1983-1984: Doin’
Hard Time
The
comic book landscape is constantly in flux, with some changes coming and going
so fast that they can, at times, seem inexplicable. Take a simple thing like a book’s page count,
for example: When Jonah Hex got his own title in 1977, each story was 17 pages
long, same as in Weird Western Tales. By JH#16, it had jumped up to 25 pages, then
was slowly scaled back to its original 17-page status by the time we reached
JH#28. Starting with JH#40, a 8-page
backup had been tacked onto the book in order to use up leftover stories commissioned
for the now-defunct WWT, and though Jonah occasionally squeezed out his costars
for an issue or two, the backups appeared on a fairly regular basis until JH#61
hit the stands. With that issue, Jonah Hex once again became a
25-page-long, single-feature book. So
why is it that, after a full year of solo stories, we’re suddenly back down to
17 pages plus a backup El Diablo tale in Jonah Hex #73 (June 1983)? Well,
young’uns, we can chalk that up to an old tradition known as the fill-in: a
continuity-light tale that’s prepared in advance and held in a file by the title’s
editor (or done on-the-fly by whomever’s available at the moment) in case the
creative team is running late or simply needs a breather. We’ve speculated earlier that WWT#37 and JH#12
may have been fill-ins (due to art inconsistencies in the former and no mention
of the then-current storyarc in the latter), but JH#73 and the two issues that
follow it are the strongest candidates yet, mainly due to the shortened page
count.
Okay,
enough about the “why” and the “how”, let’s move on to the “what”...as in what
a mixed bag JH#73 is. On the plus side,
we get art by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, who we last saw in JH#32 (in fact, when
you consider that Garcia-Lopez was the artist on this title when it launched,
it’s possible this story has been sitting in the file for years), but on the
minus side, the story Michael Fleisher wrote becomes more unbelievable the
further it goes on. Our tale begins with
Jonah getting caught in an explosion set by a gang he was trying to
ambush. They leave him for dead, but in
truth, Jonah makes it through just fine...save for both of his legs being
broken. A young Mexican boy manages to
get him to a doctor, who puts Hex in casts from his ankles up to his knees. He realizes this will make him a sitting duck
when that gang discovers he’s not dead, and sure enough, one of the owlhoots breaks
into his room that night to blast him with a shotgun, but Jonah had already
wrestled himself into a wheelchair and got the drop on him first. From there, “The Wheelchair Bounty Hunter”
and his new sidekick Manuel go riding across the countryside on a buckboard,
tracking down the gang members one by one.
Jonah kills about half of them before the rest of the gang bushwhacks our
duo, wounding Manuel and shoving Jonah off a cliff! Thanks to some quick-thinking lariat work,
Jonah survives, and after recovering his wheelchair, we are treated to one of
the craziest stunts we’ve ever seen the man pull:
After
that silliness, Fleisher gets a mite serious again with JH#74 &75, a
two-parter drawn by regular artists Dick Ayers and Tony DeZuniga. In addition to the short page count, the lack
of Emmylou Hartley in this tale points to it being a file story. Also of note is the cover to JH#74, done by
Dick Giordano and Jonah Hex editor Ross
Andru, which not only switches back briefly to the “classic” logo, it imitates a die-cut cover, putting “holes” in strategic places so you can see portions
of the splash page beneath. The effect
isn’t perfect, but since it came out nearly a decade before such gimmicks became rampant in the comics industry, I’ll cut them some slack. The story itself appears to be based loosely
on the life of Frank and Jesse James: like the brothers, “Railroad Bill”
Clinton (no relation to the 42nd President, I’m sure) rode with William Quantrill during the War, and now uses his talents to rob trains and banks. These facts win him a lot of fans among the
poor farmers in the area, who see those institutions as being just as
oppressive as the Union they fought against a decade earlier, and therefore
look upon Clinton as a Robin Hood figure.
A group of Pinkertons, led by Archibald Graphus, have been after him for
a year with no luck, so the head of the Western Pacific Railroad has decided to
hire Jonah Hex “off the books” to do what Graphus can’t.
One
week later, Graphus and his men try to ambush Clinton’s gang as they rob a
bank, but the impetuous Pinkerton orders his men to take them out before the
civilians can clear the street, leading to a shooting gallery that kills eight
of the outlaws along with a handful of innocents. As the remaining outlaws escape town, Graphus
shoots Clinton’s horse out from under him, thereby finally capturing his
quarry. He’s not interested in arresting
Clinton proper, however, and makes ready to hang the man on the spot. Luckily, Jonah rides up at that moment and
tries to talk Graphus out of it, saying that Clinton deserves a trial. Seeing as how Jonah’s hanged a man or two
himself in his day, one has to wonder if he’s stopping this so he can collect
his fee, or if Jonah, like the farmers, commiserates with ex-Confederate
Clinton. To be sure, Graphus thinks it’s
the latter, and when Clinton escapes, he shoots Hex in the back when the bounty
hunter rides after him. Despite knowing
who Jonah Hex is (and why he’s most likely shown up), Clinton turns his horse
around to help Jonah out. The two men
ride off together, eventually stopping at the house where Clinton’s mother and
sister live -- Jonah gets patched up there with the understanding that he won’t
pursue Clinton any longer. Jonah not the
one he should be worrying about, though: after night falls, one of Clinton’s
gang members (who arrived at the house before them) sneaks out and meets up
with Graphus. This two-timing skunk is
the reason the gang got ambushed during the robbery, and now he’s arranging for
a slaughter.
When
the traitor gets back to the house at the beginning of JH#75, Clinton is
waiting for him, having realized too late that there was a snake in their
midst. Clinton’s gunshots wake up the
rest of the house, and as he explains that it isn’t safe to stay there any
longer, Graphus and his men sneak up to the house and begin lobbing in sticks
of dynamite -- the explosion kills Ma Clinton and his sister along with a
couple more gang members. Hex and the
other survivors manage to escape Graphus’ deathtrap, and once they’ve put
enough distance between themselves and the Pinkertons, Clinton tells Hex that
it’s time for them to part ways, and that the bounty hunter had best steer
clear of him from now on:
Jonah
agrees to Clinton's terms for now, but three weeks later, he stops Clinton and
his diminished gang from robbing a train.
Clinton passes up a good chance to kill Hex and instead rides off, an
action that causes one of his men to declare that Clinton’s “gone sweet” on
Jonah. That doesn't sit well with
Clinton, and he tells them to hole up in Briar Springs for a spell, while he
goes off alone to kill Jonah Hex. Four
nights later, we find Jonah sitting alone by a campfire, himself wondering why
he allowed Clinton to get away scot free.
Unbeknownst to him, Clinton is peering down upon him with a rifle, but
before the man can pull the trigger, Graphus shows up at Hex’s campsite
demanding to know where Clinton is! With
two enemies in his sights, Clinton has to decide to shoot first, and wouldn’t
ya know it, Graphus is the one he chooses, killing him with one shot. Jonah quickly dives for cover as Clinton peppers
the campsite with lead, but he soon runs out of ammo and tries to escape,
unaware that Jonah has snuck around behind him.
Jonah demands that Clinton surrender, to which the outlaw replies,
“Ah’ve told yuh before thet Ah ain’t ‘bout tuh let no man put me back inside a
prison!” He then cocks the rifle,
bluffing Hex into thinking that it’s still loaded so that he’ll shoot Clinton
dead. When Jonah realizes he’s been had,
it doesn’t sit right with him at all, but as he’ll soon learn, “Railroad Bill”
Clinton was right in his assertion that death on the trail was better than life
in prison.
Jonah’s
normal 25-page count is back with JH#76, as well as his normal problems,
namely what to do about Emmylou Hartley.
His love for the gal has dissipated, but he can’t bring himself to tell her
so. Meanwhile, Emmy seems to have fallen
back to her old role as a warrior’s squaw, setting up camp for Jonah and
preparing the game he brings back, and even wearing a buckskin dress and
moccasins like she was when they met in JH#50 -- faced with devotion like that,
it’s easy to see why he’s having a hard time talking with her about their
relationship. Still, his diminished
feelings don’t stop him from throwing Emmy to cover when three unknown skunks
open fire upon them. Jonah wipes them
out fast, and is left to wonder who they were and why they were shooting at
them. The reader soon finds out that this
was Turnbull’s latest attempt on Jonah Hex’s life, and he’s none too happy that
his agents have failed him once more. As
he rants to his manservant, Solomon, about the situation, he observes a possum
Solomon had caged earlier in the day.
“This is what I’ve been waiting for!” Turnbull tells him. “An inspiration for achieving a fitting
vengeance on Jonah Hex!”
That
very evening, Jonah and Emmylou ride into town, and as Emmy gets them a hotel
room, Jonah takes their horses to the livery, where he’s bushwhacked by some
fellas who drag him into the woods.
Seems the governor of the state, McKinley Phelps, wanted to meet with
him in private (nobody ever asks nicely in these stories, do they?) to discuss
business. According to Phelps, the state
penitentiary is hopelessly corrupt, and he needs a man like Hex on the inside
in order to gather evidence against the warden and his staff. The idea is that Hex -- a man whose
profession is already slightly questionable -- will commit of series of crimes
so that he can be sentenced to the penitentiary and therefore begin his
investigation without suspicion. After a
month, he’d be released, his record cleared, and collect a well-deserved
fee. Jonah didn’t just fall off the
turnip truck, however, and wants something more than the governor’s word that
everything will be peachy-keen once this is over:
With
his true innocence set down in writing, Jonah tells Emmy that he’s going away
for a while. She demands to know where
he’s going, but he tells her it’s a secret and that she’s probably better off
without him anyhow, which leads to her snapping at him in public that she’s
tired of being a stand-in for his wife. Jonah
doesn’t attempt to patch this over, and instead rides off, most likely thinking
that this incident will finally shake him free of Emmy. Two weeks later, Jonah begins his sanctioned
crime spree, brazenly robbing trains and stagecoaches until he’s finally bagged
by the law. Charged with four counts of
armed robbery, Jonah is sentenced to twenty-five years in the state
penitentiary. The news is soon splashed
all over the papers, one of which ends up in the hands of Mei Ling’s brother,
who proceeds to berate her with the fact that the father of her son turned
out to be a no-good criminal. Emmylou,
on the other hand, isn’t so accepting of the news, and intends to get to the
bottom of this.
Jonah
is transferred to the penitentiary the following day, where he’s stripped of
his distinctive Confederate gray and given prison stripes. Over the next few days, he learns quite a bit
about how corrupt his new home is, and when he comes to the aid of a fellow
prisoner that collapsed from being overworked and underfed, the guards beat
Jonah within an inch of his life, then chuck him into solitary
confinement. But it’s all worth it,
right? In a month, the governor will
order his release, and Jonah can see to it that these skunks get what’s coming
to them.
Wrong. As JH#77 opens, we find Jonah’s gone
half-mad from having spent several weeks in the hole with nothing but rats for company. Then after a quick recap, we
get a scene reminiscent of The Shawshank Redemption as Turnbull himself shows up at Jonah’s cell door to gloat over
his predicament. Seems Governor Phelps
is a longtime friend of Turnbull’s who just happened to owe him quite a few
favors, so Turnbull coerced the man into helping him with his mad scheme to get
Hex thrown in jail...and unlike the situation Turnbull engineered that led to
the “fugitive” storyarc in JH#2-16, Jonah is actually guilty of these crimes. “You’re going to rot in here forever, my young friend,” Turnbull says,
“can’t you see that? You’re going to be hemmed in by these four
dank walls until your mind turns to jelly and your body to dust!”
Too bad all this gloating blinded him to the fact that Jonah wasn’t
restrained:
The
guards come in and pummel Jonah before he can harm Turnbull, then lock him away
in solitary once again. Unbeknownst to
either Hex or Turnbull, Emmylou Hartley is meeting with the warden at that very
moment and doing her level best to arrange a visit with Jonah (thankfully, she
had the sense to put on a nice proper dress as opposed to the buckskin she’d
been running about in earlier). The
warden is blocking her request, however, saying that Hex has been sentenced to
a full sixty days in solitary, and that it’ll be two weeks before he’s allowed
any visitors. Emmy vows to be back once
the time is up, but she’s in the shock of her life when the warden tells her upon
her return two weeks later that Jonah Hex is dead, even going so far as to show
Emmy the grave -- this is all a ruse, of course, in order to continue torturing
Jonah down in solitary without fear of anyone else looking in on his welfare.
After
news of Jonah’s “death” reaches the papers, one of the guards taunts Jonah
with the notion that, since everyone thinks he’s dead, “we can keep you locked
up here just as long as Mr. Turnbull wants us to--” Jonah responds by bashing the guard’s skull
into the wall, a remarkable feat considering that Jonah himself admits that he
feels worse now than when he had cholera back in JH#63 (no wonder, since he’s
been in the hole subsisting on nothing but bread and water for over two
months). Still, he manages make his way
to the prison storeroom to retrieve his usual duds and weapons, then takes out
a passel of guards before hightailing it out of the prison on foot, intent on
reaching the governor and making him straighten out this mess.
At the
governor’s mansion several days later, Phelps tells Turnbull (whom he calls
Quentin, making this the first time we learn the full name of Hex’s longtime
foe) that Jonah has escaped and, even worse, he mentions the letter Jonah made
him write last issue declaring his innocence.
Turnbull is livid, brandishing his eagle-headed cane at Phelps, who
backpedals so fast he trips and smacks his head upon a marble fireplace,
killing him instantly. Such things are
of no consequence to Quentin Turnbull, and he’s already planning his next move
as he departs the mansion...while Jonah Hex watches him from a nearby
tree. Jonah doesn’t know what transpired
inside until someone rushes out yelling that the governor is dead, and when
they spot Jonah, the blame is quickly pinned upon him, and he runs off before
he can be shot.
At a
hotel that night, Emmy is still holding on to the hope that Jonah is alive, and
when someone knocks upon her door saying they have a message for her, she
presumes that it’s from him. In reality,
it’s Turnbull and three cronies demanding to know where the governor’s letter
is! Thank goodness Jonah shows up at the
beginning of JH#78 to save the day -- presumably, he tailed Turnbull after he
left the mansion. While he’s busy taking
out Turnbull’s cronies, the old man escapes, and Jonah tells Emmy to go hide
out in the next town south of there until all this blows over...but not before
he bestows a very passionate kiss upon her lips (there goes that notion of
not really being in love with her, but then again, he did just spend over two
months in jail).
After a
brief scene with the warden of the prison having to explain to the press why
he’d told them earlier that Jonah Hex was dead (“a slight mix-up in our record
keeping” is his lame excuse), the story meanders a bit, first to a couple of
hayseeds-turned-bounty hunters who decide to go after the $10,000 reward on
Hex, then to Hex himself riding out to wherever he hid the governor’s letter,
only to come across a bunch of massacred Ojibwa women and children beside a river,
and finally jumping to Mei Ling and her son out in the family garden as J.D.
Hart rides up. Neither we nor Mei Ling
have seen the marshal since JH#44, and her exclamation of “Is that really you?”
is certainly called for: though previously depicted as dark-haired, Hart is now inexplicably a blond, and his fringed buckskin clothes have turned a lurid shade of blue! We could dismiss this
easily if there had been some change in the staff, but the issue was done by
the exact same people who worked on JH#44, and the error will persist
throughout this storyarc, so it’s a serious fumble on everyone’s part
here. On a more positive note, Jonah’s
baby boy finally gets a name -- Jason -- and Mei Ling states that he’s nearly
two years old now, so even though the comic’s still in a constant state of
1875, time’s been moving along at a regular pace for lil’ Jason Hex. As for the reason J.D.’s dropping in out of
the blue, he’s concerned about the mess Jonah has gotten himself into and wants
to help -- I don’t know how going to see Jonah’s estranged wife is supposed to
help things, but there he is.
Back on
Jonah’s end of the story, it appears that one of the Indians survived the
massacre: Little Raven, the bossy twelve-year-old son of the chief. He insists that Jonah help him avenge the
death of his fellow Indians, and together they track down the men responsible
before Jonah returns the boy to the Ojibwa.
In a ceremony that night, the chief makes the two of them blood brothers,
and Jonah gets back on the trail the next morning, where he runs into those two
hayseeds that’re out to collect the bounty on his head. They almost get the drop on him at the
beginning of JH#79, but Jonah gets away with a bullet in his side after blasting
one of them in the face. What follows is
an issue-long chase through the desert, with Jonah’s pursuer, Walter, slowly
chipping away at his quarry with a high-powered Sharps rifle. First he shoots Jonah’s horse out from under
him, then Walter blasts a canteen out of Jonah’s hand when he pauses for a
drink. Jonah comes across a water hole
hours later, but in a cruel twist, there’s a sign posted next to it reading
“Poison”, which he destroys in a fit of rage.
Delirium sets in not long afterward, and he imagines his parents
hovering above him, ashamed by his weakness:
It
getting near dusk when Walter finds Jonah collapsed near the poisoned water
hole -- with the sign destroyed, Walter doesn’t know it’s unsafe, and takes a
deep victory drink. Not until he’s
doubled over with pain does he realize that Jonah didn’t collapse there by
accident, and he finally dies just a few feet away from Jonah. J.D. Hart (who’s been following Jonah’s trail
for quite some time) rides up moments later, but it’s not until JH#80 that we
learn Jonah is still alive. A sheriff
and his posse soon arrive as well, and take Jonah into custody despite Hart’s
protests. After being deposited in the
local jail and looked over by a doctor, Jonah manages to tell Hart about the
letter, and as the marshal sets out to go fetch it, three of Turnbull’s men
tail him, and he gets jumped once they’re out in the wilderness. Sometime later, Jonah gets a visitor: Emmylou
Hartley, who read in the paper about Jonah’s capture. He reassures her that everything will be
right as rain soon, unaware that Mei Ling has also come to visit -- she walks in just as Hex and Emmy are in a
lip-lock, and though the sight of them together upsets Mei Ling, it’s Emmy that leaves,
saying, “I-it’s always been you he’s
loved anyway! Not (sob) me!”
Later
on, Turnbull joins his men at the shack where they’re holding Hart, and gives
the marshal until sundown to cough up the location of the letter, or else
suffer the consequences. Being a man who
detests violence, Turnbull doesn’t stick around to watch them work Hart over,
and instead returns to town, where an inventor is lobbying for Hex to take a
ride on his newfangled electrocution device instead of being hanged
(unfortunately, it requires a lightning strike to spark up, so we’ll have to
wait another decade or so for the AC-powered electric chair to take its first
victim in 1890). Hex isn’t keen on being
killed in any sort of fashion, so he’s glad to see Little Raven show up outside
his window, all ready to free his blood brother with a lit bundle of
dynamite! After collecting up his gear,
Jonah bolts out of town alone on horseback, unaware that Turnbull is following
not far behind. There’s a brief aside
wherein J.D. Hart manages to overpower his captors, then we’re back to Jonah
out in the wilds as he approaches a pile of rocks -- finally, we’ve reached the
place where he hid the letter. Turnbull
suddenly appears, gun in hand, and demands that Jonah step away from the
rocks. Keeping his eyes fixed on the
bounty hunter, Turnbull thrusts his free hand into a hole in the rock pile,
then screams. “Thet’s whut’s alluz bound
tuh happen when yuh go an’ stick yore hand in a rattlesnakes’ nest!” Jonah says
as he picks up a forked branch to pin the rattler with, thereby letting him
retrieve the letter within. The proof of
his innocence secured, Jonah turns to leave, not caring that his longtime enemy
will most likely die from the snakebite. Turnbull isn’t about to go down so easily,
however, and aims his gun at Jonah’s turned back.
This
cliffhanger becomes somewhat anticlimactic when we get to JH#81, as the story
backs up to when Turnbull and Hex first arrive at the rock pile, then unspools
in a slightly different order: Turnbull gets bit, then he tries to shoot Hex,
but passes out cold. Only after this
does Jonah retrieve the letter, but as he turns to leave, Jonah has a change of
heart about letting Turnbull die, and instead sucks the venom out of the
unconscious man’s wound, then bundles him into Turnbull’s surrey to drive him
back to town. When the old man comes to,
he’s rather surprised by Jonah’s kindness, but he doesn’t have long to
contemplate it before the two of them are attacked by El Papagayo, last seen
rotting in jail back in JH#72. The
bandito and his men open fire upon the surrey and drive them into a cave, where
Turnbull decides that his own hatred of
Hex should exempt him from Papagayo’s vendetta.
Jonah knows better, and when Turnbull tries to surrender, Jonah yanks
him away from a fresh volley of gunfire (though he admits that he debated with
himself about whether or not he should let Turnbull get killed!).
While
the two men are occupied, the ladies in Jonah’s life begin to move on without
him: Emmy arranges to leave town on the stagecoach to St. Louis, and Mei Ling
shares a meal with J.D. Hart who, after getting back to town and explaining to
the local law about Turnbull’s plot, has decided to start courting Mei Ling! Such things are the least of Jonah’s concerns
at the moment, for after fending off a direct assault from Papagayo’s men, he
and Turnbull make a break for the surrey, only to discover as they drive away
that Papagayo had previously snuck over and strapped dynamite to the
undercarriage! They manage to leap to
safety at the beginning of JH#82, landing on a ledge jutting out from the
cliff face they were riding alongside -- the bandito spots Hex and Turnbull
down there when he comes over to examine the wreckage, and inexplicably decides
to leave them be for now, promising to kill him next time they meet. “Good grief, Jonah!” Turnbull says to
him. “What is all this, anyway? Some kind of crazy game you two play?” As they make their way back to town, though, Turnbull
tells Jonah that he’s in the bounty hunter’s debt for saving his life so many
times over the course of the past day, and swears he’ll file a sworn affidavit
saying the death of Governor Phelps was an accident. Between this and the governor’s letter, the
criminal charges against Jonah will be dropped...but their old feud still
stands, and Turnbull declares, “For your role in bringing about the death of my
only, beloved son, I hereby renew my vow to put you in an early grave!”
All
these threats fade into the background for Jonah once they reach town, because
when he catches sight of a commotion in front of Mei Ling’s hotel, he
immediately fears the worst. And he has
good reason to: a passel of skunks called the Riordan brothers kidnapped Mei
Ling right outside the hotel in order to lure out Hex. They winged J.D. Hart in the process, but he
insists on coming along with Jonah as he tracks them down. They ride out so fast that Jonah never thinks
to ask what Hart was doing with Mei Ling in the first place, though he figures
it our real quick when he sees the marshal -- who rescued Mei Ling while Jonah
took out the bad guys -- holding the woman a mite too closely. Jonah doesn’t even bother to ask for an
explanation, he simply begins pounding on Hart with one hand behind his back (he
wants to be fair about it, ol’ J.D. being wounded and all). After knockin’ the stuffing out of Hart,
Jonah storms off, leaving behind any notions that he and Mei Ling could ever
again be a happily-married couple. Of
course, he’s still got Emmylou to fall back on...or he would if she hadn’t
taken the stage to St. Louis, remember? Emmy
thought leaving Jonah would bring an end to her problems, but a new one arises
when the stagecoach gets stopped by bandits before it reaches its destination,
and along with the strongbox on board, they decide to take Emmy as well! She demands in Jonah Hex #83 (April 1984) to know why she was abducted, to which
the man in charge replies, “‘Cause you were the only good-lookin’ female in the
bunch, that’s why!” We then discover
that the other two bandits are women, though whether they were kidnapped as
well is uncertain. To be sure, the man
seems intent on beating up Emmy until she learns to obey him, but considering
the treatment she got during her years with the Crow Indians, she may be able
to endure whatever punishment he puts her through.
Jonah
returns to the hotel they were staying at, then throws a fit when the desk
clerk tells him that Emmy checked out yesterday and left on the stage. Despite knowing that she was heading to St.
Louis, Jonah chooses to go to the local saloon and get drunk all day, pausing
only briefly to gun down a couple of idiots looking to make their reputation
off of him. By that night, the townsfolk
have decided they don’t like the idea having of a drunken, trigger-happy
gunfighter hang around, so they set fire to the barn Jonah’s sleeping in (the
hotel refused to rent him another room).
Jonah escapes, and eventually settles down by the edge of a lake,
cursing the mess his life has become. He
decides right then and there to devote his life to being the best damn drunkard
he can be, tossing his prized Colt Dragoons into the water for good measure:
Considering
the number of times he’s risked his neck
to recover those Dragoons, this turn of events is rather shocking -- I
seriously doubt he would’ve done such a thing if he’d been sober. Jonah falls asleep not long after, and wakes
up the next morning to find a lady named Catherine Rebecca Smollett berating
him for his slovenly state. She talks
him into accompanying her back to the a nearby temperance farm, where she plans
on making a God-fearing teetotaler out of him.
Considering that Hex was probably suffering from the mother of all
hangovers, it’s surprising that he didn’t just cuss Smollett out and stumble
off in the opposite direction, but perhaps there was some unpickled part of his
brain that realized he really couldn’t go through life like this (if nothing
else, there may have been a small desire to not end up like his father). Jonah spends the next few days working on the
farm, trying his best to remain sober as well as put behind him all the grief
he’s gone through over the past few months -- this is the first opportunity
he’s had to relax since getting thrown into prison back in JH#76, and though he
most likely has to sit through Bible readings and temperance lectures every
day, the man desperately needs the break.
Too bad it doesn’t last long, for soon some friends of the two men Hex
gunned down show up looking for revenge.
Jonah quickly makes short work of them with his Bowie knife and various
farm implements, and afterward, Smollett reluctantly asks him to leave the
farm. “I do wish you could have stayed
here with us long enough to be truly saved, Jonah!” she says as he makes ready
to ride off. Jonah replies that he
figures he’s been pretty nearly saved already, silently adding, Leastways as saved as Ah’m ever likely tuh
be!
It’s
doubtful that Jonah’s time at the temperance farm has truly changed him on a
personal level, but out in the real world, Jonah
Hex the comic book was undergoing changes that would have a long-term
effect on the character, the first of them beginning this issue, as Michael
Fleisher became both writer and editor of the title. Fleisher exercised his newfound powers right
from the get-go, making Tony DeZuniga the main artist (no more sharing the
byline with Dick Ayers) and hiring Ed Hannigan to do the covers. The logo also switched back to its classic
look for good with this issue, but whether it was the doing of Hannigan or
Fleisher is unclear. All this was just
the tip of the iceberg, for as Fleisher himself said in a note to the readers
two issues later, “Jonah’s got some surprises up his sleeve you wouldn’t
believe if I told them to you! Because
if I get my way, there are things that are going to start happening in this
magazine that’ll scramble your brains around!”
By the summer of 1985, readers will know he ain’t just whistlin’ Dixie.
