An Illustrated History of Jonah Hex (Part 12)

1987-1992: Fragments

Jonah Hex has always been a wanderer.  There were times during his first 15 years of comic-book adventuring that he took up residence somewhere, like homesteading with Mei Ling or hanging around New Orleans high society with Adrian Sterling, but those periods would always be brief, and he'd soon find himself out on the trail again.  After the cancellation of HEX -- Michael Fleisher's attempt to keep Jonah on comic-book shelves by giving him a sci-fi/superhero spin -- the bounty hunter started to wander down a different sort of trail, one that meandered through various titles as he struggled to find a home in an era that was unfavorable to Westerns.

The first stop on that trail was Secret Origins #21 (December 1987), the very last Jonah Hex story written by Michael Fleisher during his thirteen years with the character, making his final tally a whopping 126, one of the longest runs for a writer on a non-creator-owned comic.  With a cover by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez and interiors by Gray Morrow, "Requiem for a Gunfighter" serves as an epilogue for both the character and Fleisher's "The Last Bounty Hunter" from 1978's Jonah Hex Spectacular, as it continues the tale of Jonah's stuffed corpse which, by 1987, has taken up residence in Frontier City Amusement Park in Laramie, Wyoming (roughly 50 miles away from Cheyenne, where Jonah died in 1904).  Once again echoing the strange case of Elmer McCurdy, a film crew accidentally discovers the "statue" in one of their shots is really a dead body, and a Princeton professor by the name of Lawrence -- who is said to have written "the definitive book" on Hex, and bears a resemblance to Fleisher himself -- verifies via photographs that the body is indeed the long-lost corpse of Jonah Hex:

Once news of the gruesome discovery hits the press, a few people with an interest in procuring Jonah's body step forward.  One is them is Mr. Lewellyn, a collector who will do anything to add the corpse of Jonah Hex to his private museum of Western memorabilia.  Another is Tall Bird, Jonah's widow: it was implied at the end of "The Last Bounty Hunter" that she'd died in the fire with Professor Michael Wheeler, Jonah's would-be biographer (seeing as they were both from Princeton, perhaps the foundation of Lawrence's book came from work Wheeler had completed before his death), but it appears that Tall Bird made it out alive, and now wishes to cremate her husband, just as she'd planned to do eight decades earlier.  Lawrence is asked by a representative of Frontier City to verify that she is who she claims to be, so he flies out to Wyoming and speaks at length with her.  Tall Bird is around 100 years old by now, but her memory is as sharp as ever, so after convincing Lawrence of her identity, he inquires about some aspects of Jonah's life that have gone unrecorded.  When he asks about the fate of Jonah and Mei Ling's son, Jason, she replies that "his is a tale so fraught with horror that I have vowed to carry it within me, in secret, to the end of my days."  Lawrence also brings up the events at the end of Jonah Hex #92:

While this scene helps to confirm that HEX remained in-continuity after its cancellation, it also neatly avoids answering the question of how Jonah got back to the Old West: Jonah didn't tell Tall Bird, so she can't tell Lawrence.  Why Fleisher didn't slip in the answer right there is puzzling, especially since the series ended 10 months earlier, but as Bob Greenberger told me when we spoke back in 2012, "DC doesn’t think enough about continuity conundrums such as how Hex returns to his proper era...Everyone knows he got back and gets stuffed and no one is bothering to tell the tale."  That's not to say that attempts to tell it were never made, as we'll discover later.

Back to the issue at hand: Lawrence continues to ask Tall Bird questions about what drove Jonah "to become the most renowned manhunter of his age."  Now Tall Bird gets talkative, spinning a yarn about an incident that occurred on Jonah's birthday as a boy (no specific year is given, but young Jonah says it's Wednesday, and since we know his birthday is November 1st, my perpetual calendar states that would make it either 1843 or 1848...knowing  Fleisher's track record, he was probably shooting for the latter).  Jonah's father presented the boy with a rifle, which came into play later that night when Woodson went off on a drunken tear and began beating Ginny for supposedly "slippin' around" instead of attending to her wifely duties.  Jonah grabbed his new rifle, presumably with the intent to shoot his Pa, but the man knocked his son to the floor before he could do it (if you recall, young Jonah also got a hold of a gun way back in Jonah Hex #27, but kept it well-hidden from his Pa...this incident here might be why).

The notion that Woodson Hex was a abusive man is nothing new to Lawrence (or Hex fans), but when Tall Bird tells Lawrence the rest of the tale the next day, as they stand before Jonah's stuffed corpse, the significance becomes clear: after being scarred with the "Mark of the Demon", Jonah went through what sounds like a bout of depression, where "he drank hard and often, to relieve the gnawing pangs of bitterness and defeat".  Between being shunned by his adoptive Apache tribe and ending up on the losing side of the Civil War, not to mention all the other indignities Jonah had suffered in his life by that point, the idea of him getting depressed and wanting to drink himself to death is totally understandable.  One night, while in the middle of a heavy drinking binge, he came across a man beating a woman in the street -- Jonah was so wasted, he thought the couple was his parents, so he shot the man in order to rescue his "mother", not realizing until the deed was done that he'd made a serious mistake.  Lucky for him, the sheriff showed up and told Jonah the man he shot was "Mad Dog" Lucas McGill, a wanted outlaw with a sizable reward on his head, then handed Jonah a wad of bills.  "Reward?!?" Jonah exclaimed, then dumped the money in the street and walked away as the people around him scooped it up.  It's not said outright, but the implication seems to be that Jonah Hex only became a bounty hunter in order to keep people from suffering the way he had his entire life, and that any reward money he collected for his deeds was secondary to this desire (I daresay this happened not long before the events of Jonah Hex #30-31 -- which features Jonah's first true bounty hunt -- and the two incidents occurring so close together helped Jonah make his career decision).  As Tall Bird finishes her tale, Mr. Lewellyn shows up with his two goons, ready to take possession of Hex's body, even if it means shooting both her and Professor Lawrence.  Lucky for them, someone's got their back:

Just as with Lew Farnham's assistant eighty-three years before, the stuffed and mounted corpse of Jonah Hex fatally shoots Mr. Lewellyn, but unlike last time, it's a little hard to write this off as accidental.  Tall Bird described Jonah earlier as a "restless spirit", and this seems to confirm it.  To be sure, Lawrence is convinced: "By tomorrow morning, we'll have you out of here forever, Jonah!  I-I promise you that!" he says over his shoulder as he and Tall Bird are escorted out of the park by police...but did he truly keep his promise?  The final panel is reminiscent of the one for "The Last Bounty Hunter", with Jonah being left on his lonesome in the middle of an amusement park.  The reader is left to presume that Jonah's body will soon be put to rest, but think of the paradox such an action would create: how can Jonah stumble across his own corpse in 2050 if it was cremated in 1987?  As Peter Sanderson wrote in SO#21's letter column, "there clearly is a great deal more of the saga of Jonah Hex yet to be told."  Sadly, Michael Fleisher would no longer be telling that saga.  He went back to college the same year HEX ended and, among other accomplishments, eventually earned a doctorate in anthropology from the University of Michigan -- his last official comics credit was in 1995, for the UK anthology 2000 AD.  It seems that, without Jonah Hex around, Fleisher lost interest in writing comics, and in more-recent interviews, his memories of those days has grown fuzzy, meaning some unanswered questions from his run (such as the final fate of Emmylou Hartley) will remain so.

After Fleisher's departure, it fell to other writers to decide where Jonah would appear next, and in what era.  One of the first to show interest was, surprisingly, Alan Moore.  In 1987, he submitted a proposal to DC that, despite having never been used, has since taken on legendary status: Twilight of the Superheroes, an epic tale which would have rivaled Crisis on Infinite Earths in scope.  The proposal itself is rather long and complicated, involving scores of DC characters, so we won't be discussing it in-depth here, only highlighting a passage that discusses the House of Tomorrow, one of the superhero factions that comes into being on a possible future Earth due to the machinations of classic Legion of Superheroes villain the Time Trapper:

"This is the House built by all the various exiles from other eras who have been trapped in this world by the Time Trapper's flux...since anyone passing through that strip of the timestream at any time in the "future" or "past" would be sucked into that time zone as well, there are a paradoxical number of past and future selves of the various time-travelers also caught there...It strikes me that amongst these travelers there might also be Space Ranger and Jonah Hex.  This might even be an opportunity to return Jonah Hex to his original western continuity where we know he will eventually end up according to previous DC history.  It would also be convenient to explain the so far unassigned radioactive hellworld that Hex's adventures have been set in as one of the maybe-Earths that exist in the fluke."

This was only a proposal, of course, and the finished product could have totally excised this idea, but intrigues me that Alan Moore actually thought enough of Jonah's predicament to include a way for him to escape it.  Of course, Twilight of the Superheroes would never come to be, so we can only speculate as to whether or not it would have been the key to Jonah getting home.  And while we're on the subject of speculation, let me indulge in a bit of my own regarding the four time-travel adventures Jonah took part in that were published before and during the HEX series.  By some strange quirk of fate, nearly all of them are dated after 1875, the year Reinhold Borsten pulled him from.  Continuity-wise, they couldn't have occurred until Jonah had been returned home by whatever unknown method, meaning we can slap an unofficial retcon on these tales and declare that Jonah Hex had previous experience with time travel during all of them!

First up is DC Challenge #2-3, where it's stated that the Jonah Hex seen there was from 1876 (presuming this crazy tale is in-continuity), so he must've lucked out and returned to the Old West not too long after he'd left.  In those issues, Jonah reacts very badly here to being dropped into another timeframe (namely 1985), but why would that be if he's already had one time-trip?  Maybe he's suffering from some kind of post-traumatic stress from being in that "radioactive hellworld" of 2050, and seeing all them automobiles and 1980s fashion choices has set him off.  If that's so, I'd say Jonah has got a decent handle on it by the time Justice League of America #159-160 rolls around.  There's no specific date given here, but since he hardly bats an eye at the notion of the Lord of Time plucking him out of the Old West and forcing him to fight strangers -- a scenario rather similar to what Borsten had in mind for him -- while his fellow time-warriors in the tale appear rather shaken by it all, I'd say this must occur post-HEX.  By 1878, when Jonah has his second brush with the Lord of Time in Justice League of America #198-199, he's got so much experience with future-folk that even Green Lantern shooting emerald bolts of light past his head causes him to do little more than cuss the hero out, and in 1879, he manages to keep the gawking to a minimum when he briefly gets tangled up in the events of Crisis on Infinite Earths.  As if these stories weren't odd enough reads the first time around, tossing in the notion that it's all "been there, done that" for Jonah takes them to a whole 'nother level.

Lest we forget, the events of "The Last Bounty Hunter" also take on a new spin: What was going through Jonah's mind in 1904 when Lew Farnham showed him the same outfit he found his corpse wearing?  To be sure, Jonah is giving Farnham a deathly glare throughout the scene, right before Jonah tells Wheeler that they'd best get back to hunting "a'fore we do somethin' tuh these two lunatics we'd be sorry fer later!"  Did he perhaps have to fight the urge to kill Farnham and his assistant on the spot in order to avoid the fate he knew was coming, or did he think walking away would be enough?  When he told Tall Bird about his trip to the future, did he tell her about the corpse as well, perhaps insisting that his body be cremated once he passed on?  Again, this is all speculation on my part, with no official weight behind it...though this won't be the last time we speak upon the subject of Jonah's fateful demise.

Nearly two years passed before Jonah appeared in a comic book once more, specifically Swamp Thing (vol. 2) #85 (April 1989).  While it can be read by itself, this tale -- written by Rick Veitch and illustrated by Tom Mandrake & Alfredo Alcala -- was part of a yearlong storyarc encompassing ST#80-90, wherein the plant elemental is falling backwards through time, stopping in various eras along the way.  This particular issue takes place on November 7, 1872 (just six days after Jonah's 34th birthday): Jonah and many other DC Western heroes have been hired by Jason Blood and Otto Von Hammer (father of "Enemy Ace" Hans Von Hammer) to take down Wise Owl and his pet demon El Diablo.  Little do they know that Wise Owl has another mystical force under his sway, namely Swamp Thing, who impales a bunch of nameless gunmen on what appears to be a thorn bush from Hell.  Jonah survives through "dumb luck", as he plainly puts it when Firehair and Hawk, Son of Tomahawk show up:

Jonah throws in the towel after this, leaving Bat Lash, Super-Chief, Madame .44, and Johnny Thunder to take care of Wise Owl (Jonah does show up later, playing cards with Lash as they wait to be paid for their trouble).  If you go looking for this issue, I recommend picking up the entire arc, at the very least to revel in the dozens of classic DC historical characters who show up over the course of the story.

Jonah turned up again exactly one year later in the Time Masters miniseries, which revolves around Rip Hunter using time travel to fight the Illuminati.  Now, before we get into it, I'd like to point out that Rip's life had intersected with the bounty hunter's on one other occasion, albeit in a very oblique way.  Just two months after HEX #18, it was revealed in the pages of Booster Gold (vol. 1) #15 that Reinhold Borsten's time platform -- the very device that dragged Jonah Hex from 1875 to 2050 -- somehow survived the destruction of the Needle, and was used by Rip Hunter in the year 2462 to return himself, Booster, and their friends to their proper time.  Jonah himself neither appears nor is mentioned in the issue, but since there are virtually no other references to Borsten outside of the HEX series, it seemed worthwhile to note it here.  As for Time Masters itself, Rip has no direct contact with Jonah: the closest he gets is in issue #2, when Rip discovers a time-worn Polaroid of Jonah, Bat Lash, Scalphunter, and Rip's friend Jeff Smith.  In Time Masters #3 (April 1990), we learn the photo had been taken in Oaxaca, Mexico on September 16th, 1874 (Rips says the date is visible on a poster in the photo).  "That would be right before Porfirio Diaz got himself elected president for the first time", he tells Jeff, though "right before" in this case means 1877.  Rip believes Diaz was a pawn of the Illuminati, so he sends Jeff back in time to kill the man before that can happen.

Jeff runs into the three gunfighters not long after he arrives back in 1874.  They've been hired to protect Diaz, so Jeff gets friendly with them in order to get close to the politician (Jonah also worked for Diaz in a roundabout way during Jonah Hex #9-10, which took place at some unspecified point in Diaz's presidency).  Any delight in seeing three Western heroes in one story is ruined by the poor characterization of Jonah throughout, while Scalphunter and Lash fare better only by virtue of having fewer scenes.  When Hex sees Jeff -- a black man -- for the first time, he wonders aloud if Jeff is a runaway slave (making Jonah sound like a stereotypical racist johnny-reb), and later on, while standing guard for President Diaz, he's caught napping on two occasions (and Diaz sneaks up on him, to boot!).  What little gunplay we see from Hex is fairly standard, and the majority of his dialogue so generic they could've had an anonymous cowpoke speak it and you'd be none the wiser -- there's very little fire here, no growled lines or crass remarks, save for Jonah telling Scalphunter at one point, "All I know is the pay's good.  And if you don't ask questions, you kin live to collect it."  One has to wonder if Jonah decided to cash in after he saw Jeff vanish in a flash of blue light following the man's failed attempt to kill Diaz:

Since this happened a year before Jonah's own time-trip, did the significance of what he saw occur to him after he ended up in 2050?  In hindsight, writers Bob Wayne & Lewis Shiner missed a real opportunity for a character moment here: had they instead set this around 1876, when Diaz actually launched the Plan of Tuxtepec in Oaxaca (which led to him becoming president), Jonah would've known all too well by that point what people vanishing in a flash of light means, not to mention he'd recognize Jeff's Polaroid camera as a piece of future-tech the second he laid eyes on it.  The next scene could've shown Jonah running out of that house like it was on fire, possibly dragging Scalphunter and Lash right behind him, 'cause any place where time travelers hang out is a place he doesn't wish to be.  Of course, going by the overall writing in this miniseries, I may be asking too much of them.

Jonah managed to wrangle two separate appearances in 1991: a ghostly, dialogue-free cameo in the fourth issue of the Books of Magic miniseries (February 1991), and an amusing four-page scene in Justice League Europe Annual #2, which tied into the Armageddon 2001 crossover event that year.  During the event, a time-traveling character named Waverider -- who was from a future ruled by Monarch, a superpowered despot -- visited various heroes and, by touching them, got a glimpse of where their lives might possibly lead them in 10 years.  His hope was to find out which hero would eventually become Monarch and stop him before he could kill all the other heroes.  A fairly straightforward premise, but since this is a Justice League title smack in the middle of the "Bwa-Ha-Ha era", writers Keith Giffen & Gerard Jones take it in the craziest direction possible: every time Waverider touches one of the JLE members, he sees nearly all them at some point in the past, or a point far ahead of 2001.  Rocket Red cavorting with King Arthur around Camelot, Power Girl fighting alongside General Glory in World War II, Crimson Fox getting hit on by Bat Lash in the Old West...by the by, did I mention the scads of cameos in this story?  Then Waverider gets to Metamorpho, and we're treated to something we haven't seen in four years: the post-apocalypse future of HEX as rendered by Giffen himself.

In regards to HEX, Giffen was quoted in Back Issue #14 (February 2006), saying that he "never had much use" for the character.  "When they turned him into the Road Warrior, I was really against that."  But he consoled himself with the fact that it was an opportunity to work with Michael Fleisher, whom he admired.  For all his dislike of the notion, Giffen obviously had some fun revisiting it: these four pages look better than what he delivered in HEX (though that may be the inker's doing), and Jonah's dialogue is humorous without being out-of-character.

By the end of the story, we find out that the reason Waverider saw all those JLE members scattered throughout history was because a time machine stored in the basement of their headquarters would blow up in 2001...but since this won't take place for another 10 years, Waverider is able to prevent the explosion from ever happening by shutting down a spy camera planted on Power Girl's cat, thereby creating a "butterfly effect".  This means Waverider just rendered all the previous scenes in the comic null and void, including Metamorpho meeting Hex (sorry, folks, I know it's confusing, but it's the truth).  Due to the way Waverider's powers work, he's the only one who actually saw all those possible futures, so when he tries to explain to them what he prevented, he's greeted with blank looks.  "Never mind.  Let us simply say that I have closed off an unproductive loop of history," he tells them, "and spared you all some difficulty."  He's also inadvertently closed off a way for Jonah Hex to get back to the Old West, 'cause you know if the Leaguers had shown up in 2050 to rescue Metamorpho, Jonah would've insisted on hitching a ride.

The Armageddon 2001 event spawned another miniseries the next year, titled Armageddon: The Alien Agenda, where Captain Atom continued the fight against Monarch, who'd been revealed as Hank Hall, AKA Hawk (a plot twist that's a story in and of itself).  As you probably guessed from the title, the overall story involves aliens that wish to destroy the Earth, so they talk Monarch into tracking down Captain Atom -- who's stolen their detonator -- as he flees through time.  Armageddon: The Alien Agenda #3 (January 1992) finds Captain Atom landing in the Old West, where he runs into a whole passel of DC Western characters, including Hex, who's only a minor player here.  The dialogue in the issue is mostly tongue-in-cheek, and writer Jonathan Peterson accidentally calls Firehair "Flame Bird", but we do get a great bar fight scene, rendered in fine detail by Alan Weiss & Joe Rubinstein:

There is one tiny mistake near the end of the story that puts a damper on things: during the slugfest between Captain Atom and Monarch, a powerful alien gun is accidentally discharged at the ground, setting off an earthquake, which soon ripples northward from the tiny desert town of Dry Gulch towards the San Andreas Fault, "and thus San Francisco suffers its greatest tragedy", according to the caption box on a panel that shows the bayside city being torn to shreds.  There's no date given within the story itself, but the image and wording heavily implies this to be the Great San Francisco Earthquake, which occurred on April 18, 1906...two years after Jonah Hex died.  One could ignore how young the artists made Firehair/Flame Bird look (when we saw him in Swamp Thing #85, he appeared to be in at least his 60s, befitting a character originally based in the early 1800s) or even write the fella off as Firehair's descendant, hence the different name, but putting a very-much-alive Hex in a story set after he'd been stuffed and mounted is a bit harder to gloss over.  The best we can do is be glad they didn't put a specific date on this, and keep in mind there had been other large earthquakes in the San Francisco area that preceded the 1906 quake, so maybe it's one of those instead.

All in all, Jonah only managed to rate a half-dozen appearances in the first 6 years after HEX folded, and the results were a mixed bag.  Things weren't likely to improve, either: without a regular series in print, he would remain at the mercy of whatever random wordsmith plucked him out of Comic Book Limbo...not the best position for any fictional person to be in.  Lucky for Jonah, a new frontier was just beginning to open up within the DCU, a place where surly ol' cuss like him would be free to drink and smoke and swear and kill to his heart's content.  Fleisher's idea of a Jonah Hex title that was truly for "mature readers" would finally be realized, thanks to a born-and-bred Texan who'd help bring the weird back to the Old West.

<< Part 11  |  Index  |  Part 13 >>

Appendix A  |  Appendix B

North versus South, Facebook-style

Back in January, I told you fine folks about how I'd finally landed a publishing contract for my original novel, Swords & Sixguns: An Outlaw's Tale.  At the time, I had no idea when the release date would be, other than it would happen sometime in the next 4 years.  Well, I'm happy to report that we've narrowed that window down to 2016.  That gives me two years to bang out the second novel (I'm up to 100-odd pages at the moment), as well as begin to build a bandwagon upon which I'll be shilling the book to everyone within earshot.

To that end, I've started a Facebook page for the book series.  If you recall, that was the original reason I joined Facebook a couple of years ago, back when I thought I might have to self-publish and, therefore, self-promote.  Why did I start the page today instead of waiting another year or two?  'Cause September 1st, 1994 was the very first day I sat down with the clear intent of writing a book -- I'd even taken a week's vacation off from work just to make sure I had time to really buckle down and write -- so I figured the 20th anniversary of that day was the best time to start up the Facebook page.  So if'n ya feel so inclined, head on over to https://www.facebook.com/SwordsAndSixguns and give it a like.  Posting will be sparse at first, I'll admit, but I'll do my level best to keep things interesting.

Speaking of Facebook and September events, this is also the anniversary month for "Jonah Hex, Via Pony Express"...the other page I run, thanks to Darren Schroeder tagging me in as admin not longer after he set it up.  Turns out these past two years of doing Hex-centric posts and noodling with the page in general have been great practice for what I'll need to be doing with the "Swords & Sixguns" page, so I won't be a total doofus about it like I was when I first tried making a Facebook page (you may recall the large amount of cussin' I did regarding that).  On VPE's end of things, today's the first day of our FOREVER HEX celebration, which is a little bittersweet this year, what with the recent cancellation of All-Star Western.  Despite this, VPE will soldier on, and if you want to join us, pop over to https://www.facebook.com/ViaPonyExpress and, once again, give it a like.

This is gonna be a little weird, running two different Facebook pages about two different Western guys.  As if they don't vie for my writing time already, now I've pitted them head-to-head on social media.  Let's see how long it takes before I start mixing up which post goes where.

A Meeting and a Departure

It's been a bit of an emotional roller-coaster for me the last few days when it comes to Jonah Hex stuff: one big high point followed by one bigger low point.  The low you probably already know about, and I'll get to it later, as I would much rather start with the high. 

This past Saturday,  my husband and I made our annual pilgrimage to the Motor City Comic Con.  Money's still kinda tight around Hillwig HQ, so we had a limited budget, but we each managed to obtain our major targets.  For Jamin, it was autographs from Chris Sarandon and Robert Hays, and for myself, it was getting a chance to finally meet the legendary Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez.

Since I write so much about Hex, you probably think that's where I got hooked on the artist, since he had a good run on Weird Western Tales and Jonah Hex, but I actually knew him from further back, thanks to that big ol' stack of comics my dad would bring home from work.  Mixed into that stack were a few issues of Atari Force, the earliest one being #8.  My 10-year-old self was instantly drawn in, both by Gerry Conway's story and Garcia-Lopez's art.  I fell instantly in love with his style, and when I found out that he was also responsible for creating many of the images used for DC's licensed products, it pretty much blew my mind, because it meant that his work graced all those puzzles and paint-by-numbers and other things that my dad's company made (it also meant that I had scribbled all over a Batman marker-by-number poster with his stuff on it as a kid...my coloring skills haven't improved much since then).  This guy was everywhere, perfectly capturing the image of every DCU character that he rendered.

When I got into Jonah Hex, I eventually stumbled upon the Garcia-Lopez issues, and once again had my mind blown.  As I mentioned when chronicling his first Hex story for my li'l history project, the way he draws the character differs greatly from how so many others have done it over the years.  All those crisp lines and pitch-perfect expressions that Garcia-Lopez is famous for seem like they wouldn't fit in a Jonah Hex story, but it becomes like a breath of fresh air.  Dwayne over at Matching Dragoons points to one issue in particular -- Jonah Hex #32 -- as being one of the most outstanding Hex stories ever produced, mainly due to Garcia-Lopez's art.  He took what Tony DeZuniga originally envisioned and distilled it into a form that can stand next to all the characters he's ever worked on, so that Jonah fits in perfectly without losing anything that makes the character what he is (weird fact: Garcia-Lopez is the only Hex artist I've ever seen that remembers to add the little deerskin pouch onto Jonah's belt that Tony DeZuniga always put on there...seriously, go look at a bunch of renderings and see if you can spot it).

Needless to say, when I found out he was going to be at the con, I was bound and determined to meet him.  I sent him a note via Facebook, asking if he would be doing sketches (some artists don't do them at cons anymore) and was thrilled when he sent a positive reply.  I will admit, I geeked out heavily, bouncing up and down a bit from overexcitement before I even spoke with the man -- when he looked up at me and said, "I remember you," presumably from my Facebook pic, I just about went over the moon.  Thanks goodness Garcia-Lopez had some original pieces laying out on his table in portfolios, as the images helped me find the words I wanted to get out.  "This is the first work of yours I ever saw," I told him, pointing at some Atari Force pages (yes indeed, he still has four in his possession...they're a couple hundred bucks apiece if you're interested).  Then I pointed at a recent Jonah Hex piece he'd done and said, "But today, I'm here for him."

He gladly did a head-shot of Jonah for me (his fourth of the day, according to his assistant), and as he worked, I told him that I'd been enjoying the Madame .44 backup he'd been doing in All-Star Western, but I'd love to see him draw one more Hex story.  I know quite a few folks who've been hoping for the same ever since the character came back in late 2005, as Garcia-Lopez's version is so quintessential.  I reckon that's why my hands began to shake when he handed the sketchbook back to me -- I actually had to put the book down on the table and lay my hands flat upon it until I was sure I could hold onto it.  I must've thanked him a dozen times before, during, and after he did that sketch, and even now, I look at it in disbelief.  Buying that Tony DeZuniga piece earlier this year was phenomenal, but this...I stood there while Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez himself drew it!  I swear, Jonah's staring at me from the page as if to say, "Yuh ain't worthy tuh own this."

I was still somewhat giddy about the whole experience when my husband broke the bad news to me Tuesday morning: All-Star Western has been cancelled.  The final issue -- #34 -- will be released in August, wrapping things up just before DC does their next big event...which I have absolutely no interest in.  After ASW's departure, the only two DC titles left on my pull-list are Harley Quinn and the upcoming G.I. Zombie, both co-written by Jimmy Palmiotti (who appears to be the only reason I still buy DC these days), so if they get tangled up in this "Future's End" mess coming in September, that'll be my only exposure to it.  I've talked about this conundrum before, how I've been drifting away from the current DCU offerings even though they're the ones who got me interested in comics to begin with, and to be honest, I figured that, when Jonah got the axe, that would be the end of my association with DC, but things keep ending up on my pull-list here and there (Li'l Gotham ended a few months back, but I'm also signed on for the Batman '66/Green Hornet mini, and Sandman: Overture occasionally shows up in my box was well), so for now, my connection with the DCU is not fully severed.

After they did a "skip month" last September, I figured ASW's cancellation was only a matter of time.  I still held out hope that we'd get another year out of the book, though, or maybe fortune would smile upon ol' Jonah, and he'd actually make it all the way to issue #55, thereby enabling Jimmy & Justin to surpass Fleisher's record for number of Hex stories written (and maybe we'd get some new Garcia-Lopez art out of the deal, as well).  Of course, that isn't going to happen now, but I am happy they'll have 106 tales under their belt when it's all over...twenty shy of Fleisher, but still a damn respectable number.  Add in the guest-shots, the cartoon appearances, the action figures, plus the movie (yes, it was lousy, but it still happened), and you've gotta admit, the past nine years have been very, very good for Jonah Hex.  It's been over four decades since his creation, but that sonovabitch is still here, and just because his title is bring cancelled doesn't mean he'll cease to exist.  Over six years passed between HEX#18 and Jonah Hex: Two-Gun Mojo #1, and another six passed between the last issue of Jonah Hex: Shadows West and the first issue of Palmiotti & Gray's tenure on the character.  If the trend holds, and those fellas don't crank out a special or something after August 2014 passes (thereby skewing the numbers), Jonah will claw his way back onto the comic book racks sometime around 2020.  Hunker down, be patient, and keep your eyes peeled for more guest-shots in other titles -- any time there's a whiff of the Old West in a DC book, Jonah's there more often than not.

As for myself, I'll continue to keep Jonah's memory alive in my own peculiar fashion.  And that's really the key to bringing the old man back on a large scale: we can't let folks forget about him.  I really do enjoy writing the Hex-fics and such, but part of the drive to do them has always been to raise Jonah's profile, and to get people interested enough in the character that they'd go out and plunk money down for his books.  Justin Gray told me years ago that he should buy me a shot of whiskey for every new Hex-nut I'd brought into the fold, to which I replied that I'd already roped so many in, he owed me a whole bottle.  Now there's no book to hype (save for my own...release date still pending), but that doesn't mean the work stops.  Yes, I can switch to a lower gear, especially since I now have a paying gig with Permuted Press, but until the ideas totally dry up in my brain or I simply run out of Hex-related things to talk about, I'll keep chugging along.

To that end, I'm doing my best to set up a schedule, as opposed to my usual scattershot method of writing this stuff.  "An Illustrated History of Jonah Hex" will become a bi-annual thing, with new parts being released on November 1st (Jonah's birthday) and May 1st (exactly 6 months later) until we hit the end, after which I'll start to work on appendices, like comparing Jonah's known Civil War activities to real-life history.  As for fanfic, there's still a few tales that need to be told in Weird Western Quarterly, including the long-delayed issue  #25, so I'll get those out eventually, and of course, there's the ongoing saga of Jonah Hex: Shades of Gray, which I plan on writing for a good long time.  With no regular Hex title being published, this'll be the only way to get new stories for the foreseeable future, so if you like what I'm doing with Jonah, let me know...and if you hate it, let me know that as well (I also encourage you to write your own fics, and if you do, send me a link, I'd love to read someone else's take on Jonah).  I don't have a schedule pinned down for WWQ or SoG as of yet, but I'm working on it.

And now I shall make a promise to all my fellow Hex-nuts out there: if my novel series Swords & Sixguns becomes a hit, and I gain enough clout that I can actually wrangle a meeting with The Powers That Be at DC Comics, I will do my damnedest to bring Jonah Hex back to the racks, even if it's just a one-off special (this is presuming he's not already there in this hypothetical scenario).  There's a couple of tales rattling around in my brain that I'm holding in reserve just in case the opportunity ever arises.  Until that day comes, though, tell others about Jonah Hex.  Buy the trades from DC.  Join us on the "Jonah Hex, Via Pony Express" Facebook page so you don't miss any news that might pop up.  Draw pictures, write stories, dress up as Hex or Tallulah Black or the other DC Western folk at conventions, do anything you can to keep that memory alive.

 Because Jonah Hex will come back one day, and it'll be nice to have friends waiting for him when he arrives.

What do you get a 160-year-old guy for his birthday?

Today is a very special day: On April 5th, 1854, Richard Ashley Corrigan, the main character of my novel Swords & Sixguns, was born in New York.  Yes, I really did give him a birthday.  It was something I used to do when I first began making up characters, and I fell out of the habit not long after I bestowed Richard with his.  It was a way to make these fictional characters feel more “real” to me, and in Richard’s case, it gave me a baseline so I could figure out where and when he fit in historically.  So, since this is his big day, I thought I’d give you a peek at how he came to be.

The truth is, Richard was born when I got stuck on a scene for the story I was working on back in 1991.  At the time, I was transitioning from trying to draw a whole story -- page by page like a comic book -- to actually writing it out in full prose, plus I was moving away from superhero rip-offs and into fantasy (mostly because that’s the sort of stuff my friends in high school were writing).  I’ve never been a full-on fantasy fan, though: I like the aesthetic, but I’m not interested in reading or watching every single sword-wielding epic that comes along, and writing in typical fantasy style isn’t all that appealing to me, either.  But again, this is what my friends were writing, so I decided to give it a whirl by building a medieval world that I dubbed Arkhein, which I quickly populated with all the usual cliché characters: the swordsman, the spellcaster, the thief, and on and on (the results weren’t very good, and those original tales now reside in a landfill somewhere).  Then came the day when I decided that my thief must have learned his trade from someone, but I couldn’t nail down who that someone was (despite the clichés, I was trying to do some actual character development), so I put the work aside and went to bed.

This is the point where reality takes a weird turn.  I had a dream about playing poker in some seedy bar with a guy I’d never laid eyes on before -- brown hair, stubbly face, dingy coat -- who scooped all the money off of the table and ran away after I’d won the hand.  Determined to get my winnings back, I went after him, dodging folks in the crowded street outside the bar as I yelled his name, “Corrigan!”

I woke up the next day with the memory of this guy still in my head.  Strange thing was, I couldn’t recall at the time ever hearing the name “Corrigan” beforehand (I now believe that I subconsciously picked it up from a local company called Corrigan Oil, which has a sign that’s plainly visible from a highway I frequently traveled on around that time).  Why that name in particular decided to drift through my sleeping brain, I have no idea, but it stuck fast to this new character, and other details about him soon came into focus, like the first name of “Richard” (it just sounded right) and the fact that, despite his presence in a traditional fantasy setting, he carried a gun.  I think I can blame my still-blossoming interest in Westerns for the latter wrinkle, mixed with my love of Star Wars (it was obvious from the start that Richard’s attitude was similar to Han Solo’s), and after failing to mentally shoo that anachronism away, I gave in and began to reason out why he had it.  Well, he must not be from that world, I thought.  He’s from Earth, and he got transported to Arkhein somehow...he found a crossroad between worlds...

And that was when the clichés finally started to dissolve in favor of real storytelling.  All the work I’d put into Arkhein up to that point was chopped up and sifted through, with the best pieces repurposed for the new tale I was now constructing around this Old West outlaw who’d been dropped into a medieval setting.  It wasn’t until 1994 that I really began to buckle down and write a full-fledged novel as opposed to jotting down little scenes and doodling -- the picture above is one of the earliest drawings I did of Richard, taken from an old notebook I used to organize story ideas -- there were many more stops and starts along the way, but I believed in the character and the idea enough to keep going, and I’m proud that all the work has paid off.  We’ve still got at least a year before the novel is printed, but I think it’ll be worth the wait.

We’ll talk some other time about the earlier versions of Arkhein that existed before I finally completed Swords & Sixguns (to speak of those prior to the novel’s release would bring spoilers), so for now, let me just tip my hat in Richard’s direction and wish him a happy 160th birthday.  May we have even bigger things to celebrate next year.

An Illustrated History of Jonah Hex (Part 11)

1985-1987: Future Shock

As befits a series built around time travel, we’re going to start off this extra-long installment by skipping ahead one month into the future so we can look at the letter column for the second issue of HEX, wherein Michael Fleisher tells us how he got the inspiration to move our favorite bounty hunter into a new environment.  Unlike the tale related by Bob Greenberger -- who thinks Andy Helfer may have been the influence behind dropping Hex into a Mad Max-style setting -- Fleisher credits someone else with providing the initial inspiration.  Designer Ed Hannigan (who’d been put in charge of the covers for Jonah Hex in 1984) dropped into the DC offices one day with a HEX logo hand-painted in violet and hot pink.  While he was responsible for creating  many great designs for DC over the years, Fleisher wrote that Hannigan “had not been asked to design any such logo and had no expectation whatever of being paid for it.  It was electrifying, certainly, but it was totally unsuitable for the then-running Western series Jonah Hex.  ‘Ed, it’s gorgeous,’ I said, ‘but what the hell is it for?’  ‘I don’t really know,’ shrugged Ed.  ‘But I really like the name ‘Hex’ and I thought you might be able to use it for something.’”  According to Fleisher, he had been dabbling with an idea for “a bleak, war-torn world” before Hannigan walked in what that logo (meaning Helfer’s influence could still be in there somewhere), but it wasn’t until seeing that graffiti-style rendering of HEX that all the pieces came together in his head.  Hannigan also provided some additional character designs for the new series, which Mark Texeira used as a starting-point for his own work once he was hired on as artist.

We can only estimate that this incident with the logo happened around the same time the axe came down for the Jonah Hex title, and therefore made it easier for all concerned to see this as a viable way to keep the character alive in the DCU, albeit in a future whose exact date had yet to be determined.  In fact, a memo written by Greenberger dated May 30, 1985 (which you can find a copy of in 2008’s The DC Vault from Running Press) shows the company was still trying to nail down exactly when this new series was supposed to take place in the post-Crisis timeline just a few months before HEX#1 hit the stands.  It’s interesting to see that such notable creators as Paul Levitz, Marv Wolfman, and Dick Giordano weighed in on Hex’s fate (all of whom agreed that the new series should be set at least 500 years into the future), but as Greenberger himself said when I asked him about it in 2012, “The editorial edict that we have one timeline, one consistent throughline from 1985 to the 30th Century was paid more lip service than actual adherence,” meaning that Fleisher’s eventual decision to have HEX  take place in the year 2050 won out over everyone else’s concerns.

Another thing Fleisher mentioned in the letter column was that, unlike Jonah’s previous titles, HEX would be a non-Code book, which had heavy implications: back in the 1980s, only titles that bore the Comics Code Authority’s seal of approval could be carried on newsstands, so not submitting a title to them implied that it was for “mature readers” and a far cry from the “kid’s stuff” many folks still thought comics consisted of.  In reality, DC simply decided to make HEX a direct market-only book and not offer it to newsstands in the first place.  As Greenberger put it, “The company didn’t want to pay for a seal that was unnecessary.”  In hindsight, the decision to keep Jonah’s new title off the newsstands -- where his numbers remained consistently good -- was probably not a smart move, though DC did make an in-house ad promoting HEX in order to give him a leg-up in the comics shops (I’m sad to report that the saber-toothed tiger in the ad turns up nowhere in the series).  But the biggest irony of HEX not having the Code seal is Fleisher never seemed to take full advantage of the freedom that gave him, especially when compared to other non-Code titles published by DC around the same time (even the swears in HEX are of the “#@*&%!” variety).  It’s not like anyone at DC was holding Fleisher back, either: Mark Texeira was quoted on the subject in Back Issue #14 (February 2006), saying the company “sort of left us to our own mini-universe.  As long as deadlines were met, they left us alone.”  Despite this hands-off approach, HEX was indeed part of DCU continuity, even after it had ceased to be, but we shouldn’t discuss the end before we look at the beginning...

The first two pages of HEX#1 (dated September 1985) ease both Jonah and the reader into this new world.  The bounty hunter wakes up in an ordinary-looking saloon, wondering where Emmylou and Brett have gone.  Before he has a chance to get over his confusion, El Papagayo barges in and begins shooting -- Jonah dives for cover, shoots the bandito in the gut, and is shocked to see wires and metal spill out of his innards.  Jonah also realizes his gun -- which only contained one shot -- is just a lightweight piece of junk.  Tossing it aside, he runs out of the saloon and into what he immediately categorizes as “a nightmare”:

Stunned into submission, Jonah is dragged off to meet Reinhold Borsten, the man who brought him to this strange place.  As to why he did so, Borsten declines to say right off, instead telling his “guest” that he has “long been a devotee of the fighting man and a dedicated student of the art of war.”  Borsten then shows Jonah various images of battles throughout time, up to and including footage of nuclear holocausts -- the latter proves too much for Hex’s 19th-Century mind, and he goes catatonic.  When Jonah recovers, he’s been locked inside a glass tube, which is slowly filling with a paralyzing gas -- he busts out to find he’s in a room filled with similar tubes, all containing soldiers from various eras, along with cases of weaponry.  After grabbing some guns (good ones this time, not single-shot phonies like before), Jonah makes a break for it with the guards hot on his tail, and even though he silently admits that all this craziness has him “shakin’ in muh boots”, he eventually manages to sneak out of the compound.  Not that being outside is much better: the surrounding area is nothing but a wasteland, and Jonah has no choice but to trudge across it on foot.  Borsten had told Jonah that he was now in Seattle, but Jonah knows that “Seattle’s a far damn cry from the town of Red Dog, whar thet saloon wuz!”

While his mind is still trying to puzzle it all out, he comes across a gal in the middle of the desert being assaulted by three thugs.  Seeing as how this is a situation he can actually relate to, he throws himself into the fray and rescues the girl (who must look stark naked compared to what Jonah’s used to seeing women wear).  Afterward, she leads him to where she left her motorcycle -- since her arm’s sprained, she asks Jonah to drive, a request that causes Jonah to sit there like a lump until she explains how to start it.  As he gets it going, she says to him, “If you can’t even jockey a cycle, how do you manage to get around?”

“Horse,” he answers plainly, and the two of them speed across the wasteland, with the girl, Stiletta, directing him to where her gang is camped out.  The Road Reapers are very much cast from the same mold as the denizens of the Mad Max films, and I can only imagine what Hex must be thinking the first time he lays eyes on the giant grasshopper they’re barbecuing.  Stiletta introduces Hex to Falcon, the leader of the Reapers, who apparently thinks of Stiletta as part of his harem -- she defiantly plants a kiss right on Hex’s lips as a thank-you for saving her life, which leaves Falcon fuming and Hex looking confused.  All the talk going on about raiding a nearby community for water baffles him as well, but he throws in with them anyhow, even though, in his words, “It don’t smell right.”  Sure enough, as soon as the raid goes south and the gang scatters to the four winds, Hex hears Falcon spouting off about how he’s going to “ride back here and turn this community into a graveyard!”  Now knowing for sure that the Road Reapers are the bad guys (but holding on to the notion that Stiletta isn’t like the rest of them...that must’ve been some kiss), Jonah turns on Falcon, leading to some good ol’-fashioned fisticuffs in the desert.  Around the same time, the sky opens up and it begins to rain, but this isn’t a good thing: Stiletta had warned Hex earlier about the “acid storms” that pour down on the wasteland, and he immediately feels it eating through his fine Confederate-gray coat.  Luckily, Stiletta also told him about the protective “zone suits” the Road Reapers wear, so after knocking out Falcon, he ditches his own clothes, strips the suit off of Falcon, and leaves the skunk to dissolve as Jonah roars off on his cycle.

In twenty-five pages, we’ve watched Jonah’s past life get torn from him in bits and pieces -- his environment, his weapons, even his uniform -- until all that remains is the man himself, clad in strange clothes and riding a tricked-out chopper.  And if all these changes weren’t jarring enough for ya, HEX#2 starts in 1968 as a pair of military helicopters ferry American troops out into the field.  One of the soldiers on board, Marty Berkowitz, is reading a book about Old West gunfighters, and has just begun the chapter about Jonah Hex when a familiar beam of light engulfs both hueys.  Borsten’s men have struck again, but in their eagerness to pluck more soldiers out of time, they accidentally dump the helicopter containing Berkowitz and his buddies in the middle of the wasteland.  In a nice bit of coincidence, they nearly crash into Jonah himself on the way down -- although he doesn’t know what’s going on, he recognizes people in danger when he sees them, so Jonah pulls as many of the soldiers to safety as he can before the helicopter blows up.  Assisting him in this is Captain Stanley Harris, a black man who takes an immediate dislike to Hex.  “I don’t make a practice of shakin’ hands with you Southern boys!” he snaps the moment he hears the gunfighter’s drawl.  Berkowitz and Hank Winslow -- the only other soldiers to survive the crash -- try to smooth things over, but they don’t have much time to chit-chat before a trio of machines reminiscent of War Wheels come barreling down upon them, guns blazin’.  The weapons our ragtag bunch carry can’t put a dent in the machines, but then Hex takes careful aim at the one part of the machine that’s unshielded:

Once the crews of all three machines are wiped out (and Harris makes an anachronistic reference to a Gillette Trac II razor, which wasn’t invented until 1971), they commandeer one of the machines and head out.  As they travel, the soldiers do their best to convince Jonah of what they figured out easily, namely that they’ve all been transported to the future.  Hex, of course, ain’t buyin’ it, even after being shown the book Berkowitz had been reading, which contained an eyewitness account of Jonah disappearing from the Red Dog Saloon in 1875 (we can only presume the rest of that chapter got destroyed in the crash, or else something else about Hex’s history might’ve come to light right then as well).  Despite his disbelief, Hex does offer up information about Borsten’s complex and what he saw there, and the soldiers figure it must hold the key to them all getting back to their proper timeframes.  They’re gonna need more firepower before they attempt to break in, however, and Winslow directs them to the remains of a military research base -- seems he grew up in Seattle, and his father worked at that base in the time he came from -- but while the base’s personnel are long-gone, they left behind three laser-packin’ robot hounds (everything’s coming in threes this issue).  A grenade wipes out one, and a rotten piece of floor takes care of another, but the third hound damn-near clamps its metal teeth around Hex’s throat before a high-powered round blows it up.  And who’s the one to save Hex’s bacon?  It’s Stiletta, though the question of how she tracked Hex down is never asked...or rather Jonah doesn’t seem too concerned about asking it:

That night, after they fix up one of the flying machines found at the base, Stiletta leads them to the Needle (the name for Borsten’s complex) and helps them break in.  As they make their way down a corridor, a laser grid suddenly fires up, killing Berkowitz and Winslow instantly.  Harris immediately accuses Stiletta of betraying them, and after yelling at her for a moment, shoots her as Hex looks on in shock.  “Yuh kill-crazy lunatic!” Jonah hollers, slugging him, but Harris quickly shows the gunfighter the truth: “Stiletta” was actually a robot, sent by Borsten to lure Hex back to the Needle.  Harris had seen a flicker of light in her eyes, betraying her machine nature, but Jonah can’t comprehend this any better than the rest of the madness he’s seen.  When Borsten’s guards show up, though, he can comprehend that just fine, so he and Harris blast away at them while the pair try to escape.  Unfortunately, another laser grid pops up, separating them, and Jonah ends up escaping the Needle alone.

While Jonah flees across the wasteland on his cycle, we’re going to veer off for a moment ourselves to talk about the DC Challenge, which was featured in a subscription ad this issue.  I’m not even going to attempt to explain this 12-issue epic because, as others have pointed out, it’s somewhat inexplicable.  Suffice it to say that it’s one last hurrah for the pre-Crisis DCU, with a different creative team each issue trying to one-up whomever came before them while leaving the next batch of creators baffled.  In issue #2, Len Wein and Chuck Patton decide to add Jonah Hex into the mix, using a mysterious glowing stone to pull Jonah out of 1876 and toss him into 1985, where he promptly freaks out.  He later gets captured by some gangsters -- one of whom is the spitting image of Peter Lorre -- that want the stone in Jonah’s possession.  The issue ends with Jonah trying to keep a car from sliding into a group of children and nuns, and he succeeds when we see him again in issue #3, where Doug Moench and Carmine Infantino have him square off against a djinn before returning the bounty hunter to 1876 (it’s interesting to note that, over 13 years after making suggestions as to how Jonah Hex should look in his debut story, Infantino finally gets to deliver his own rendition of the character).  Now, for those of you keeping score, the Jonah who’s running for his life in HEX got yanked out of 1875, which means that (if we dare to count the DC Challenge as in-continuity) his part in this crazy tale takes place one year afterward.  We’ll speak more on the implications of this in the next installment, because right now, we need to get back to the other future.

HEX#3 opens right where the previous issue left off, with Jonah still on the run from Borsten’s men.  He wipes them out easily enough, which certainly doesn’t please their boss, and we soon learn the reason why Jonah got snatched up from 1875, along with all those other soldiers: Borsten is in the reenactment business, using real people from history to fight battles for his wealthy clients to bet on.  According to Borsten, the soldiers “are heavily sedated the moment they arrive here, are revived only in settings and habitats nearly identical to those they came from, and are housed securely in my own stasis capsules in the intervals between battles!”  The fact that these soldiers are also dying for their amusement seems lost on everyone -- the closest we get to concern is when one of the spectators asks if the mustard gas being used on the battlefield will leak into the viewing booth.  Jonah Hex was supposed to be his newest attraction, and Borsten had advertised this in advance, which explains why he’s been putting so much effort into getting the gunfighter back.  It doesn’t look like that’s going to happen anytime soon, though, as Jonah put some miles between himself and the Needle after hitching a ride with Barnaby Blossom, a fast-talkin’ fella who travels the wasteland selling a pacifying drug called Lotus.  Like most everything else in the future, it takes Hex a while to realize this Lotus stuff is dangerous, but he gets the message once Blossom demonstrates the effects of the intoxicating smoke on a crowd, including a little boy who almost dies after getting a snootful:

Now we all know you shouldn’t hurt a kid when Jonah Hex is around, so it’s no surprise when Jonah breaks up Blossom’s operation, knocking the man out of his flying machine in the process...which Jonah then crash-lands in the middle of nowhere that the beginning of HEX#4.  For this issue, we’re changing up artists: Ron Wagner penciled this tale, while inker Carlos Garzon (who also worked with Texeira on the previous issue) provides some continuity to the art style.  A lot of backstory gets filled in this time around, starting not long after Jonah -- who’s just about to drink from a small spring he’s found in the desert -- meets Stiletta once again.  He immediately pulls a gun on her, gasping, “You--you ain’t human!  Yo’re some kinda machine!”  Stiletta has no clue what he’s talking about, but reasons that he must’ve seen a robot that looked like her.  “Honestly, Hex, I can’t imagine how you got to be so ignorant about some things,” she says, then begins to show him how to purify the water with a chemical wafer called a Soames -- after the bombs dropped five years earlier, all open sources of water became heavily irradiated, and if he’d swallowed so much as a mouthful without treating it first, it would’ve killed him -- they’re so indispensible that they’ve become the de facto currency in 2050.  Her willingness to tell him such things must’ve convinced Jonah that she truly wasn’t going to hurt him, because in-between panels, he ‘fesses up to her about where he’s really from.  Stiletta’s surprised, but not shocked, and later on, we find out why: Reinhold Borsten is her father (okay, this kinda explains the robot...).  Seems in the year 2042, Borsten was a liaison for NSA assigned to a time-travel project, wherein he stumbled across what was to happen in only three years’ time:

Stealing designs for both the time machine and several other technologies, Borsten figured he’d bypass the nuclear holocaust and set himself up as king of the wasteland (the reenactments are just a hobby, I guess).  He didn’t count on a criminal organization known as the Conglomerate gaining a foothold before him, thanks to them controlling the world’s supply of Soames, but he’s working on a way to bring them down using his time-travel tech.  After that info-dump, we have a lovely scene involving Hex, Stiletta, and a cave full of bloodsucking mutant earthworms -- once they get out of that scrape, a flying machine tears outta the sky lookin’ to cut them down.  We find out in HEX#5 (which has Texeira back on penciling duty) that Blossom worked for the Conglomerate, and they’ve sent their goons out to search for whomever scattered that shipment of Lotus all over the desert.  Jonah and Stiletta kick the snot outta them and steal their ride so they can get back to civilization (or at least what passes for it these days).  The Conglomerate doesn’t take kindly to this, especially after one of them -- who was looking forward to seeing the gunfight Borsten promised a couple of issues ago -- recognizes Hex in some surveillance footage, and figures Hex must be working for Borsten.

In retaliation, they send out their own “hired gun”: a bruiser named Chain with a buzzsaw hand and titanium body armor.  After a five-page brawl, Jonah manages to flatten him in a car-crusher, but this doesn’t mean his troubles are over, as some of the Conglomerate’s other goons take him and Stiletta captive at the beginning of HEX#6.  Surprisingly, they’re not interested in killing him, and instead the Conglomerate offers Hex a job: taking down Reinhold Borsten and destroying his time machine before he can use his stolen tech to neutralize the radiation in the water table, which would makes Soames worthless and bankrupt the Conglomerate.  A few of their men have already infiltrated the Needle’s personnel, but Hex is “a regular one-man army”, so they want the gunfighter to “surrender” to Borsten’s forces in order to gain access to the time machine, and guarantee Hex that they’ll send him back to 1875 before they destroy it.  Stiletta wants to help out with taking down her father -- when Borsten escaped to the future, he didn’t bother to warn his family, and Stiletta survived the nukes by sheer luck -- but Jonah refuses, saying that he doesn’t want her to “gum up muh plans tuh get back tuh whar Ah come from,” then rides off alone to a spot where Borsten’s men can capture him (though he first puts up a bit of a fight to make it look good).

By HEX#7, Jonah is getting stuffed back into one of those stasis tubes. but he’s not in there for long, as the Conglomerate’s inside man shows up to release him and assist in the plan.  Unfortunately, a guard kills the man right afterward, and accidentally triggers the explosives they were going to use to blow up the time machine.  This sets off a chain reaction throughout the Needle, and Jonah has to try and get to the time machine alone before the whole place blows sky-high.  Little does he know that backup is on the way: Stiletta has ignored Jonah’s request and snuck into the Needle, and she soon runs into Harris, who’s been tortured for the last few issues by Borsten and just managed to escape, hiding out in the Needle’s ventilation shafts.  After an off-screen confab, they realize they’re on the same side and head off to find Hex, releasing all the other captives along the way.  They finally meet up with him in the chronal chamber in time to save him from being shot by Borsten.  After a quick review of the time machine’s controls, Hex and Harris prepare to depart, but more guards bust in, rescuing their boss and shooting Stiletta -- while Harris vanishes, Jonah jumps off the platform without a second thought to save her, and the time machine is destroyed as more explosions tear the chamber apart.  Hex and Stiletta escape the Needle by the skin of their teeth, while Reinhold Borsten is shown being engulfed in flames (we find out a few issues later that he survived, but like Wu Bong Phat four years earlier, Borsten’s vow of revenge will never be fulfilled).

With Jonah’s only way back to the Old West removed from the equation, both he and the reader have to face up to the fact that this hellish future is now home.  This new status quo was referenced in many places throughout the DCU at the time, from Crisis on Infinite Earths #12 to Jonah’s double-page Who's Who entry (Stiletta and El Papagayo also earned their own entries, the only two Hex-related characters to do so) to a caricature of Jonah in his new duds slipped into a tongue-in-cheek story in the back of The Outsiders #6 (April 1986).  There was even a role-playing module published by Mayfair Games in 1986 called HEX: Escort to Hell, the first piece of merchandise -- aside from comic books, of course -- to feature the bounty hunter.  But those who yearned for one last taste of “classic” Jonah Hex could find it if they knew where to look: the two-issue History of the DC Universe gave a nod to his former life as well as his current predicament, and a limited-edition portfolio set by the same name included a lithograph of Jonah on horseback by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez.  In the aftermath of the Crisis, it was good to know that not everything about the old days would be forgotten.

Wagner returned for HEX#8, a fun romp involving a rigged game in a shooting gallery.  This issue also features Jonah gaining some new guns -- a pair of .357 Ruger Blackhawks -- but by the end of the story, he’s lost Siletta!  From the looks of things, she got kidnapped while he was in town getting supplies, and though he searches high and low for her, he turns up nothing, and by the beginning of the next issue (as illustrated by Texeira again), he’s turned his attention towards getting shit-faced instead.  Considering his previous track record with the bottle, this is perfectly understandable, especially when you factor in that Stiletta may have been the only thing in this entire time period keeping Jonah anchored in reality.  There’s also the possibility that Jonah’s in love with Stiletta, but aside from lip-locking with the robot version of her in HEX#2, very little evidence exists in the series to suggest that they’re a romantic couple and not just two people that’ve thrown their lot in with each other.  Whatever the makeup of their relationship, the gal stays on Jonah’s mind through the next couple of  issues, despite distractions like the Stepford Wives-esque community he encounters in HEX#9 and rescuing a well-heeled man’s daughter from a “Sin Killer” cult in HEX#10 (the last one penciled by Ron Wagner).  The latter contains two things that I’d like to bring to your attention, the first occurring right at the beginning, where Jonah mistakes a house of pleasure for a regular roadside inn: he acts almost confused over the fact that he’s in a whorehouse, which makes no sense when you think about all the soiled doves he’d already encountered and/or bedded down over the past 14 years (even presuming he was sweet on Stiletta, I doubt he’d turn down a roll in the hay if it meant he got a room along with it).  Once again, Fleisher didn’t appear to be taking advantage of that lack of CCA oversight, even though he crowed about it more than once on the letters page -- Jonah gets so little action in this title compared to his previous Code-approved one that it’s almost like the gunfighter was afraid of catching some mutant venereal disease from these future-folk.

The other thing of note about HEX#10 is that it’s the first time characters from another title -- specifically the Legion of Super-Heroes -- appear in Jonah’s own book, as opposed to the usual practice of Jonah being the guest-star (like his appearances in Justice League of America). Sadly, these two pages don’t have any bearing on the plot at all, nor do they effect anything in Legion of Super-Heroes #23 (June 1986), where an abbreviated version of this scene appears:

Despite them having no impact upon this particular issue, the presence of Superboy and his pals does signal a turn in the title’s overall content.  Michael Fleisher remarked in HEX#2’s letter column that, in the world of 2050, “there are no hordes of costumed men and women...to haul your keester out of the fire.”  His statement was rendered false the moment he introduced a brand-new incarnation of Batman in HEX#11.  Five years earlier, he’d been a criminology student in New York named Cohen (first name unknown).  While researching the Dark Knight’s career for his college thesis, he deduced Batman’s true identity, and just so happened to locate the Batcave in Gotham the same day the bombs dropped -- he survived thanks to being so deep underground.  When he finally emerged, he found a world in turmoil, ruled by the Combine (the East Coast version of the Conglomerate) and other murderous organizations, one of which targeted his parents for the dual crimes of being Jewish and gun-control advocates.  With Bruce Wayne long dead, Cohen took up his mantle and vowed to keep firearms of any sort out of New York.  While his actions appear to have helped the Big Apple recover faster than the rest of the country (for one, they’re using actual greenbacks as money in addition to Soames), the Combine isn’t happy with Batman’s “No guns in New York” policy, and sends a couple of goons all the way out to Seattle in order to get someone both skilled and unknown to kill him.  Wouldn’t ya know it, Hex fits the bill, and we can presume these guys are the ones who kidnapped Stiletta three issues ago, because they feed Hex a cock-and-bull story about how Batman -- whom they describe as some kind of kinky freak -- tortured and killed her, even going so far as to show the bounty hunter Stiletta’s bloody clothes and footage of the deed.  They fly him to New York so he can get “revenge” on Batman, and thanks to Jonah wearing his guns right out in the open, Batman finds him first.  We get a great five-page tussle that ends with the two of them falling off a rooftop, but luckily HEX#12 opens on them working together to avoid becoming street pizza.  It’s not long afterward that Jonah discovers he’s been bamboozled, and Batman is not only kind enough to give him a lead on where the Combine might be holding Stiletta, he also lets Jonah keep his Rugers, so long as he gets the Hell outta New York once Hex finds his gal.

The rest of the issue is split between Batman’s investigation of the giant laser-wielding robots the Combine is donating to the city (the Combine’s ulterior motive being that they’ll use them to take over New York), and Jonah checking out the “cat club” (read: an illegal fighting ring) Batman directed him to.  Jonah immediately recognizes “The Blonde Spitfire” in the ring as Stiletta, but the bouncers at the door beat the snot out of him before he can even get close.  When he eventually comes to in the alley out back, the Combine already has the giant robots rampaging across the city, and for some inexplicable reason, Hex runs off to help Batman instead of trying to rescue Stiletta again.  They manage to destroy all three robots (again with the groups of three!), but dusting off the last one apparently costs Batman his life, as we never see him again after his plane crashes into the Hudson River.  In HEX#13, Jonah dares to jump into the river to try and save him, but can’t find Batman’s body, and is grabbed by a pair of sewer-dwelling, cannibalistic mutants before he can make it back to shore.   Now I don’t know about you, but I’d think taking a dip like that would be lethal for anyone -- remember, one mouthful of irradiated water is enough to kill a person -- so either Fleisher forgot about that stipulation or New York has managed to decontaminate the surrounding waters (the latter could explain why paper money is slowly coming back into use).  It doesn’t matter much in the long run, because Jonah manages to take out the CHUD wannabes and escapes through the sewer system, ranting along the way about how much he hates water (nice to see some things don’t change).

Meanwhile, “some three thousand miles to the west” (presumably the Seattle area), we discover that Stanley Harris is back in 2050, only now he’s teamed up with the Dogs of War, a bunch of other soldiers who’ve been plucked out of time, including a Viking, a demon-possessed ninja, and a Maori war chief who’s been transformed into a flying manta ray with deadly eye-beams:

We find out by the end of the issue that Harris and his new friends are rounding up gang members to be used as slave labor at the behest of some guy who looks an awful lot like the Watcher.  It’ll be a couple more issues before we get any real information on this pointy-eared fella, so for the moment, we’re just gonna ignore the fact that Jonah is being crowded out of his own book by a bunch of long-underwear types and concentrate on our favorite bounty hunter instead.  Jonah’s managed to track down the skunks who kidnapped Stiletta, but it turns out they sold her to some other “cat club”.  He finally locates her in HEX#14, but rescuing her isn’t as easy as he thought it’d be: Stiletta has not only been pumped full of mind-controlling drugs, they’re given her implants to boost her speed and agility, meaning she damn-near kills Jonah before he works up the nerve to beat the everlovin’ tar outta her.  She recovers both physically and mentally some time later, so Jonah takes her someplace where she can change out of her “Blonde Spitfire” outfit and they can get a bite to eat.  While ordering up some food, Jonah gets knocked for a loop when he overhears a guy talking about how he escaped from the work camp that the Dogs of War are dragging folks off to, and that he thinks the strange man in charge is actually a time-traveler!

We get another good shock with HEX#15, as Mark Texeira is no longer on art duties, and the legendary Keith Giffen has taken his place -- Carlos Garzon sticks around as inker, but Giffen’s style still comes through loud and clear -- it’s a jarring change to say the least, but we’ll just have to roll with it.  The issue opens with Hex telling Stiletta about what he’d overheard, and that he wants to investigate in case it’s true.  There’s a bit of a geographical anomaly here, as the work camp was supposed to be three thousand miles away from New York, so we can only presume that the “cat club” Stiletta had been sent to was closer to the West Coast, and the previous issue glossed over all the cross-country traveling Jonah had to do in order to find her (maybe we could pretend this is where that Escort to Hell RPG adventure fits in, since Stiletta’s not in the game and it appears to take place in the middle of nowhere).  To be sure, they are near Seattle once more, as the next scene shows Chain (last spotted in HEX#5) talking with some Conglomerate bigwigs about how he wants to get even with Hex.  They refuse to back him up, though, since Hex helped them out by getting rid of Borsten, and they now consider Chain to be washed up.  Chain kills a few of their goons to prove otherwise, then goes off to find Hex on his own.

Before we see that confrontation, however, we have to wade through  four dense pages of exposition from S’ven Tarah, our pointy-eared, time-traveling friend.  The short version is that he’s from a very distant future where Earth has been conquered by an H.R. Geiger-esque alien race called the Xxggs, who travel across space in generational ships and enslave any planet that crosses their path.  S’ven Tarah used a time machine to try and escape to a past era where he could find help -- knowing of the Legion of Super-Heroes, he aimed for the 30th Century, but Borsten’s time-meddling ensnared him somehow.  Trapped in 2050, he struck a deal with Borsten, assisting the despot while he secretly worked on a way to stop the Xxggs from this earlier timeframe.  After Borsten’s empire fell, S’ven Tarah was free to carry out his plans, which include endowing Harris and the other Dogs of War with superpowers, because why not?

Back on Jonah’s side of things, he and Stiletta are checking out the devastation caused by the Dogs of War as they picked up some more slaves for the work camp.  Hoping to find a clue as to where they’ve gone, Jonah and Stiletta split up, which is too bad, because Chain jumps him moments later and proceeds to beat him to a pulp.  Jonah manages to take him out by making Chain’s armor short out and explode -- we’ll presume Chain is dead this time, as we never see him again.  After passing out for a bit, Jonah eventually staggers off to find Stiletta, but before he can get far, that manta ray-lookin’ fella comes outta nowhere and zaps him good.  We find in HEX#16 that the Dogs of War have hauled Jonah off to be enslaved just like all the other folks they’ve picked up, and seeing as how Jonah already knows that he doesn’t like being a slave, it’s not long before he breaks out and tries to find the man in charge.  Meanwhile, Stiletta has her own problems: in addition to not knowing what happened to Jonah, she’s been having blackouts where she becomes rather destructive.  A doctor discerns that the blackouts are caused by the mind-control drugs still working their way out of her system, and he also discovers the strength-enhancing implants that’d been put in her -- after she thrashes some guys who try to rob the doc, Stiletta decides to keep the implants, then goes off in search of Jonah.  Back at the work camp, Jonah is still wandering about, taking out guards where he can, until he comes up against Starkad the Slayer, the Viking member of the Dogs of War, and they have a good tussle before Harris steps in to break things up.  Jonah is surprised by this turn of events, but not as surprised as Starkad, who exclaims, “By the yellow god!  Y-you mean you’re friends?!?”  S’ven Tarah’s reaction is about the same when Harris takes Jonah to meet him at the beginning of HEX#17:

Stiletta shows up not long after, as do a trio of Xxggs, who traced S’ven Tarah’s chronal trail back to 2050 (more bad guys coming in threes!).  As the Xxggs begin to tear the place apart, S’ven Tarah sends his Dogs of War to guard the spaceship his labor force has been building.  His long-term plan involves intercepting the Xxgg mothership centuries before it reaches Earth and using a “nucleotide injector” to alter the Xxgg species genetic makeup, thereby making it easier for the Earth forces in the far future to defeat them (the invasion can’t be stopped outright before it happens since it’s already a part of history, albeit hundreds of years from now).  Don’t worry if you don’t understand the plan, because neither does Jonah -- “Ah’m only a poor country boy, Harris,” he says as his friend tries to explain it to him -- yet he’s still willing to help out.  Since the Xxggs appear to be almost indestructible and all five of the Dogs of War are needed to operate the spacecraft, he and Stiletta cook up a distraction so the boys can lift off.  Right before they implement their plan (and after Jonah gets his hands on a long duster-style coat -- his “Road Reapers” jacket was destroyed last issue), Stiletta says that he may have bitten of more than he can chew this time, which prompts Jonah to ask, “You tryin’ to say you love me, sugar?”

“Love you?!?” she replies in disbelief, thereby putting the kibosh on any notion that she’s ever harbored romantic feelings towards him (though I’m fairly certain she just broke Jonah’s heart right there).  Such things don’t matter when you’re trying to save the world, however, and the plan moves forward, with Hex and Stiletta tricking the Xxggs into following them down a tunnel adjacent to where the spaceship’s exhaust ports are located.  The duo slips away just as the engines fire up, and the Xxggs get obliterated in a page sequence that takes advantage of Giffen’s unique sense of design:

With the spaceship containing Harris and the Dogs of War safely underway and all the prisoners released (they were used as cannon fodder for the Xxggs, I’m sorry to say), the only ones left in the facility are Jonah, Stiletta, and S’ven Tarah, who tells them that he is about to depart back to his own era -- he knows the Xxggs will never stop hunting for him, so he’s going to erase his memories about what he’s done in 2050 to keep the Xxggs from learning about his plan once he arrives home.  “By the time they interrogate me, I will have nothing to confess to them,” he says.  He then thanks Jonah for his assistance, but the bounty hunter doesn’t care about being thanked, all he wants is to go home himself, which leads to the reader having to watch as Jonah Hex practically begs S’ven Tarah to send him back to 1875.  He’s not falling to his knees or sobbing or anything like that, but the fact that he says “Please” -- one word, hanging all by itself in a single sentence -- when the man has rarely said that regarding anything in his entire life makes you realize just how worn down and desperate Jonah must be getting after all these issues.  When S’ven Tarah tells him that his time-travel device only has enough energy left for one trip -- and he uses it before Jonah can convince him otherwise -- we can only speculate on how crestfallen the bounty hunter must feel as he silently stares up at the night sky, trying to see the spaceship amongst the stars.

It’s after this final scene that the reader discovers HEX will be coming to an end next issue.  Despite good numbers at the outset, the title just couldn’t find a large enough audience in the direct market to save it from cancellation.  Looking back, the biggest problem with HEX may have been that Michael Fleisher’s reach exceeded his grasp: as he noted in an interview with Dwayne Hendrickson in 2009, Fleisher wasn’t well-versed in science-fiction, and when Mike Browning spoke with him for Back Issue #42 (August 2010), Fleisher said that, despite the work he’d done on the Spectre and Ghost Rider, he “always felt awkward with superheroes”.  Considering the lion’s share of the tales in HEX revolved around either sci-fi concepts or superpowered beings, it’s almost as if Fleisher was setting himself up to fail by tossing Jonah into these large-scale, world-threatening situations where the bounty hunter just got lost in the shuffle.  The best tales in HEX were smaller in scale, like what we see in HEX#18 (February 1987), which revolves mainly around Jonah dealing out bloody vengeance one skunk at a time.  Titled “Thanksgiving”, the story begins with Jonah and Stiletta riding out to visit some friends of hers for the holiday.  From out of nowhere, a gunshot rings out, plugging Jonah in the gut and causing him to crash their cycle -- they manage to scramble to cover, but Jonah is in too bad of shape to make a run for it, so he sends Stiletta off to find help.  What follows is reminiscent of Jonah Hex #46 six years earlier, as Jonah takes out the nine-man gang by any means possible while trying not to bleed to death.  And just to make this even more like Old Home Week, the issue is interspersed with some classic Fleisher flashbacks, showing us Giffen’s renditions of Jonah’s childhood as previously seen in Jonah Hex #51 (young Jonah in a boxing match versus “The Killer Kid”) and the Super-Star Holiday Special (the incident with the raccoon, which is now established to have taken place on Thanksgiving).  It’s a sad sort of irony that Jonah’s hallucinating about his old life in the 1800s just as the series chronicling his new life in 2050 is coming to a close, and it becomes even sadder when he finally collapses, silently asking God to not let him die in this hellish place:

Despite being at death’s door, Jonah manages to bump off a couple more guys before Stiletta and her friends ride in like the cavalry.  Lucky for him, one of her friends, Vance, has medical training, and fixes Hex up right good once they get him back to the warehouse they live in.  He’s still not in the best shape, and is confined to a motorized wheelchair as he explores the place that he’ll be recuperating in.  It runs out that Marya, Vance’s wife, likes to collect vintage amusement park pieces like carousel horses, games, bumper cars, and a certain something we haven’t seen since the Jonah Hex Spectacular nearly a decade ago:

What must it been like for Jonah, to have come so close to dying earlier that day, then finding this thing covered in dust inside a ramshackle warehouse later on?  The only comment we get from him on the subject is “Ah guess it means Ah’ll be goin’ back home one day...after all.”  At the moment, I suppose that’s all the comment he can muster, and since the issue ends right there, we’re deprived of any follow-up, as well as any clue as to how Jonah actually gets home.  Just as Bob Greenberger said, the previous existence of that stuffed and mounted corpse in DC history guaranteed that, should HEX fail as a series, the man would indeed be returned to the Old West at some point, but to divulge the information to Jonah like this is both a blessing and a curse.  He has to look upon Death itself, the companion that follows him wherever he goes, now sheathed in his own skin and brandishing his Dragoons (last seen in Jonah Hex #83, right before he chucked them into a lake...did he somehow recover them once he returned to the past?), but offering Jonah no information beyond its own presence.  It cannot tell him of Tall Bird, the final love of his life; Michael Wheeler, the professor who wished to write the bounty hunter’s biography; George Barrow, the criminal fated to kill him; or Lew Farnham, the showman responsible for Jonah’s body ending up in that state.  All Hex can take away from this is that he will die in the past, not the future, and that he will be an old man when it happens.

And with that grim epilogue, the fifteen-year saga of Jonah Hex came to a close...at least as far as his self-titled book was concerned.  Jonah Hex the character would live on, trapped not only in 2050, but in the same limbo occupied by hundreds of DC characters deprived of regularly-scheduled appearances.  But as we all know, Jonah doesn’t take kindly to being imprisoned, so there’ll be a few escape attempts, some of them aided and abetted by old friends who will help ensure his place in the past, present, and future of the DCU, because nothing can ever truly kill this ol’ saddle-bum.

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Appendix A  |  Appendix B