1993-1999: A Slight Case of Vertigo
In early 1993, DC relocated six of their "mature
readers" titles to a new imprint called Vertigo, overseen by editor Karen
Berger, who'd previously been responsible for bringing some of the U.K.'s best
creators over to the United States during the mid-1980s "British
invasion" of comics. Thanks to the
direct market, the number of non-Code titles had steadily increased over the
years, allowing comic-book publishers to present readers with a broad range of
stories that didn't necessarily have to conform to the stringent standards of
the Comics Code Authority, which still oversaw the newsstand offerings. As Berger explained in 1995's DC Comics: Sixty Years of the World's
Favorite Comic Book Heroes from Bulfinch Press, the foundation of Vertigo
came from her "desire to do material for adults -- male or female -- who
didn't necessarily read comics growing up." And indeed, the titles published under the
Vertigo label were adult material, both in the themes tackled by the writers
and the images laid out by the artists. Like
Marvel's Epic line a decade earlier, Vertigo would be a showcase for
creator-owned content, as well as a haven for offbeat and neglected characters
from DC's long history, including a certain scar-faced bounty hunter who'd been
without a home for six years. Between
his Old West roots and the "Future Hex" debacle, Jonah didn't really
fit in the DCU of the 1990s, but this new imprint presented an opportunity to
start over from scratch. Ignoring
everything that had occurred in HEX
-- including the unanswered question of how Jonah got home -- the trio of
miniseries released under Vertigo would send Jonah down a darker path than he'd
ever tread before, making a mark on the character that can still be seen to
this day.
"Champion Mojo Storyteller" Joe R. Lansdale had
already written about a dozen novels and even more short stories by the time he
did his first work for DC in 1989: "Subway Jack", a short Batman
prose story featuring Lansdale's "God of the Razor" character. A trio of other Batman-centric stories
followed, but while editor Stuart Moore had spoken occasionally with Lansdale
about writing a comic script for Vertigo, it wasn't until the Lansdale expressed
interest to James
McCann -- who was with DC's Special Projects Department at the time -- in doing
a Jonah Hex story that the Texas native finally made the jump to full-fledged comic-book
writing.
"It had as much to do with Tim [Truman] and I wanting to
work together as anything after the editorial interest," Lansdale recalled
when I interviewed him via email in 2014, "and there was a bit of time
devoted to getting organized, but I recall it happening quickly." Both men had been fans of Jonah Hex since the
1970s, with Lansdale encountering him in the original tales written by John
Albano, some of which he reread prior to working on the character. You may recall that, early on, Albano liked
to imply that there was something unearthly about Jonah, and though the notion
was abandoned by the time Michael Fleisher took over, Lansdale -- who is rather
adept at writing about unearthly things -- brought those early days back with a
vengeance, filling the world Jonah inhabited with all-too-real monsters and
magic men (or at least as "real" as comics get). Lansdale also saw Jonah as a Texan, same as
himself, and wrote him accordingly, thereby giving Hex a home state for the
first time in his existence (considering how many Hex stories had previously
been set in Texas, the notion seems obvious in hindsight).
As for Timothy Truman, his love of Hex is so strong that he
brought the DC Digest reprints with him when he attended classes at the Joe
Kubert School, a fact he divulged when I spoke with him back in 2006, adding
that "I loved Tony DeZuniga's inking so much, I'd try to copy his inking
style when I was in the school." He
also admitted that he once dressed up as Jonah Hex for a costume party, which
had to be quite a sight, considering the artist's eye for detail. Just as Lansdale amplified the supernatural
trappings of the early days, Truman took DeZuniga's idea of accurately depicting
the Old West as "filthy and dirty" to new heights. With Sam Glanzman on inks, Jonah's world as
seen through the lens of Vertigo is filled with weather-beaten buildings, muddy
streets, haggard faces, and clothes in constant need of mending. If they show a corpse, you can bet a plug
nickel there's flies buzzin' around it, and every bullet that finds its mark is
accompanied by a spray of blood, all of which suits Lansdale's no-holds-barred
style of storytelling very well. "When
we work together...we're like the same guy," Truman said in regards to
their collaboration. "We just have
all the same attitudes about how a character should be handled. Just perfectly synched up...we really don't
even talk much about it. I mean, we'll
do preliminary planning on a story, but as to how to depict a character, that's
just how it comes out. We just do things
how it seems like the way to do it.
Kinda play it by the gut."
On the subject of character depictions, Truman's rendering of
Jonah himself set a new standard.
Previously, his Confederate coat and hat were rather plain, with very
little variation from one artist to the next.
But since he'd literally been stripped of all that during HEX, Truman was free to redesign him
from the ground up. Jonah's coat was now
more elaborate, befitting a former lieutenant in the Confederate cavalry. A small gold hoop could be been seen dangling
from his earlobe, and his hair had grown long enough for him to braid part of
it. Most striking of all was Jonah's
facial scar: where other artists over the years had softened its appearance,
Truman made sure the "Mark of the Demon" lived up to its name by
adding ropy lines of scar tissue that reached all the way up to Jonah's eye,
which now glared at the world with a blood-red iris. Newer readers who were unfamiliar with Jonah
Hex would be able to tell at a glance that he was not a man to be trifled with.
Hitting the stands five months after the debut of Vertigo
itself, Jonah Hex: Two-Gun Mojo #1 (cover-dated August 1993) opens with Jonah himself telling the reader,
"This here story starts one mornin' bright an early with me taking a
little trip through the countryside," while the image is of Jonah getting
dragged behind a horse by the Traywick gang.
Not an unusual situation for Jonah, of course, but it does highlight
something new to the world of Hex: first-person narration. By this point in comics history, both thought balloons and third-person narration boxes were on their way out,
resulting in many characters telling tales from their own point of view. Though a few thought balloons still turn up
throughout the series, the majority of it is peppered with Jonah's sarcastic
opinions about darn-near everything, as if he were relating the story in a
saloon over a few drinks. After they
finish their "trip", the Traywicks attempt to hang Hex, who is soon
rescued by Slow Go Smith, a crotchety old bounty hunter with eyes so bad, it
takes him ten shots to kill all three outlaws.
After a brief introduction, they ride on over to Mud Creek (a Texas
town mentioned in other Lansdale stories) to collect the bounty on the
Traywicks, only to find that it's been claimed by some townsfolk who
unknowingly shot the wrong fellas. The
town is also making money off displaying the bodies and selling pictures of
them, an enterprise that doesn't sit well with Jonah:
Once the error is brought to the sheriff's attention, he says
it'll be a couple of days before a new voucher can be sent (this scene also
introduces a running gag that'll stick around for many years: folks ask how Jonah got the scar, and Jonah makes up an answer). Jonah and Slow Go then head to the saloon -- where
Jonah beats the crap out of some fellas who are harassing an Indian barmaid and
Slow Go hits the bartender with his gun -- and later on split a room at the
hotel, but Jonah kicks Slow Go out after discovering the old man snores. With no other rooms available, Slow Go has to
settle for the livery, where the stable hand charges him a nickel 'cause he got
a peek at the stuffed corpses stored there.
By the end of the issue, though, Slow Go gets more than his money's
worth when he sees one the corpses moving towards him with a pistol in its hand!
Two-Gun Mojo #2 picks up seconds later as it's revealed that the pistol is actually held by a
man in a cloak standing behind the corpse.
Having wasted all his bullets shooting an already-dead body, Slow Go
beans the cloaked man in the head with his empty gun. "Take him, Bill!" the man then yells
at someone with a rather green complexion and dressed in a fringed buckskin
cowboy getup. Bill fills Slow Go full of
lead just before Jonah arrives -- he could hear the shots all the way up in his
room -- but Bill creases Jonah's brow with a bullet and knocks him flat. Bill, the cloaked man, and a trio of other odd characters take off in a wagon with the corpses, and Jonah's left holding
the bag when the sheriff and the other townsfolk arrive. The sheriff doesn't believe a word of Jonah's
tale, of course, and quickly charges him with both the murder of Slow Go and theft
of the corpses, despite Jonah pointing out that it doesn't make any sense:
"I hadn't seen that much industry since my home town
built its first whorehouse," Jonah tells the reader as he watches them
construct the gallows outside the jail.
"But I wasn't as cheered by it." Indeed, Mud Creek is in an incredibly festive
mood when the day of the hanging comes. Lucky for Jonah, the Indian he helped back in
the saloon decides to return the favor: she walks into the sheriff's office and
begins stripping down, getting the sheriff so excited that he doesn't notice her grabbing a gun to blow his brains out with.
The two escape on horseback, with Jonah shooting five of the townsfolk
in the process, including the two picture-peddlers and the bartender, who shot
the Indian in the back (an act that earned the bartender an up-close-and-personal killing from Hex).
They're still in the midst of escaping when Two-Gun Mojo #3 begins, and though Jonah takes out four more of
the townsfolk and shakes off the rest, the Indian gal dies from her gunshot
wound. "Figures. I liked her," Jonah thinks, thus continuing
the grim tradition of Death claiming anyone Jonah cares remotely about.
After circling back 'round to fetch Slow Go's body from the
town's refuse pile -- and set the gallows on fire -- Jonah tracks the
mysterious wagon to Nacogdoches, where he makes sure his friend gets a decent
burial before taking in a medicine show run by the cloaked man, Doc
"Cross" Williams. The man and
his odd friends -- minus the green-skinned Bill -- put on quite a spectacle as they hawk bottles of "Sweet Brown" Tonic, so Jonah waits until the
wagon trundles out of town before making a move on them, "lest I work up a
new hangin' party of citizens who might not like me blowin' holes in their
entertainment," as he puts it. That
night, while watching from afar, Jonah sees them yank Bill out of a pickle
barrel and squirt a mouthful of Lord-knows-what into his mouth to wake him
up. Thoroughly confused but full of
curiosity, Jonah sneaks into the wagon, shoves a gun in the Doc's face, and
demands to know what in blazes is going on:
Naturally, Jonah doesn't believe the Doc, since Wild Bill Hickok
has been dead for some period of time (more on that later). His disbelief doesn't help much when Bill
shows up and points a gun at him, followed by the Doc smashing a bottle of
tonic over Jonah head. "I just got
you a partner, Bill," Doc Williams cackles as they drag a semi-conscious
Hex out of the wagon and stuff him into a pickle barrel of his own. Two-Gun Mojo #4 opens with the Doc preparing a rather explosive concoction that
is soon forced down Jonah's gullet.
According to the Doc's ramblings, the stuff is capable of making
"the one who drinks it about as willful as a Thanksgiving turkey...only a
little less smart." Luckily, Jonah
has regained enough of his senses that, after they seal up the barrel and load
it on the wagon, he forces himself to vomit up the concoction, but he still
spends the night sweating through fever dreams as the wagon continues on its
merry way. The next time Doc removes the
lid, he relates the tale of how he acquired Wild Bill Hickok. Seems ol' Bill kicked his ass outta the No. 10 Saloon in Deadwood, and while the Doc was itchin' for revenge, Jack McCall
got there first and shot Bill in the head, so Doc did the next best thing and
dug up Bill's grave (the headstone in the story is dated August 2, 1879, but
the real-life Hickok actually died in 1876...maybe it happened a little later
in the DCU?). Realizing that Bill was
still alive but pretty much a vegetable, Doc used some tricks he'd picked up in
Haiti along with a book of dark magic to whip up a zombie elixir, which he later
applied to three other unsuspecting folks who weren't as close to dead yet (on
a side note: Hickok's gunslinging corpse also appears in Lansdale's 1986 novel The Magic Wagon).
As night approaches again, Jonah decides he needs to make a
break for it before Doc Williams forces him to drink any more of that "special
medicine", so he kicks his way out of the barrel, only to discover that
the wagon is parked right next to a cliff!
He falls into the water below and floats downstream for a bit, where
he's rescued by a farmer and his boy.
After a couple of days' worth of
recuperation, he heads out after Doc Williams once more. He tracks the man all the way across Texas
and into New Mexico, where Jonah runs afoul of a band of Chiricahua Apaches
(Jonah mentions both here and in the next issue that he lived with the
Mescalero, making this the first time it's ever been specified which Apache
tribe Jonah belonged to), and when he tries to get away, he stumbles across the
Doc and his zombie troupe, along with some members of the 10th Cavalry. Over half of Jonah Hex: Two-Gun Mojo #5 (December 1993) is devoted to this
motley crew's attempts to escape the literal hole the Chiricahua have driven them into. Eventually, Doc makes a
break for it on his "Wagon of Miracles" in the middle of the night,
with Jonah and a cavalry sergeant following not long after. Like the Indian gal back in Mud Creek,
though, the sarge catches a bullet in the back, but instead of passing away
quiet-like, he takes matters into his own hands the next day so Jonah can
escape their pursuers unimpeded:
The chase continues across the desert, until Jonah comes
across Doc's wagon and one of his zombie pets, which is now all-the-way
dead. He then finds the Doc himself
roasting the remains of another, with a third hanging from a tree and bleeding
out. Wild Bill Hickok is still
"lively", however, and Doc screams at him to kill Hex. "I ain't gonna lie none. Hickok made me nervous," Jonah admits to
the reader, and one has to wonder -- presuming the events of HEX were still canon -- if Hickok's
present state reminds Jonah of when he found his stuffed corpse in the future, especially given how similar the outfits are.
For sure, Jonah knows the Chiricahua will reach them pretty soon, so he
has no choice but to face off against the undead gunfighter:
As Hickok falls, he keeps shooting, missing Hex by inches,
then stops when he hits the ground and his brains finally ooze out of his
skull. Doc begs Hex not to kill him, and
he doesn't...but he does shoot Doc in the kneecaps and leaves him for the
Chiricahua to torture, giving Jonah time to flee. It's the sort of "eye for an eye"
ending we've seen in other Jonah Hex stories throughout his career, so despite
the supernatural trappings and extra layers of gore, the first Vertigo
miniseries didn't stray too far from what an old-school fan would expect.
Overall, Jonah's revival was well-received, with Two-Gun Mojo winning a Bram Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association, and there was already talk of a
second miniseries when issue #5 went to print, though it would be two years
before it appeared (in-between, Lansdale & Truman worked on a 4-issue Lone Ranger & Tonto miniseries from
Topps Comics). For their next Hex
outing, the pair moved away from zombies and literally headed underground. "We were watching a lot of the singing
cowboy serials and [Gene Autry's] Radio
Ranch stuff, where there would be these underground denizens that were attacking the Radio Ranch," Truman explained, "just all the wacky
shit they used to do in the '30s. So we
just kind of took it to the nth degree, and I was going through a real heavy
acoustic blues period at the time, so I was doing a lot of research into
acoustic blues and stuff, so I mixed that
in there."
Thanks to the incident at Mud Creek, Hex is a wanted man, and
at the beginning of Jonah Hex: Riders of
the Worm and Such #1 (March 1995), he's hiding out on a farm belonging to Tex
Smith -- an old friend from his Confederate cavalry days -- when a gang of
bounty hunters led by a fella called Stove Belly Jack come a-callin'. Jonah manages to eliminate them all, but not
before they kill Smith and his wife.
Jonah's not in the best shape himself, and after riding away from the
farm, he takes a tumble off of his horse.
He's later found by a couple of cowpokes named Rudy -- nicknamed "Ears"
-- and a young man referred to as "the Kid" (later identified as
Henry McCarty-Antrim AKA Billy the Kid, thanks to a photograph at the beginning of the third issue). They take
him to an abandoned shack to patch him up, and when they ask who he is, Jonah only
tells them his first name. The Kid then asks whether the folks that shot him
will come looking, and he replies, "No.
They're retired...permanent-like."
That night, as they try to get some shuteye, something erupts out of the
ground and attacks their horses, causing such a ruckus that Ears takes a peek out
the window and instantly regrets it:
Jonah and the Kid spend the rest of the night wide-awake and
guns at the ready, just in case whatever ate Ears and the horses returns. When daybreak comes in Riders of the Worm #2, they bury what's left of Ears and depart the
shack, during which time the Kid 'fesses up that he knows exactly who Jonah is,
saying, "That scar is famous."
Jonah replies, "What scar?" and then asks that the Kid to not
call him by his full name, just Jonah will do (which leads to a running gag
where the Kid refers to him as "Just Jonah"). After walking for a while, they come across
some ranch hands collecting up a herd of cattle that'd been slaughtered in a
manner similar to their horses. They offer
Jonah and the Kid a ride back to their place, and as the group approaches it,
the ranch hands inexplicably break out their guitars and fiddles and start
singing. Turns out these fellas work at
the Wilde West Ranch, a "Music and Culture Emporium" owned by an
Englishman named Mr. Graves who is trying to bring a touch of civility to the
West.
After being reassured by the trail boss, Hedge, that the
newcomers aren't "riders for the Worm", Graves invites them to stay
for dinner...provided they clean up, of course. This leads to a scene where Hedge -- who is
black -- doesn't take kindly to Hex's ribbing and tells him, "You old
Rebels are all the same. Can't let a man
be a man if he's a different color."
Jonah bluntly answers that he "fought for the Confederacy because I
felt the South was my country" and doesn't hold any sort of grudge against
blacks. As Lansdale himself put it,
"Jonah was an individualist, but he was a Southerner and saw the South as
his patch of land, same as many others. He
didn't believe the North should be able to come south for war. That said, Hex, like Robert E. Lee, would
have been opposed to slavery. No doubt
in my mind the right side won, though the myth is the North rose up in
self-righteous indignation one morning opposed to slavery." For the sake of new fans unfamiliar with the classic
stories, it was good to see that Lansdale was reinforcing the characterization first
laid down by Fleisher two decades earlier.
On the way to dinner, Hedge tells them not only about the
purpose behind the ranch, but also about the "Worms", their term for
the creatures responsible for all the destruction. Jonah and the Kid are rather doubtful until,
after dinner, one of the big Worms breaks through the floor and eats both
Hedge and another cowboy. Understandably,
Jonah and the Kid are demanding more-thorough explanations when Riders of the Worm #3 opens, and after
leading the pair and a big-boned gal named Hildy to his office, Graves finally
tells them, starting with the origin of the "Wilde West Ranch". Seems Mr. Graves encountered Oscar Wilde
during the author's real-life lecture tour across America (which occurred in
1882...and the previously-mentioned photo was supposedly taken at the ranch in
1876, so I reckon that tour happened much earlier in the DCU). Wilde's opinions weren't appreciated by the
majority of those present during his stop in Austin, Texas, and Graves came to
the rescue of his fellow Englishman when a fight broke out. Graves later decided to apply Wilde's ideas
about "art for art's sake" to his ranching business, a notion all his
workers must go along with if they wish to remain employed:
As for the Worms, they're a race of creatures from prehistory
that dominated the Earth until humanity drove them into tunnels far below
ground. Millennia later, the entrance to
one of these tunnels was accidentally opened by Errol Autumn, who previously owned
the land the Wilde West Ranch now sits upon.
One night, something crawled out of the hole and had its way with
Errol's wife, and nine months later, she gave birth to half-Worm/half-human
triplets, one of whom died immediately.
Errol committed suicide not long after, and ever since Graves bought the
land, he's been battling both the Worms and the surviving Autumn brothers,
Johnny and Edgar...and this is where we need to step back from the comics page
for a second to talk about a real-world battle which took place in the courts.
For those unaware, the Autumn brothers are a loose visual
parody of twin musicians Johnny and Edgar Winter. As Truman told me, they were tossed into this
already-oddball story just for fun: "I said [to Lansdale], 'I love these
guys, they're part of Texas music, so let's, you know, do a little tribute to
'em.'" Unfortunately, the Winter
brothers didn't find the tribute very amusing, since the fictional Autumn
brothers were portrayed as dimwitted inhuman killers that had romantic
inclinations towards pigs. In 1996, the
musicians brought a lawsuit against both the creators and DC Comics over this, and since the details of the case have been chronicled elsewhere, we're gonna skip to the end of the whole mess in 2002, when it was decided that the work fell under
the standards for "transformative use" and the case was thrown out
of court. Despite this, DC did play it
safe for a while: 2008's Vertigo
Encyclopedia from DK Publishing omitted any mention of Jonah Hex: Riders of the Worm and Such from the entry on the
character, and the story itself wasn't reprinted until 2014, when all three
Vertigo miniseries were collected into a single volume.
Back to the issues at hand: much of Riders of the Worm #4 is devoted to the Autumn brothers, their
half-Worm "cousins", and the full-blooded Worms dwelling underground,
including the Big Mama Worm. As the
brothers plot to break into the ranch, Jonah convinces Graves and his men to
take the fight to the Worms for a change, saying, "When we was fightin'
Yankees and all the odds was on their side, we could fight another day if we
took it to 'em...mad and quick." They begin descending into the hole made the
previous night by the invading Worm, while unbeknownst to them, the half-Worm
raiding party breaks through the front gate:
When we get to Jonah
Hex: Riders of the Worm and Such #5 (July 1995), the nods to the Gene Autry
"Phantom Empire" flick go into overdrive, as Jonah and the others
encounter 1930s-style robots, sleek elevators, and a vehicle that looks like a cross between a Cadillac and the armored personnel carrier from Aliens, while the Autumn brothers and
their kin strut around in capes and helmets.
These are all remnants of the once-great Worm civilization, now gone to
seed as the current brood has forgotten the purpose of their ancestors'
machinery. Once again, the notion that
Jonah might be familiar with this sort of craziness thanks to the HEX series comes to mind, not to mention
the full-blooded Worms might remind Jonah of the lizard-men he fought in Justice League of America #160 (with Big
Mama Worm standing in for the "toad-frog outta Hell"). Eventually, the half-Worm party follows the
Wilde West members down the hole, leading to an all-out war in Big Mama's
nesting chamber -- Johnny and Edgar both catch bullets in their brainpans, and
the mother Worm is killed after she swallows a ranch hand named Paco, who just
so happens to be holding a couple lit sticks of dynamite:
Once they're clear of the tunnels, Mr. Graves and the others trap
the remaining Worms underground once more by blowing up the ranch, and Jonah
celebrates with a song. Yes, Jonah sings, and he ain't exactly good at it, but considering how the rest of the
story went, it fits. Once again, a few years
will pass by before the pair would get together for another Hex tale, but
that's not to say they didn't find ways to individually contribute to the
bounty hunter's mythos. In 1997-1998, Timothy
Truman penciled the first eight issues of The
Kents, a maxi-series written by John Ostrander (with whom Truman had
created Grimjack years earlier), and issue #8 just so happened to feature a cameo of Hex back in his Confederate
cavalry days. Truman also tossed in a
reference to Jonah's stuffed corpse in the 1998-1999 Guns of the Dragon miniseries, which he both wrote and drew. Meanwhile, Joe R. Lansdale -- by virtue of
being on the writing staff for Batman:
The Animated Series -- got the opportunity to help Jonah make the
transition from the comics page to the television screen in an episode titled
"Showdown".
"I don't know where the initial idea for that one came
from," B:TAS producer Bruce Timm
admitted in the TwoMorrows Modern Masters volume from 2004 dedicated to his work. "It was natural to give [Lansdale] the script. But what happened there -- again, the idea
probably came from one of our lunch conversations between myself and some other
creative people from the show -- it was probably Kevin Alteri. But I remember being at a recording session
with Kevin, and during one of the breaks Kevin and I started fleshing out the
story a little more -- just brainstorming and coming up with ideas. Between the two of us we hit on the idea of
doing the Master of the World thing." Within 20-25 minutes, the broad strokes of
the story were worked out, then Timm went home and plotted out the entire episode in longhand before passing it off to the writers and, finally,
Lansdale, who luckily was available to work on it.
Lansdale recalled that "The outlines were pretty
basic. I had a fairly free rein as long
as I stayed within the boundaries of the idea and kept it within the constructs
of the series. I got to do my dialogue,
or play off a suggested line. I kind of
wrote director scripts and tried do it in a manner that would make the scripts
fun to read even if a lot of it wouldn't appear on screen. I love animation." On the screen, Lansdale was credited with the
teleplay, while Timm, Alteri (who also directed the episode), and Paul Dini got
story credit...not a bad pedigree for what would become Jonah Hex's animated
debut.
First airing on September 12, 1995, "Showdown" was
one of the last new episodes of Batman:
The Animated Series to be shown on Fox Kids prior to the series moving to
Kids WB in 1997 (where it was retitled The
New Batman Adventures). The story
starts at a rest home, where the Dynamic Duo fail to stop Ra's and his ninja
henchmen from kidnapping an elderly man living there. Ra's leaves behind an audiocassette, which
they listen to as they chase after him in the Batmobile, thereby setting up the
flashback that will take up the majority of the episode (as one reviewer put it, "'Showdown' is, on its most basic level, the story of Batman and
Robin listening to an audio book narrated by Ra’s Al Ghul on the way to the
airport.").
"The year was 1883.
Your government was ruthlessly expanding westward," Ra's says on
the recording as the flashback begins, showing Jonah Hex walking into the
frontier town of Devil's Hole. His depiction
here is neither the traditional DeZuniga-designed Hex nor Truman's updated version:
Jonah's clothes are a nondescript gray and black (though he is wearing his
Confederate officer's hat), his long hair is white (we'll find out later on
that Jonah's also going bald), and his build is reminiscent of the
big-and-bulky appearance Carmine Infantino wanted Jonah to have way back when
the character was first created. He's
still got a sixgun tucked beneath his belt, however, and when he sits down in
the saloon (accompanied by a cloud of traildust puffing up!) and orders water
"in a clean glass", we can see that his scar still ain't all that
pretty. The voice of Hex was provided by
William "Bill" McKinney, who played (among numerous other roles) the
mountain man in Deliverance and the
leader of the "Red Legs" regiment in The Outlaw Josey Wales. McKinney
had Jonah speak with a soft growl that could turn sharp when the situation
warranted, and it did: Jonah's come to town lookin' for a fella named Arkady
Duvall (voiced by Malcolm McDowell), who has a $200 bounty on his head.
A kind-hearted saloon gal (voiced by Elizabeth Montgomery of Bewitched fame) leads Jonah to a rock
formation in the desert where strange lights have been spotted -- it started
right around the same time Duvall showed up, as did sightings of a "sky
monster" that can only be seen at night.
Jonah sends the gal back to town, then heads down into the vast cavern
beneath the rocks. He soon discovers the "sky monster" is a massive airship being built by Ra's al-Ghul, with
the intent of destroying the railroads as it flies eastward. "Once Washington is in flames, I'll
force the United States government to declare me 'Master of America'!"
Ra's tells Duvall, who apparently works for the immortal terrorist. Jonah's presence is discovered by some
workers not long after, and Duvall assumes he's a government spy sent to stop
the destruction of the railroad.
"I don't give a tinker's cuss 'bout no railroad," Jonah tells him. "I've come to get you, Arkady Duvall, on account of what you done to that girl back east." Duvall is about to kill him when Ra's intervenes, ordering that Hex be locked up so they can interrogate him later. As the airship heads out on its deadly mission, Jonah escapes his cell and manages to grab one of the mooring lines dangling from the bottom of the airship. Climbing aboard just as the initial attack is underway, Jonah wreaks havoc throughout the airship, punching out crewmen and setting off bombs until he comes face to face with Duvall himself, who is surprised to see the bounty hunter:
"I don't give a tinker's cuss 'bout no railroad," Jonah tells him. "I've come to get you, Arkady Duvall, on account of what you done to that girl back east." Duvall is about to kill him when Ra's intervenes, ordering that Hex be locked up so they can interrogate him later. As the airship heads out on its deadly mission, Jonah escapes his cell and manages to grab one of the mooring lines dangling from the bottom of the airship. Climbing aboard just as the initial attack is underway, Jonah wreaks havoc throughout the airship, punching out crewmen and setting off bombs until he comes face to face with Duvall himself, who is surprised to see the bounty hunter:
When all is said and done, Ra's gets away, Duvall is captured, and presumably Jonah gets paid. As we return to present-day Gotham, Robin says, "Great story, but what's it got to do with that rest home?" Well, old chum, it turns out that the elderly man that got kidnapped is Arkady Duvall...Ra's al-Ghul's son. After being brought to justice by Hex, Duvall was sentenced to fifty years of hard labor. "Of course, no one expected him to live out that sentence," Ra's tells the heroes once they catch up to him. "No one but me." Having been exposed to the Lazarus Pit in his youth, Duvall's lifespan had been increased, but his mind didn't survive the rigors of prison: when they finally released him, Duvall disappeared, and it took Ra's many years to track him down. Not interested in fighting anymore that night, Ra's simply says to Batman, "Let me take my boy home," which he does.
With its Wild West setting, the Jules Verne-inspired storyline,
and the near-absence of Batman -- even counting the title sequence, he's only on
screen for about five minutes! -- "Showdown" was one of the most
memorable episodes of Batman: The
Animated Series ever produced, and for many children in the 1990s, it was
also their first exposure to Jonah Hex.
The scarred gunfighter made quite an impression on the kiddies, and
though the Vertigo offerings certainly weren't suitable for the cartoon's
target audience, this one-time showcase of the character would pay off in the
next decade.
On a related note, two separate attempts were made around
this same period at creating a live-action version of Jonah Hex. An unproduced Jonah Hex TV pilot from producer Mark Canton and
screenwriter Akiva Goldsman was supposedly in the works between 1998-2000, and a first-draft
Jonah Hex film script by William
Farmer dated January 13th, 1997 surfaced on the Internet back in 2004. Going by descriptions of what the script contained, the film's plot was heavily influenced by Lansdale & Truman's
Vertigo work. In addition to working in Doc
"Cross" Williams (now a centuries-old necromancer) and his zombies, the
writer had Jonah fighting werewolves and romancing a Haitian voodoo priestess,
plus General Nathan Bedford Forrest attempting to start the Ku Klux Klan with
undead Confederate soldiers. The biggest
surprise of all, however, was Jonah himself, as it's revealed he was really Captain
Jonathan Hazeltine, who'd become a spy for the Union but was shot and left for
dead by Forrest near the end of the Civil War -- stricken with amnesia, he took
the name "Jonah Hex" when he couldn't remember what the initials J.H.
on his coat stood for. While neither of these projects saw the
light of day, the names of two of the people involved would resurface in
Jonah's life further down the line.
When Jonah's third and final miniseries under the Vertigo
banner hit the stands, it was already off to a rocky start. Said Lansdale, "[Shadows West] was supposed to be one more issue, but we got cut an
issue. It kind made the story wrap too
quickly." Where the other two
miniseries had five issues to stretch out, the last one had to make do with
three, but Lansdale & Truman did their best to keep it interesting. Jonah
Hex: Shadows West #1 (February 1999) starts with Jonah on trial...but not
for that mess back in Mud Creek. Nope,
seems he shot six fellas who took offense to Jonah askin' their sister Kathy
Sue if she was a whore (which she was, but they still took offense) and tried
to kill him. The judge -- who might be Roy Bean, but it's never said -- clears Hex of the charges, but the rest of that
whore's family isn't satisfied with the verdict:
In the midst of the gunfight, a little person named Long Tom
jumps in to assist Hex since, as Tom puts it once the battles over, "You're
a freak like me," to which Jonah replies, "Actually, I just consider
myself ugly." They then ride over
to "Buffalo Will's Wild West Show", where Long Tom works. Yes, that's "Buffalo Will", not to
be confused with Buffalo Bill Cody, who's more famous and therefore has
a better claim on the name than William Bruce Smith, a former dentist and
currently the proprietor of this particular show. Due to Hex's shooting skills -- as well as
his own famous moniker -- they offer him a job, which he takes since the pay's
supposed to be decent. Jonah soon
discovers that an Indian friend of his, Spotted Hand (actually, his name's
Spotted Balls, but he prefers you not call him that), works there as well, so
they bunk together.
After only a day with the Wild West show, Jonah's already unimpressed
with it, along with a couple of the people working there, like the ones who're taking advantage of an Indian woman living in the camp. Long Tom chews him out for causing such a
ruckus over "just a squaw", telling him that his interference
might've caused her to lose all her business now, good and bad. "I sure seem to be Hell on whores,"
Jonah mutters, then goes over to her tent to apologize and maybe toss a little
more money her way...and that's when Jonah sees her nursing a talking bear.
Jonah wanders away from the tent in a daze at the beginning
of Shadows West #2 and heads over to
Long Tom's abode for answers. Tom
confirms that the woman did indeed give birth to a bear cub right there in
camp. "She claims a bear spirit
turned himself into a handsome brave and came to her and she spread 'em,"
Tom says rather ineloquently, adding that Buffalo Will plans on exhibiting the
cub as soon as it can talk better. None
of this sits right with Jonah and, after ruminating on it over a few bottles of
whiskey, he and Spotted Hand decide to ditch the Wild West show and take the
woman and her cub back to the Black Hills where they belong. Though it's unspecified which Black Hills they're referring to, they manage to reach the location by the end
of the issue (during which time the cub has begun picking up on swear words),
but that's also when Long Tom and a few others from Buffalo Will's troupe have
tracked them down. Tom pulls out a
Sharps rifle and starts firing at them, taking out Jonah's horse at the
beginning of Jonah Hex: Shadows West #3 (April 1999). Their other horse is soon shot as well,
putting Hex's party at a disadvantage, so they move deeper into the hills and
begin to set up some traps. From here,
the story becomes like a Fleisher-era Hex tale, with their pursuers falling
victim to various hazards, including a bundle of baby-bear droppings:
It all culminates with a gunfight in the dark, during which
Long Tom and his cohorts are killed, and Spotted Hand dies while protecting the
cub, leaving it up to Jonah to finish escorting the Indian woman back to the bear-spirit that sired her son. The
last page shows Jonah riding back to Buffalo Will's camp to drop off Long Tom's
corpse, along with a message: "If I ever see you again, or even hear you've diddled a horse I know...then I'm comin'
for you, Will-Who-Never-Shot-A-Buffalo."
Hex then hollers at the other workers nearby, "Any of you balls
sweats want to argue?" and after they reply, "No sir!" he rides
off.
Over a decade will pass before Joe R. Lansdale pens any more
dialogue for the bounty hunter, but when he does, it won't be for Vertigo. Jonah's tenure under the "mature
readers" imprint was now over and done with, for as Lansdale told me,
"Tim and I didn't want to get trapped in a
series. We were doing lots of things outside of that." The duo have teamed up again many times over
the years on other comics projects, however, so those who enjoyed the pairing
have much more material they can look for.
In regards to their time working on the character, Lansdale said of all the comics
he's done, Hex's adventures might be the ones he had the best time writing,
adding that "I think Tim and I made a real impact with our version. I hear
about it all the time. For many our version is THE version. That's satisfying."
Truth to tell, there were other versions of Jonah Hex scattered
around the DCU during this same period.
While Truman's redesign of the character did influence the way Jonah was
presented in Zero Hour #0 (September
1994), those longing for a more old-school depiction could find it throughout
the late-1990s and early-2000s if they kept their eyes peeled, and for those
who wanted to see Hex in a whole new light...well, you should be careful what you wish for.
ERRATA: A new landmark for Early 1863 has been added to Appendix A, due to an oversight when the timeline was originally written.
