, hoping a few good dunkings will loosen the Hexes tongues.  Jonah manages to free himself and Pa, and after taking out their captors, Jonah turns his gun on Pa before he can escape on horseback.  “Y-yuh shorely wouldn’t drill yore own dear Paw, w-would yuh, Jonah boy?” Woodson stammers, one foot already in the stirrups.

“Yes, blast it!  Ah would!” Jonah responds, then demands to know where the rest of the money really is.  Seems Pa hid it in an undertaker’s parlor before those guys captured him -- more specifically, it’s in an occupied coffin due to be buried.  They race back to town, figuring on digging up the coffin once the funeral’s done, but unfortunately, the dead man’s last wishes were for his coffin to be sealed inside the played-out silver mine he’d worked in for forty years, and with one push of the detonator’s plunger, the missing money is lost for good.  Jonah and Pa part ways after that, both unsatisfied with the outcome but seeing no point in taking it out on each other.  All in all, the elder Hex comes off as almost comical in this pair of stories, and aside from lobbing insults at him, Jonah seems to want no revenge for the abuse he suffered as a child.  Perhaps now being an adult who has lived through far worse, it doesn’t seem worth the trouble.

We’re introduced to another figure from Hex’s childhood in JH#22, as we meet Pack Rat Benson, who hasn’t seen Jonah since he was “knee high to a[n] armadillo!”  Seems Benson has found himself a rich vein of gold, which he’s eager to tell Hex all about before the two of them ride off to his homestead.  Unfortunately, the conversation is overheard by the brother of a fella Hex just escorted to a hanging, giving him and his two other siblings/gang members more than enough motivation to kill both Benson and Hex.  They ambush the duo out on the trail, and though they kill Benson immediately, they decide to break Hex’s leg and leave him to die in the desert.  The issue then alternates between the gang terrorizing Benson’s family as they’re forced to work the gold mine, and Jonah’s struggles to reach the homestead and rescue them.

The issue is notable because everyone in both the gang and the Benson family is Black, but aside from a few comments from one of the gang members, race is not the main focus of the story.  Seeing as we were approaching the end of the “socially relevant” 1970s, Fleisher could’ve inserted some proselytizing about how many, if not all, of these folks were enslaved just one decade prior (it’s not mentioned if Pack Rat Benson was a slave or freedman the last time he saw young Jonah), but no such thing occurs here.  Instead, he simply wrote all of them not too dissimilar from how he’d write any other character…which is a great improvement over the stereotypes he layered upon Blackjack Jorgis in WWT#22 five years earlier.

With JH#23, drawn by Dick Ayers & Romeo Tanghal, we get to witness a significant moment in Hex history, though we won’t realize it for nearly two years.  The story centers around a group of Chinese workers building a railroad spur who are suffering at the hands of their employers, to the point where they’re being gunned down in order to quell dissent in the ranks.  The elderly leader of this group tries to hire Hex to avenge the deaths, but he’s only able to pay 30 dollars, so Jonah turns him down.  Upon leaving the bounty hunter, the elderly man is confronted in the street by three of the rail bosses.  They goad him into a one-on-one gunfight, but he’s no match for the rail boss, who guns him down easily, an event Jonah witnesses.  The cold-bloodedness of the act must’ve stirred something in him, because he then confronts the rail bosses himself, killing the trio for free just minutes after turning down 30 bucks to do the same deed.

You’d think that would be the end of the story, but we’re only halfway through, as Jonah now has to face the grief and rage of the elderly man’s daughter, Mei Ling, who watched helplessly as her father was murdered.  Blaming Hex for the situation, she beats her fists against his chest, and Jonah gives her a slap to calm her down, causing her to faint, so Jonah takes her to the hotel he’s staying at (to let her rest, mind you, not for shenanigans).  When the clerk objects to having Asians on his property, Hex threatens to throw the him off the roof, which persuades him to give Mei Ling have a room down the hall from the bounty hunter’s.  After returning to his own room, his frustration over the chain of events explodes out of him as he shatters a mirror with his fist.

What follows is a prime example of Fleisher’s “character moments trump action” rule, as the next couple of pages feature Jonah doing nothing more than talking with Mei Ling.  He not only expresses remorse over the death of her father, but Mei Ling manages to get him to open up a little about both his personal beliefs (of which he claims to have none) and the reason why he leads the violent life he does (he says “it just sorta come up on me!”).  Getting Jonah to talk about anything having to do with himself is like pulling teeth, so there must be something quite remarkable about Mei Ling for him to do so.  All this time they spend “makin’ cow eyes” at each other doesn’t go unnoticed, and the remaining rail bosses soon kidnap Mei Ling in order to get revenge on Hex.  Our hero makes short work of them, and then we get a scene that’ll bring a tear to your eye, as Jonah does his best to sputter out that he loves Mei Ling, but she believes what he truly loves is the “gentleness” that he long ago buried deep within himself and now sees reflected in Mei Ling, and that he can never truly love anyone until he can find the strength to love himself.  So she instead sends him away weeping, an act that probably adds yet another layer of scars to Jonah’s lonely heart.

After such an emotional issue, the one in JH#24 -- with both cover and interior illustrations by Luis Dominguez -- is liable to give some folks whiplash due to somewhat-comical premise.  Y’see, ol’ Jonah disguises himself as a preacher to get the drop on some owlhoots, but then he gets buried in a rockslide, which leads to a classic amnesia plot, as he comes under the mistaken belief that he really is a preacher!  His brain does unscramble by the end, of course, but allow me to take a moment and insert a bit of real-world medical knowledge into this.  There are several different forms and causes of amnesia, and though none truly resemble what we see in this here comic (i.e. you get bonked on the head and you totally forget who you are), I can point to a possible form that Jonah is suffering from here, namely dissociative amnesia.  This is not normally caused by physical injury, but instead by mental trauma and/or stress.  Therefore, it’s possible that Hex’s willingness to believe himself to be a genteel man of faith is an extreme reaction to Mei Ling’s rejection of him.  In other words, his subconscious is giving him an excuse to embrace that “gentleness” inside him that Mei Ling pointed out.  Too bad it all got undone the moment those same owlhoots he’d been chasing force “Reverend Julian” to strap on a gunbelt and face off against the three of ‘em.

Things turn serious again in Jonah Hex #25 (June 1979), with Ayers & Tanghal back to illustrate Jonah’s reunion with Nate Ashin, an ex-Confederate who’d lost an arm at Vicksburg while saving the life of a young Lieutenant Hex (see Appendix A for more details).  Seems Nate has called on Jonah to help out against the Black Hat Gang, who’ve been terrorizing the area, up to and including burning down Nate’s newspaper business in retaliation for all the negative press he’s been tossing their way.  What follows is a typical Hex story filled with gunplay, harrowing escapes, innocents dying, and the bad guy meeting a gruesome end, but it’s the final page that I want to highlight.  As her husband lays dead in their yard, Nate’s wife, Sally, confronts Jonah over his deeds.  “You’re the cause of all this!  Well, tell me, are you satisfied with what you’ve done?”  Tears streaming down her face, she jabs a finger at him and says, “The bad guys are all dead now and you can collect your reward money and get on your horse and ride off into the sunset!  But what about me?  What about my children who’ve lost their father?  What about us -- widow maker!!”

And that’s the real obstacle which Jonah Hex can never overcome: Any love he could possibly have for himself like Mei Ling wants him to cannot survive the fact that, wherever he goes, lives are destroyed, and he’s usually the one responsible.

Though Jonah’s tales (for the most part) remained firmly ensconced in the 1870s, time would keep marching on for the rest of the world.  The decade the birthed Jonah Hex was rapidly coming to an end, as was the trend that inspired him.  By this time next year, one Western title will begin to breathe its last, and another will have to make room for some new friends.

<< Part 3 | Index | Part 5 >>
Appendix A  |  Appendix B