An Illustrated History of Jonah Hex (Part 13)

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: 

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.

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Appendix A  |  Appendix B