1984-1985: Last
Days of an American Gunfighter
Things
were hopping in the DC offices back in 1984: the company was gearing up for its
50th anniversary celebration next year, with lots of projects being created
specifically for that event. A fellow by
the name of Bob Greenberger had just rejoined DC around that time to help with
a few of them, and though his name isn’t one normally associated with Hex
history, you’ll find out later that he had a front-row seat in regards to a big
change in the bounty hunter’s life.
Before
we get there, however, we have to go through a slew of small changes, starting
right on the opening page of
Jonah Hex #84 (May 1984): Jonah’s over at the local gunsmith shop replacing his prized
Dragoons, which he’d tossed into a lake during the previous issue...though he’s
reluctant to admit it. “Ah just kinda
had one nip too many, thet’s all!” he tells the gunsmith. “An’ first thing Ah knowed, they’d kinda
dropped in!” Jonah is probably still
coming to grips with the stupidity of his actions, seeing as how he’s owned
those Dragoons since JH#18, but he eventually settles on replacing them with a
Colt Peacemaker and Smith & Wesson Schofield .45 (but not until he’s made
a few modifications).
Some
time afterward, Jonah receives a telegram from the wealthy Mr. Sterling,
offering him a job down in New Orleans.
Jonah arrives two weeks later, just as Mardi Gras is about to begin, and
his told by Mr. Sterling that he fears his daughter, Adrian, may be kidnapped
during the festivities, and wishes Jonah to act as bodyguard for Adrian and her
fiancé, Clifford Mapely, who believes the bounty hunter’s presence to be
unnecessary. Despite Clifford’s
objections, Jonah escorts the couple to a party, where the other guests proceed
to ridicule Jonah to his face. As you
can imagine, Jonah doesn’t take this very well:
Clifford
is aghast at Jonah’s actions, but Adrian stands up for him, saying as they
leave the party, “And what exactly should
he have done, Clifford? Just stood there
and taken that awful abuse--” Her words are cut short as three men in
skeleton costumes jump off a roof and attack them. One of the attackers shoots Jonah while the
other two grab Adrian -- Clifford flees during the commotion, leaving his
fiancée and their unconscious bodyguard to fend for themselves. When the attackers decide to finish Jonah
off, Adrian bluffs them into thinking that he’s her fiancé, and Clifford was
the bodyguard. Figuring on a bigger
payday, they kidnap both of them and stash the couple in a wine cellar
somewhere within the city. When Jonah
wakes up later, Adrian confesses to him why she lied: She apparently fell in
love with Jonah the moment she laid eyes on him! Though surprised by this turn of events,
Jonah frees himself and Adrian from their bonds, and together they take out the
kidnappers. After turning them over to
the authorities, Jonah escorts Adrian home, where she tells the shamefaced
Clifford that she never wants to see him again, then walks off arm-in-arm with
Jonah! Of all the relationships our hero
has been involved in, this one seems the most mismatched -- he doesn’t have
much in common with this gal and her high-society world -- but that may be
what’s causing Jonah to stick around, the fact that this one is so different
from what’s he’s previously gone through.
Speaking
of previous relationships, we get a glimpse of them in this issue. First is a brief scene between Mei Ling and
Jeremiah Hart, where she chews him out for giving her son Jason a gun carved
out of wood (perhaps a nod to the “Wooden Sixgun” tale in JH#27?). Later, we look in on Emmylou Hartley, who’s
still being held captive by bandits. The
leader, Brett, has kept her tied up and locked in a closet for the past few weeks
in an effort to soften her up. Whenever
she begs to be let out, Brett tells her that it’s not
his fault she’s tied up, but
her
own, and that, if she’d just promise to not try to escape every chance she
gets, he’d gladly untie her (a textbook example of brainwashing). It’s not until
JH#85 that Emmy’s spirit
becomes broken enough for her to give in when they ask her to help with a bank
robbery (more on that later).
Meanwhile,
Jonah’s spent the past two weeks playing socialite with Adrian, who’s set the
two of them up in a house left to her by her grandmother. She’s managed to gussy him up “like a blasted
chimpanzee” (as Jonah puts it), and though he still seems fond of the attention
she lavishes on him, he seems to have lost his taste for the non-stop
partying. As they get ready for yet
another soiree, Clifford barges into the house and tries to get revenge on
Jonah for taking Adrian away from him,
an action that Jonah quickly makes him regret. A spurned suitor is the least
of Jonah’s problems, though, for unbeknownst to him, Quentin Turnbull has set
yet another assassin on the bounty hunter’s trail: a masked man in Confederate
togs called the Gray Ghost (no relation to either
Colonel John S. Mosby, who bore the same moniker, nor the character from Batman: The Animated Series). It’s said he was a Confederate officer whose
family was slain by Union troops, and when the War ended, he refused to
surrender, choosing instead to hunt down those he believed to be traitors to
the Cause...and his newest target for vengeance is Jonah Hex!
That night, as Jonah and Arian ride home from the party, they come across a nicely-dressed man
alongside the road, who tells them that his horse broke its leg, leaving him
stranded in the middle of the night.
They offer him a ride in their buggy, and “Mister Gray”, as he’s calling
himself, is grateful to take them up on it.
Whatever plan the Gray Ghost has in mind is soon scuttled when a trio of
men nestled on a ridge further up the road suddenly begin firing upon the
buggy, clipping “Mister Gray” in the head.
Hex takes up a rifle and opens fire, killing one of them, but the other
two get away -- we later learn that these men were hired by the Clifford to
eliminate Jonah so he can get Adrian back.
Unaware that there’s still a snake in their midst, Jonah and Adrian take
the injured “Mister Gray” back to their home, and soon they all turn in for the
night. Before Adrian joins Jonah in bed,
however, she decides to check in on their guest, only to find the Gray Ghost
brandishing a gun in her face. He shoots
the woman, then goes after Jonah, who’s already out of bed and armed -- they
briefly exchange gunfire in the stairwell before the Gray Ghost decides that it
would be best to retreat at the moment.
Unfortunately for him, his exit is spotted by Clifford’s hired men, who
mistake the man in Confederate gray for Hex and fill him full of lead!
The
issue ends with Mr. Sterling and Jonah speaking with a doctor, who tells them
that Adrian will recover from her wounds in a month or two, while reassuring
them that the Gray Ghost is most certainly dead...though the reader soon finds
out the Gray Ghost handsomely paid the doctor to lie. This won’t be the last we see of him, but it
will be two months before we see Jonah Hex in any capacity, as readers of the
time learned when they reached that issue’s letter column. “Writing these lines is a bittersweet
experience for me,” Michael Fleisher said in
a note that took up three-quarters of the page, “for reasons that will soon become apparent.” He went on to inform readers that JH#85
marked his 100th Hex tale as writer (17 issues of
Weird Western Tales, 81 of 85 issues of
Jonah Hex, and the stories included in the
Jonah Hex Spectacular and
Super-Star
Holiday Special) and his third as editor.
He spoke of his deep love for the character, and of the fans who’d stuck
by Hex through thick and thin. “In a
comic book market increasingly dominated by costumed flying men, we have,
together, managed to keep alive the spellbinding legend of one flawed,
ordinary, extraordinary man,” he wrote.
“Whatever the future brings us, we’ve accomplished something together we
can always be proud of.”
Then
came the bitter part of his note: After seven years of monthly adventures,
Jonah Hex was becoming a bi-monthly
title again. Fleisher told readers this
was due to the burgeoning direct market (AKA comic book stores), which had a
different sales demographic than, say, a spinner rack at the local drug
store. “Jonah has always been very
strong on the newsstands, but in the comic shops, well, to be frank about it,
he’s never been entirely comfortable squeezed in among all those flying men,”
he wrote. In DC’s eyes, a book that
couldn’t perform well in both markets at once wasn’t worthy of monthly
publication. In an effort to turn the
tide, Fleisher asked readers to not only buy Jonah Hex comics at their local
shop, but also to introduce the character to friends in order to increase
readership. And two months later, Dick
Giordano’s “Meanwhile” column, which was printed in all DC titles (including
JH#86), featured a sidebar called
"Spotlight on...Jonah Hex", praising the title’s uniqueness in the mainstream
comics market (it’s uncertain whether Giordano or Fleisher was the author of
this sidebar).
As for
the story presented in
JH#86, life goes on as normal (or at least as normal
as Jonah’s life gets). He’s still in New
Orleans, and still getting into brawls with anyone who pokes fun at his
relationship with Adrian. Even Adrian’s
father is objecting to the affair: he must’ve had Jonah’s past investigated,
for he tells Adrian that “the man’s married to a
Chinese woman out West!!”
Adrian knows about this, but states that Jonah is no longer married to
Mei Ling, then goes on to tell her father that neither she nor Jonah is
entirely sure as to their feelings for each other:
Meanwhile,
Jonah is out riding, probably trying to sort out in his mind the same issues
Adrian is talking over with her father, when a familiar figure appears at the
end of the plank bridge he’s crossing.
Holy Hannah in the mornin’! He’s alive! Jonah thinks just as the Gray
Ghost opens fire. Earlier in the issue,
we saw the Ghost stumble home, where his son, Jeremy Ashford, was waiting for
him -- not only does the Gray Ghost now have a surname, but it looks like at
least one member of his family survived the supposed massacre. Still in bad shape from the gunshot wounds he
suffered last issue, he spends a week recuperating before riding out again to
finish the job he started. He nearly
succeeds this time around, peppering the bridge and Jonah with so many bullets
that both fall into the water below.
Jonah manages to escape, but when he gets back to the house he’s sharing
with Adrian, he finds that his foe beat him there, and managed to snag Adrian
when she got home earlier. Luckily, the
Gray Ghost was kind enough to leave a note on the mirror as to where they’ve
gone (which inadvertently leads to Tony DeZuniga
drawing the scar on the wrong side of Jonah’s face). When Jonah
arrives at the slaughterhouse, the Ghost immediately pounces, leading to a
three-page brawl and includes
both men falling from a loft, as well as trading
bullets at close range. In the end,
Jonah rescues Adrian, but the Gray Ghost vanishes once more, much to Jonah’s
consternation. “Whar in the Sam Hill is
he?!?” he shouts when he goes to look for the body, only to find a couple of
bloodstains on the floor.
Perhaps
his foe’s seeming inability to die is one of the motivations behind Jonah
suddenly deciding to leave New Orleans in
JH#87, though he has another that
he lays out for Adrian, namely how he’s beginning to feel “like some rich
girl’s lap dog, goin’ out tuh fancy dress-up parties ever’ night.” Jonah knows that a life of pampered luxury is
not for him, just as he knows that Adrian would never be comfortable with him
out on the trail, far away from “all them fancy dress shops an’ yore daddy’s heaps
of money!” It’s a low blow, but Jonah
may have done that on purpose: considering that the Gray Ghost has already
attacked Adrian twice to get to him (and the first attack injured her so badly
she now has to walk with a cane), he might be trying to break her heart so that
she’ll stay away from him, lest a third attack leave her dead. If that was his intention, he did a damn
lousy job of it, as we’ll discover later.
Around
the same time, far from New Orleans, Emmy is having man troubles of a different
sort. She did indeed assist Brett and
the other two gals, Camille and Sandy, with the bank robbery last issue, and
though all the women were disguised as men, some people got a glimpse of Emmy’s
face when her bandana fell down during a struggle with a bank customer, which
led to Brett shooting him. Now Brett
thinks Emmy owes her for saving her hide, and he’s not above forcing himself
upon her to get what he wants. He keeps
telling her how she’s a member of their “little family” now, and going by the
way Brett cozies up to Camille and Sandy later on, this family is rather close,
if you catch my drift.
Back on
Jonah’s end of things, the bounty hunter has managed to hitch a ride on a
freight train headed west. Seeing as it
has no passenger accommodations, he’s riding up front with the engineer and
brakeman, so Jonah gets a perfect view of the dynamite a gang of outlaws laid
on the tracks! Though he survives the
explosion that wrecks the train, he still has to hightail it into a nearby
swamp in the hope of losing the outlaws.
What follows is typical “Hex versus a passel of skunks” action, with
Jonah using the swamp to his advantage to take them out one by one, even going
so far as to fill a covered pit with punji sticks:
After
finishing off the last of them, Jonah hauls their carcasses to the nearest
town, where the sheriff shows him the newest wanted poster to come in...and it
just so happens to bear Emmylou’s face!
As if this wasn’t trouble enough, the readers find out elsewhere in the
issue that the Gray Ghost (who was indeed fatally wounded) has managed to hang
on long enough to pass his legacy onto his son.
The young man swears an oath to carry on his father’s cause, up to and
including the death of Jonah Hex. The subplots
get even more complicated from here, to the point where they can’t fit the Gray
Ghost stuff into the next issue.
Instead,
JH#88, titled “The Saloon Girl and the Outlaw Queen”, focuses
on Emmy and Adrian, who’s decided to travel west in the hope of finding Hex
once again. Before we reach her, though,
we get a scene with a group of train robbers that’ve decided to use the wanted
poster of Emmy to their advantage: the leader buys a blonde, pigtailed wig and
forces of the younger gang members to wear it, the notion being that any job
they pull will be blamed on Emmy’s gang instead. As (mis)fortune would have it, the first
train they decide to rob under this scheme is the one Adrian is traveling
on. During the trip, Adrian has struck
up a conversation with a former tavern gal named Temple Starr. Unlike Adrian, Temple is running
away from a man, not after one, and she
shows Adrian the man’s picture in an engraved locket he gave her. In a contrived sequence of events, Adrian
asks to try on the locket just as the robbers burst into the passenger car,
killing Temple and striking Adrian in the head with the butt of a gun. This results in Adrian losing her memory and
(thanks to the engraved locket she was still wearing) later being led to
believe that she’s actually Temple Starr!
Though Jonah later rounds up the robbers, he never learns of Adrian’s
mishap, and aside from a couple of brief scenes in the next issue of an
amnesiac Adrian working in a saloon, we'll neither see nor hear of the poor gal again. For all we know, she spent the rest
of her days waiting tables, unaware that she’d left friends, family, and riches
behind in New Orleans.
After
the false lead caused by the train robbers, Jonah finally manages to catch
sight of Emmy with Brett and his gang. He
follows them into the town of Red Dog, where they try to rob the assayer’s
office. Not believing that Emmy could be
a willing participant in all this, Jonah busts open the back door with the
intent of rescuing her, and gets a nasty surprise:
Brett,
Emmy, and the others get away clean, and the readers spent two
months wondering whether or not Jonah survived. It
turned out that, while Jonah didn’t lose his life, he did lose Tony DeZuniga,
who left the title after this issue.
There’s a strange symmetry to this, for when DeZuniga departed last time
(after Weird Western Tales #23), the last
scene he’d rendered was of Jonah “dying”.
As to why he left this time around, I was able to pose that question to
him via a mutual friend back in 2006, and his reply was simple: his contract
with DC had expired, and the company decided not to renew it. Though we can’t say for certain why DC made
that decision, the most likely reason is that, by this point in time, the
company had already determined that Jonah
Hex was to be cancelled. As Fleisher
had told readers months earlier, overall sales weren’t what they used to be, and
with Crisis on Infinite Earths --
DC’s huge 50th anniversary event -- just around the corner, the time had come
for sweeping changes across all titles.
To paraphrase the old tagline, worlds would live and worlds would die,
and Jonah Hex’s world had fallen squarely on the “die” list.
This
didn’t mean Fleisher was going to let Jonah go down without a fight, not after
over a decade of writing a character that he identified with so strongly. If the direct market didn’t favor Westerns,
then he’d think of a different genre to slip the bounty hunter into. This is where Bob Greenberger comes into the
picture: as an editor for both CoIE and The
History of the DC Universe project, as well as researcher for the 26-volume Who’s Who series, Greenberger was privy
to much of the behind-the-scenes action during the mid-1980s. I spoke with him at length on the subject in
2012, and he said this portion of our tale actually begins a few years before
Jonah’s impending cancellation. “In
1982, when Mad Max: Road Warrior was
being brought to the United States after playing to huge box office in
Australia a year earlier, several DC execs, including special projects guru Joe
Orlando and his editor Andy Helfer, attended a screening. Andy was arguably in
favor of licensing it for comics and Orlando, I was told, didn’t think DC
should spend the money, just rip it off.”
Swiping a good idea from another medium and using it in a comic book wasn’t
exactly a new notion: if you’ll recall, Jonah himself first came about as a
riff on the Clint Eastwood spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s-70s. Greenberger believes that Helfer, who was acting
as “keeper” for Michael Fleisher in regards to his various projects, brought up
the idea of dropping Jonah Hex into a Mad
Max kind of setting (Fleisher credits his own viewing of the movie as
inspiration, and it’s possible that Orlando, being a longtime friend of
Fleisher’s, may have contributed to the idea as well). Another thing to consider was the
four-books-a-month contract that Fleisher was locked into at the time -- with Jonah Hex cancelled, another project had
to be created to fill that hole -- so he was given the go-ahead to move Jonah
to a whole new playing field, “with the out being that we knew he’d come back
[to the Old West] so he could be stuffed,” Greenberger said.
With
the destination set, all they needed to do now was build the road that would
get Jonah there. First priority was
getting a new artist, and Mark Texeira was chosen for the task. A relative newcomer to the comics industry,
he’d worked mainly in the commercial art field before landing a few jobs on
licensed comic titles and the occasional fill-in -- illustrating Hex’s upcoming
adventures would be his first long-term gig, starting with
JH#89. This issue is less action-packed than usual,
and for good reason: Jonah’s got “a king-sized hole” in his chest thanks to
Emmy, and the doctor who patched him up has left him in the care of a Mrs. Crowley,
who runs the local boardinghouse. She’s
been ordered to make sure that Jonah actually rests up for the foreseeable
future, indulging in neither strenuous activity, spicy foods, nor any smoking
or drinking. In short, Jonah’s in Hell,
and his need to rebel against Mrs. Crowley’s strict adherence to the rules
causes him to sneak out one night and go to the nearest saloon, with comedic
results:
The
following afternoon -- with his porch privileges intact -- Jonah is sitting
outside with Mrs. Crawford when Jeremy, the Gray Ghost’s son, rides up in
plainclothes. He’s come to avenge his
father’s death, but he’s unaware of what Hex looks like, only that he’s staying
at the boardinghouse. Suddenly, Jonah
catches glimpse of a rifle barrel from across the street: the loudmouth from
the saloon last night has come gunning for him, and Jeremy’s about to get caught
in the crossfire! Jonah jumps off the
porch, knocks Jeremy flat, then guns down the would-be assassin. Jeremy’s gratitude quickly turns to dismay
when he learns the man who saved his life is Jonah Hex, but that doesn’t stop
him from putting on the Gray Ghost uniform and sneaking into Jonah’s room that
night. The bounty hunter is unaware of
the intrusion, as he’s wrapped up in
a nightmare where his ex-lovers come back to kill him. While he tosses and turns,
Jeremy stands over him, ready to put a bullet in Jonah’s brain, but he soon
decides this is too cowardly an act, and instead waits until morning to face
Hex like a man, unmasked.
Finding
him out on a porch swing, Jeremy sits down across from Jonah and tells him who
he is. Jonah says he already knows, as
he spied the uniform inside Jeremy’s bag when he saved him from getting
shot. Jeremy then draws his gun and
holds it inches from Jonah’s face, but the bounty hunter doesn’t flinch, he
simply says, “Yuh want muh two cents, boy?
Don’t do it!” What follows is
probably the most intense scene in a Jonah Hex tale ever:
Jonah’s
calm demeanor causes Jeremy to lose his nerve, and the young man runs off. Once he’s out of sight, Jonah breathes a sigh
of relief, then reveals that he’d been holding a cocked pistol beneath the
blanket on his lap the entire time.
Moments later, Jeremy, who can’t live with the shame of letting down his
father, puts his own pistol to his head
and kills himself, bringing an abrupt end to the Gray Ghost saga (at least for
the next few decades).
Around
this point in history, we hit a somewhat muddled patch. We know that work on Jonah’s new series was
proceeding apace behind the scenes (as evidenced by the
tiny ad slipped into that issue’s letter column), while at the same time, the events of
Crisis on Infinite Earths were effecting
nearly every DC title to varying degrees, from the simple presence of red skies
up to being directly tied into the larger story. According to Mark Texeira, he’d drawn a story
back in 1985 that not only would’ve linked CoIE with Jonah’s title, it would’ve
been the cause of him getting stranded in the future! He’s related the tale to a few people over
the years (including myself and journalist Michael Browning), giving a summary
of what he can remember drawing: Jonah is riding through a snowstorm,
apparently lost. There’s a scene where,
desperate for food, he digs beneath the bark of a tree and eats bugs. The story ends when a bright white light
appears before Jonah (similar walls of light are prevalent throughout CoIE) and
he rides into it -- the first issue of the new series would have begun with
Jonah riding out of that white light and arriving in the future. Texeira claims the pages were completed and
ready to print, but no story matching his description was ever printed, nor
have the pages themselves ever turned up on the collector’s market. When I brought up the tale of the missing
pages to Greenberger, he said that he couldn’t verify their existence, but did
offer an explanation as to why the story might have been abandoned: There was a
mandate from DC at the time that all titles would feature the Monitor (one of
CoIE’s big movers-and-shakers) in some capacity, so it’s possible that Fleisher
had included the character in the story, but the idea was rejected after the
art for the story had been completed. As
Greenberger put it, even though DC’s decision to send Hex into the future
coincided with CoIE, the company “
never
intended to use the Crisis as the vehicle for his relocation.”
The fact that JH #90 is included on official lists as a tie-in book
(even though it doesn’t feature the Monitor nor any other references to CoIE)
lends credence to the “rejected story” theory, as they may have forgotten to
remove it from the list after it was scrapped.
Despite
all that hullaballoo, Jonah did actually participate in the Crisis, just not
within his own title.
Crisis on Infinite Earths #3 (June 1985)
features a scene where Hex, Bat Lash, Scalphunter, Nighthawk, and Johnny
Thunder meet up with some modern-day superfolk and fight off the Anti-Monitor’s
shadow-demons. The most notable thing
about the scene is the date: 1879, four years after the “current” time in Jonah’s
own title, as well as a year after the events of
Justice League of America #198-199,
which Jonah makes reference to when he sees John Stewart is wearing a Green Lantern uniform. Sadly, this was Jonah’s only real
part in the Crisis, though he had cameos in issues #4-5, and was on the cover
for #7. There were also CoIE flashbacks featuring
Hex in
Green Lantern #195-196 (Dec.
1985-Jan. 1986) and
Swamp Thing #46
(March 1986), but he added nothing to those particular stories.
Back in
Jonah’s title, the end was slowly creeping up on him. The final three issues were drawn by Gray
Morrow, who’s probably better known for his work on another DC cowboy -- Greg
Saunders, the original Vigilante -- but he’d also done a cover or two in the
past for the bounty hunter. It’s
uncertain why Texeira didn’t close out the series, though we can speculate that
his schedule was possibly full due to work on the new Hex title (and again, if
a completed story had been rejected, drawing a whole a new one would put him
behind), so Morrow was brought in to pinch-hit, with Texeira contributing to
two of the covers. There’s a feeling in
these tales of Fleisher just biding his time until the end, shoehorning scenes
that are relevant to the current storyline into scripts he perhaps had laying
around. It’s not to say these three
issues are bad, they just mostly come off as “business as usual”.
JH#90 revolves around a young woman named
Silver Ames, who’s decided to become the fastest gun in the West, and she’s got
it in her head that the best way to do it is to kill everyone who’s faster than
her. When we meet her, she's just
tracked down Jeremiah Hart, the second-fastest gun in the country according to
folks. I’m glad to tell you that the
colorist finally got it right and made Jeremiah dark-haired again with
tan-colored buckskins, but we don’t get to enjoy it for long because Silver
shoots Jeremiah in the back when he refuses to draw on her. We later see Mei Ling sobbing over Jeremiah’s
dead body, and though it’s a terrible note to leave the poor gal on,
this is the last image we’ll have of Mei Ling for the next 26 years.
Meanwhile,
Jonah’s recovered well enough that he can go searching for Emmy again. It’s a darn shame he doesn’t know Emmy just
escaped from Brett’s clutches, as he could’ve saved himself a lot of grief out
on the trail: first Jonah gets caught in a rockslide (which kills his horse),
then he gets mauled by a mountain lion (which tears his Confederate coat to
shreds). By some miracle, he makes it to
a farmhouse, where the owner lends him a horse.
This is where Jonah’s luck finally turns good again, as he just misses
being hit by a “shootin’ star”:
Not
giving the strange incident a second thought, Jonah heads back to town to get
patched up by the doc (as well as borrow an ugly purple shirt, which would look
great with the “pimp hat” he got from that other doctor over a decade
ago). A telegram is waiting for him
(from Mei Ling, perhaps?) telling him about Hart’s murder, and just as he reads
it, Silver Ames herself shows up, demanding a shootout. Knowing what she’s capable of,
Hex shoots her down before she can finish her three-count. His attitude about it may seem blasé, but who
knows how many times he’s gone through this same scenario...and unlike Jeremy
Ashford, who was reluctant to kill when the time came, it didn’t appear that
any amount of talking would make Silver back down.
JH#91 introduces yet another love interest for Jonah, and they’re not subtle about it
either, showing Jonah in a lip-lock right on the cover,
which imitates a Neal Adams Superman piece from 1971 (note
that Jonah's boots are depicted here with flat heels and no spurs). Jonah runs into Carolee while he’s out
looking for Emmy (there must be a really fast tailor back in Red Dog, because
he’s wearing his Confederate coat again), and she tells him a sob story about
wanting to join the rodeo that just came into town. Well, it just so happens Jonah knows one of
the guys working that rodeo, and he says he’ll see what he can do about getting
her a job. Carolee is so overjoyed by
the news that she pulls him down for a roll in the hay right then and
there...which wouldn’t be so bad if she wasn’t seventeen and he wasn’t pushing
forty! Jonah is quite aware of how wrong
this relationship is, but he doesn’t seem too eager to fight it. However, it does turn out to be a good thing
that Jonah’s hanging around the rodeo, as there’s a few former employees
that’re fixing to destroy it. While
tracking them down, they ambush him, and though Jonah manages to kill one
before the rest run off,
the dead body vanishes in a beam of light while
Jonah’s back is turned -- since he didn’t witness the event, Jonah doesn’t make
the connection between this disappearance and the incident at the farmhouse,
but the reader may have by now.
Back at
the rodeo, Jonah decides the best way to smoke these skunks out is to make them
think he’s moved on, so he raids the costume tent and disguises himself as a
rodeo clown. This has to be one of the
most embarrassing points in Jonah’s career, especially when he’s
forced to enter the ring and distract a bull. As
if that wasn’t humiliating enough, he also spies Carolee cozying up to the
owner of the rodeo. The only good thing
to come out of Jonah’s greasepaint adventure is that he catches the bad guys
before they can do any more damage. The
issue ends with Jonah punching a mirror in a fit of rage, and who can blame
him? Think of what’s happened to Jonah
in the past year: He spent months in a hellish prison, he lost his wife to another man, he went on a major bender and had to
go to a temperance farm to dry out, he burned
through
three girlfriends (the last
one being more than half his age), and then there’s all the usual crap he has
to suffer through on a daily basis like getting shot and stabbed and beat up
and what-have-you. It’s been a long time
since Jonah’s had so much go wrong in his life all at once, and going by
the ad in JH#91’s letter column, the new life waiting for him will be just as
rough.
When we
reach
Jonah Hex #92 (dated August
1985), the cover says it all: “
GUT-WRENCHING
FINAL ISSUE! Will it also be Jonah’s
last gunfight?” To tell the truth,
the overall issue is far from gut-wrenching.
The story flips between scenes of Jonah protecting a young orphan girl
who witnessed a murder, and scenes of Emmy on the run from Brett (just as she’s
been doing since JH#90). The parts with
Emmy have the pace of a slasher film, as Emmy keeps thinking she’s reached a
safe place, only to have Brett turn up and set her running again. Meanwhile, Jonah seems to make a quick bond
with the girl, Cindy, who’s quite eager to help out the bounty hunter, despite
his best efforts to keep her safe.
There’s a point where Jonah actually considers taking Cindy under his
wing, at the very least so he could “have somebody tuh talk to all thet time Ah
spend on the trail,” and from the way things look
after Jonah picks up his $5,000 bounty, it really does seem as though that’s where the story is
heading, so it’s a shame when her definitely-not-dead parents suddenly show up
to collect her. Turns out Cindy is a
habitual runaway, and perhaps Jonah sensed that, deep down, because he leaves
the little girl with her folks with only a “So long, now!” tossed over his
shoulder. Still counting his bounty
money, Jonah heads for the Red Dog Saloon, and that’s where Emmy finally finds
him...as does the mysterious beam of light that’s missed him twice before:
And
just like that, in the summer of 1985, the very last Western on the comics market
came to an end. The heyday of four-color
cowboys had long since passed, and it would be decades before publishers would
offer up multiple Western-themed titles again (though only a handful compared
to the old days). Along with the loss of
an entire genre, readers would also be deprived of any knowledge as to what
happened to Emmy after Jonah vanished: like Adrian Sterling, there has never
been another mention of Emmylou Hartley in all the years since her last
appearance.
As for
Jonah himself, he would be given one last chance at survival, far from the
genre that birthed him. In a comics shop
full of superheroes, Jonah needed a miracle in order to stand out amongst
them.
What he got was HEX.
