Today my husband and I went to The Motor City Comic-Con, or as we call it, "The Geek Jamboree". We've been going for about a decade now, and as always, we picked up lots of neat stuff and met some cool people. It was while doing the latter that I also received a slight buzzkill.
Let me rewind a bit. Eight years back, not long after DC announced they were giving Jonah Hex a new series, I stumbled across some sketches by Tony Moore, the original artist for The Walking Dead. Suffice it to say, I got a mite excited: I love his work, and the notion of him doing Hex just lit up my brain like wildfire. I went so far as to hunt down his email address and ask him directly if he was indeed working on the upcoming book (this was long before DC revealed Luke Ross would be doing the initial art chores). Mr. Moore was kind enough to send me a reply saying that, sadly, we wasn't the lucky artist, but he loved the character and wished he could do something with him in the future.
Cut to this afternoon, and my husband and I walking up to Tony Moore's table to get our Walking Dead Season 1 DVD signed (we already had Michael Rooker sign it last month at Motor City Nightmares, and we were hoping to add Norman Reedus as well today, but his line was -- no joke -- at least a half-mile long, all twisty-turny like you see at Disneyland). After he signed it, I mentioned the email, and said that I'd still love to see him do at least a cover. That's when the buzzkill happened: Tony Moore was slated to do a Jonah Hex story before the "New 52" reboot occurred. Jimmy Palmiotti & Justin Gray had written a story just for him, an "evergreen" that wasn't time-sensitive -- this was common practice on the series, as it allowed many artists who may not have time to do multiple issues to do the story at their own pace -- and just as Moore cleared his schedule so he could get to work on it, DC changed Jonah Hex to All-Star Western, thereby tossing the "done-in-one" format out the window and committing the title to a single artist.
I was so surprised by this that I didn't think to ask what the story was about, but that's kinda beside the point. How many other Jonah Hex stories will we never see because DC decided to reboot everything? How many scripts were written by J&J and passed out to various artists that never made it to pencil stage...and were there any that actually got finished, but now sit in DC's files unused because they don't fit the new format? I'm reminded of an anecdote told to me by Mark Texiera during another Motor City Comic-Con, about a Jonah Hex story he claims to have illustrated before the character was tossed into the future, but was never printed (Texiera did draw one "Old West" issue of Jonah Hex that saw print, in addition to the majority of his 2050 jaunt). It can't be verified that Tex's "lost" story ever existed at all, as no one's been able to locate the pages, and the artist seems to be the only one who recalls it. Now we can add at least one more tale to the M.I.A. list.
If I can find Moore's email again, I'll drop him a line and ask if he can give a summary of the script J&J wrote for him, so we can at least ponder what might have been.
