2005-2006: Back to Basics
Folks who picked up Wizard
#160 (cover-dated February 2005) back in the day got their money’s worth, as it
was jam-packed with multi-page previews for just about every major comics event
to come in 2005. They even managed to
squeeze in a joint interview with Marvel editor-in-chief Joe Quesada and DC
Vice President - Executive Editor Dan Didio.
Over the past five years, Didio had worked his way up the ladder from
writer to one of the topmost positions in the company, and with that increased
power came the ability to push through projects that otherwise might have not
seen the light of day. In-between queries
as to what the two executives would like to accomplish in the coming year, the
interviewers asked which characters they’d like to see fixed or improved in
2005. While Quesada briefly mentioned
Moon Knight and nothing more, Didio rattled off a handful of offbeat choices,
starting with a certain scar-faced bounty hunter. “We’ve got Jonah Hex coming down the line,” he said, even going so far to call
the character “a personal favorite,” alongside the Metal Men and Kamandi. Laughing, he added, “How’s that for
psycho? I’m excited about Jonah Hex
again. It helps diversify the DCU and
he’s just a rough and tumble mercenary-style character.”
That bombshell was accompanied by an editor’s note that
there was indeed an ongoing planned for 2005, but otherwise, neither hide nor
hair of Jonah Hex could be found in that issue, nor did any other information
about this supposed new series come to light until months after this initial,
under-the-radar announcement. In the
meantime, fans could only speculate was to what was in store for the
character. Would we see another Vertigo
miniseries (the last of which had wrapped up six years prior), or would Jonah
return to the mainstream DCU? Would
there be a full-on reboot of the character, ignoring not only the “Future Hex”
years like Lansdale & Truman did, but all of Jonah’s past history? Most important of all, could a monthly
Western comic succeed in the 21st Century, or was it doomed to die on the racks
before the first issue was even released?
Coincidentally, Jonah managed to land cameos in two high-profile
projects right around the same time as the announcement. First up was
Superman/Batman #16 (Late February 2005), the third chapter in
writer Jeph Loeb and artist Carlos Pacheco’s “Absolute Power” storyline. While we won’t go into a full explanation of
the story here, suffice it to say this portion involves alternate realities
collapsing on themselves thanks to an exploding Time Bubble. After a bit of bouncing around, our titular
heroes end up in what appears to be modern-day Gotham, only to be accosted by
numerous members of DC’s Western stable, including El Diablo, Tomahawk, Johnny
Thunder, and Madame .44 (whom Bat Lash refers to as “Cinnamon”...well, we did
say this was an alternate reality!).
After dispatching most of them with his heat vision, this
slightly-more-ruthless version of Superman makes the mistake of turning his
back, making him the perfect target for our favorite bounty hunter, who’s dressed
in his traditionally-styled Confederate grays and sporting his “pimp hat” with
the tiger-striped hatband, last seen nearly three decades ago:
After blasting the Man of Steel with two cylinders’ worth of kryptonite
bullets, Jonah has to contend with
Batman, who pastes him good across the jaw before Scalphunter comes to help out.
Together, they polish off the World’s Finest team, who soon fade away
into another reality. For readers who
prefer spurs to Spandex, the five pages that comprise this scene likely captured
their feelings on the subject rather succinctly.
On the heels of that appearance came Jonah’s second foray
into animation, guest-starring in an episode of the Cartoon Network series
Justice League Unlimited. On February 22, 2005, “The Once and Future
Thing, Part 1: Weird Western Tales” hit the airwaves, and as the title
promises, we got to see a trio of League members trotting around the Old West,
specifically 1879. Batman, Wonder Woman,
and Green Lantern (John Stewart) are on the trail of Chronos, who’d tried to
steal Batman’s utility belt from the Watchtower, but after landing in the Old
West, Chronos ran afoul of Tobias Manning -- aka Terra-Man, an old-school Superman
baddie -- who swiped Chronos’s time-travel gear and used it to take over the
frontier town of Elkhorn. In order to
stop him,
the Leaguers team up with Sheriff Ohiyesa "Pow-Wow: Smith, Bat Lash, El Diablo, and Hex. Though Jonah had
already logged in an appearance in the
"Timmverse" thanks to
Batman: The Animated Series, the
character designers for JLU decided to take advantage of this tale being set
four years before “Showdown” and give him a look that was identical to very
first appearance in
All-Star Western
#10, right down to the lefthanded gunbelt he originally wore as well as having
the cuffs of his jeans cover his boots.
A new actor was also brought in to do the voice work, namely Adam
Baldwin, who delivers his lines with the same growl that he used when
playing Jayne Cobb on Firefly.
And he gets some of the best ones: when GL asks what the plan is to
bring down Manning, Jonah scoffs, “Plan?
We put him in the ground.” Later
on, while they’re
heading out to Manning's base of operations, Jonah notices
the utility belt Batman is wearing with his otherwise-period-accurate clothes
and remarks, “Fancy gunbelt you got there.
I’m thinkin’ you folks are time travelers.”
“Where would you get a crazy idea like that?” Batman asks.
“Experience. I’ve had
an interesting life,” the bounty hunter replies with a smile, making this the
very first time Old West Jonah has ever made reference to his previous
time-hopping exploits. And it doesn’t
stop with just the one line, either: in the midst of the battle against Manning
and his cronies, Hex grabs a rocket launcher and fires it as easy as you
please, and afterward, once they’ve trounced the bad guys and are rounding up
all the future tech, Hex says in regard to “them fancy ray guns” Lash wants to
keep, “Ain’t dependable. They jam.” I was lucky enough to speak with series
producer and story editor Dwayne McDuffie prior to his death in 2011, and he
said that, when writing the script for the episode, he’d slipped all that in for
just a bit of fun. Little did he know
that Jonah’s “been there, done that” attitude in regards to time travel would
become the standard, at least when it came to the majority of his adventures
outside of comics.
The story moves to the future for Part 2, leaving Jonah and
his Western pals behind (though Baldwin makes a cameo voicing Hal Jordan), and
leaving comics fans even more anxious for any news about the upcoming Jonah Hex
title. Before any progress could be made
on that front, however, there was some sadder news to deal with: on May 23rd,
2005, Jonah Hex’s original writer and co-creator John Albano passed away at the
age of 82, due to heart attack and stroke.
After parting ways with his creation in 1974, he’d continued to write
for comics, eventually moving from DC to Archie, and was even working on a
script for an off-Broadway play at the time of his death. While he was probably aware that a new series
was on its way thanks to his royalty contract (which required DC to notify him
of any upcoming checks), “in all likelihood, he didn’t care one bit,” according
to his grandson, Seth Albano, whom I spoke with in 2017. “He hated all the Vertigo stuff, and always
used to say, ‘You can’t take prestige to the bank.’ Hence why my family kept all of his writing
awards; he didn’t care for them at all.”
He does believe, however, that had John Albano lived long enough to see
the series to come, “he would have loved every second of it. He was very enthusiastic about the stuff he
liked, and he wrote every story from the ending [to] the beginning; if a movie,
TV show, etc. didn’t have a twist ending or at least a good one-liner to close
off with he’d complain. Jimmy’s Jonah
Hex stories always had great endings, and the fact that Hex never gets to keep
the money is something he REALLY would have gotten a kick out of.”
The Jimmy being referred to is Jimmy Palmiotti, one half of
the writing duo that was eventually revealed to be responsible for the latest
incarnation of Jonah Hex. He and Justin
Gray first shared writing credits on
a reimagining of Chaos! Comics heroine Chastity in 2002, which was soon followed by work on Gen13 and Vampirella, and
at the time of the announcement, Palmiotti & Gray were co-writing both
Hawkman and their creation
The Monolith for DC. I’ve had the pleasure of chatting with both
of them numerous times over the years about their tenure on Jonah Hex, but it
wasn’t until an extended conversation in 2017 that I learned the full circumstances
behind them landing the gig. It turned
out that, when Didio first let folks know the series was coming, a whole
‘nother creator was on board. “
I
think it was mentioned that Brian Azzarello had the character on hold then
decided to write his own original series Loveless,”
Palmiotti recalled, “and then when we were asked to pitch Jonah Hex and it went
through.” This wasn’t their first time
pitching it either, as they’d tested the waters before, but made no progress. Now that DC had a promised new series with no
creative team, though, the powers-that-be gave them a shot. Both men had been Hex fans for years, with
Palmiotti picking up back issues of Weird
Western Tales as a kid from a bookstore in Brooklyn (which, coincidentally,
employed future DC exec Paul Levitz), and Gray definitely preferring the bounty
hunter in his traditional spaghetti Western-inspired iteration as opposed to
the “Future Hex” or Lansdale/Truman eras.
Their pitch reflected these old-school tastes, as they framed it as
“Punisher in the Old West”, which fortunately landed them the gig, for as
Palmiotti said, “at the time we were bottom of the barrel at DC. We were only given characters that were going
to be cancelled or no one wanted.”
One aspect of their pitch, unfortunately,
changed right after it was accepted.
Their friend and former Hex artist Mark Texeira was initially on board
as series artist, but he soon bowed out because he didn’t want to draw
horses. Since you can’t exactly have a
Western without horses, the writing duo was now in a bind, but luckily, Palmiotti
mentioned to Steve Wacker -- who was to be the new title’s editor -- that he
was enjoying the work of Luke Ross on Dark Horse's Samurai: Heaven and Earth.
When Wacker said Ross was available, Palmiotti was all for it, so the
artist became the first of many to help bring Hex to a new generation of comics
fans.
On November 2, 2005 -- the day after Jonah’s
167th birthday -- Jonah Hex (vol.2) #1 (cover-dated January 2006) hit the stands, sporting a Frank Quietly cover
and the more "Western" logo briefly used in the early 1980s. That mix of old and new extended to the
interior as well: Ross rendered Hex in the classic style of the 1970s-1980s,
but with a photorealistic accuracy that didn’t shy away from making him a
doppelganger for Clint Eastwood. As for
the writing, there were two immediate differences in Palmiotti & Gray’s
approach, the first being the inclusion of “title cards” throughout: though the credits page will name this story as “Giving the Devil His Due”, the first page presents us with a slim black panel bearing the words “A Cemetery Without
Crosses”, thereby giving the scene laid before us its own subtitle (a practice
that will carry on not only throughout this issue, but the entirety of the
series). The second difference is the
narration boxes: as noted earlier, these had replaced thought balloons starting
in the early 1990s, with Jonah first taking them on during his run at
Vertigo. However, the ones we see here do
not contain Jonah’s thoughts, but rather are the words of an unseen, unknown
narrator, hearkening back to the sort used in comics decades earlier, yet possessed
of a literary style more befitting the dime novels of Hex’s own timeframe. From here on out, the thoughts of our
favorite bounty hunter would be off-limits to us unless he chose to utter them
aloud, a decision that would serve to bring some mystery back to the character. Our narrator ain’t no slouch when it comes to
Hex lore, either, reminding us that “as any man, woman or child knows, he had
no friends, this Jonah Hex...but he did have two companions...one was Death
itself...the other, the acrid smell of gunsmoke,” and later remarks how Jonah
has been witness to “more than three decades of trials and unimaginable
suffering”, referencing not only how long he’d existed as a comic-book
character by that point, but also Michael Fleisher’s habit of setting virtually every story in 1875 (a trope that, happily, Palmiotti & Gray
would not perpetuate).
In truth, the beginning of JHv2#1 has nothing
to do with the main story, but between Jonah’s deadly actions and the
knowledgeable narration, those first four pages do serve as a mission statement
of sorts, letting new readers know right off the bat what sort of man Jonah Hex
is, what sort of world he lives in, and apologizing for none of it. A different sort of statement is made with
the plot of the main story, for it bore striking similarity to the Fleisher-penned JH#1 from 1977. As Gray
revealed, this was very intentional, “because the previous
incarnation of Jonah Hex under the Vertigo imprint was one we didn’t want the
book to be associated with. That’s nothing
against the Vertigo version or the version where Hex took on the [persona] of
Mad Max. At the time I remember we
wanted to send a clear message to readers that this was Jonah Hex as originally
envisioned so riffing on the very first issue seemed like a smart way of going
about it.”
In both cases, the basic spine of the story
involves the kidnapping of a wealthy man’s son, but with no ransom
demands. As in Fleisher’s tale, the
father is incapable of conducting a search of his own (in this newer case, the
father was crippled by an elephant during a hunting expedition -- “Seems fair,”
Jonah says when told the circumstances), and Hex is called in to follow a trail
that’s several weeks old. Then and now,
the trail leads him to a boy-fighting troupe, with this one being part of a
carnival, and the boys have to fight vicious dogs as opposed to each
other. Jonah steps in when their boss,
Victor Romanoff, begins beating the kids, and inquires whether they’ve seen the
missing boy. When they tell him no,
Jonah leaves, and two of the carnies -- one of whom resembles Matheus Nachtergaele, an actor from Ross’s home
country of Brazil -- later try to ambush Jonah at his campsite. Jonah gets the drop on them instead and
forces them to ‘fess up, which leads to one of the biggest differences between
this tale and Fleisher’s: the missing boy is still alive, but he contracted
rabies from one of the dogs Romanov forced him to fight. A doctor in Romanov’s employ confirms that
the boy doesn’t have long to live, and that his final moments won’t be
pleasant, which leads to Jonah making a heart-wrenching decision:
Considering Jonah’s history of punishing anyone
who’d dare to harm a child, this mercy-killing must’ve been one of the hardest things he's ever had to do, and likely left a scar on his psyche as ugly
as the one on his face. To be sure, any
hatred he felt towards himself in that moment is soon turned directly against
Romanov: he strips the man naked, douses him in pig’s blood, and sets loose a
pair of dogs who proceed to rip Romanov to shreds off-camera (as before,
Jonah’s assessment of things is “Seems fair”).
Though Palmiotti & Gray wanted to distance themselves from the
Vertigo years, they managed to infuse just enough of Lansdale’s no-holds-barred
sensibilities into the traditional Albano/Fleisher story structure to create
something that honored both, as well as taking full advantage of the fact that
the Comics Code was all but dead by that point in history (DC finally dropped it from the handful of titles that still carried it in January 2011). They also brought to the forefront something
that was teased at over the years: Jonah’s feud with God. There’d been many a story under Fleisher’s
tenure that included a panel of Jonah addressing the Lord about one unfair
matter or another, but this first issue both opens and closes with the narrator commenting on Jonah’s views regarding God, Heaven, Hell, and the
bounty hunter’s place within it all. It
will be a subject that comes up multiple times over the next decade, but
surprisingly, it doesn’t come up at all in JHv2#2, which concerns a stolen
gold cross and a murdered priest (heck, it even begins on Dia De Los Santos Reyes). The most notable things in this
issue are a shot of the numerous scars on Jonah's body other than his face
(something alluded to over the past three decades, but no artist had bothered
to draw prior to the Palmiotti & Gray era), and a printing error on the
second-to-last page that flipped the art but not the placement of the word balloons.
JHv2#3 brings us a new landmark in Hex
history by virtue of its special guest star.
Previously, the only way to see Jonah pal around with other DC Western
folk was to wait for him to turn up alongside the Justice League or in some other non-Western title. But in this issue, Bat Lash became the first
established DC Western character to appear alongside Jonah Hex in his own
title...and just to make it more memorable, we also get to learn how they first
met! The two men cross paths when a
crooked sheriff and his pals nail Jonah inside a coffin and send him for a ride
over a waterfall (“Maybe he’ll wash up downriver and we can have him stuffed,”
one of them says, a sly wink to the Jonah
Hex Spectacular). Lash is witness to Jonah's peril and helps cut him loose from his bonds, telling the bounty
hunter about coming across a dying girl whose wagon train been ambushed by
white men impersonating Apache. When Hex
informs Lash that those same men are responsible for his trip over the falls,
they hatch a plan to bring them all down. The twist comes when Jonah hauls the sheriff
off to face Apache justice: the bounty hunter had been hired by the tribe to
prove they weren’t responsible for the wagon train raids. Lash is somewhat horrified by the sheriff’s
fate, but that doesn’t stop him from asking for a share of the reward, later
remarking that he could see the two of them “forming a certain kind of profitable friendship...” to which Hex
replies that he’s “not interested in
making new friends. I don’t even like the ones I have.”
“You’re kiddin’ me! You got friends?” Lash exclaims, putting a
humorous spin on the bounty hunter’s tagline.
In truth, Jonah had quite a few friends in the industry, including Didio
and Sales VP Bob Wayne (who, if you recall, did his own brief take on Jonah in 1990’s
Time Masters #3). According to Palmiotti, if it hadn’t been for
those two executives “we would have been off the book and character
after a year,” and that it “almost got cancelled about a dozen times.” Gray concurred, saying that he remembered “being
100% positive that it would be cancelled by issue 12. By that rationale with the book being single
stories we were trying to write every issue as if it were the last.” He also remembered Tony Moore -- the original
artist on The Walking Dead and a big
Hex fan in his own right -- told him at the time “not to fuck it up.”
As Gray pointed out, Jonah Hex relied on the old-school “one and done” formula, with the
majority of their tales getting wrapped up in a single issue, plus they would
sometimes skip forward or back along Jonah’s timeline, not concerning
themselves with setting each issue in a precise chronological order. It was sharp departure from the multi-issue,
continuity-tight storyarcs that the majority of other comics presented. Palmiotti explained, “A lot of that was the
idea that we couldn’t find an artist that would stick to a monthly schedule and
as well thought westerns were made for that kind of format, being that the
original series was done like that.”
Like the narration, it was a throwback to an earlier time, one that they
used to their advantage, according to Gray, who said, “Because we were writing stand-alone stories we
could have half a dozen issues working at the same time with half a dozen
artists. The joke was that Hex was the
easiest book to edit because we were almost completely left alone to do what we
wanted with who we wanted. I can’t
imagine that is something that will happen again. We felt very proprietary about Hex because we
were driving not only the content but also a lot of the appearance. We actively sought out people and could
influence the hiring of so many talented people with little or no interference.”
We’ll be talking about
those other talented people later, as we still have Luke Ross in the artist’s
chair for a few more issues. In
JHv2#4, the team introduces us to the newest recurring character in Jonah’s
life: Chako Jones, a young Mexican who damn-near talks Jonah’s ear off as the
bounty hunter brings him back to the town of Tall Pines. Chako is wanted for raping the mayor’s mute
daughter, Mayleen, but she soon reveals to Jonah (via a hastily-written note) that Chako is not responsible, so he springs Chako from the jail cell he’d just
helped to put him in...an action that leads both of them to an appointment at
the gallows. Chako is hanged first, and
seconds before Hex is to follow, Mayleen shows up with a rifle -- after firing
a warning shot, she uses it to write a message in the dirt: My father did it! Seems Chako had been witness to the crime,
and the mayor was trying to get him killed before he could tell. Lucky for Chako, the noose didn’t cinch
tight. and they soon cut him loose (but not before we get a shot of him looking like Gary Sinise in The Quick and the Dead). Jonah leaves town right
afterward, glad to rid of the “little mosquito”, but it certainly won’t be the
last time he and Chako cross paths.
In the midst of Jonah’s
career revival, the modern-day DCU was going through Infinite Crisis, and while it didn’t affect the new series
directly (Jonah makes a blink-and-you-miss-it appearance in issue #6 as a resident of Earth-898), the event did resolve a gaping plot-hole in Jonah’s
history. Infinite Crisis Secret Files (April 2006) reveals how Superboy-Prime
kept accidentally changing the DCU whenever he punched the crystal barrier that
separated him from the rest of reality, and on one page, we can see both the Old West and 2050 versions of Jonah Hex reflected in two different
facets. Writer Marv Wolfman doesn’t give
us any specifics, but I’m inclined to believe “Superboy-Prime reality punch”
may be the closest to an official explanation as we’ll ever get regarding how
Jonah got home from the future (imagine the bounty hunter’s shock when he flipped from one reality to the next in the blink of an eye!).
JHv2#5 was another
landmark issue, not just for the story, but the artist: for the first time in
two decades, Tony DeZuniga was on hand to illustrate the character he’d
co-created. By this point in his life,
DeZuniga was retired from comics, and spent his days doing paintings which he’d
sell at his wife’s restaurant in California.
He still made appearances on the convention circuit, though, and
Palmiotti approached him at WonderCon prior to the title’s relaunch. “I went up to him and introduced myself and
said ‘I’m a huge fan of yours, and I’m actually writing with a buddy of mine a
new book,’” Palmiotti recalled during a chat we had in April 2006. “And he had sketches he was selling, and I
bought one of the sketches of Jonah Hex and said, ‘I’d love to get you to do an
issue or a cover.’ And he goes, ‘Oh, I
don’t have the time or the energy to do a book, but I’ll do a cover.’ And I called Wacker and gave him all of
Tony’s contact information, and all of the sudden...I guess Tony got a hold of
copies of the book, maybe. All of the
sudden, he wanted to do one.” So
Palmiotti & Gray wrote a story specifically for DeZuniga titled “Christmas
with the Outlaws”, Jonah’s first holiday-themed tale since HEX #18’s
“Thanksgiving”. Set on Christmas Day in
1870, Jonah has to defend an isolated train depot from both the outlaw gang
coming to rescue their buddy Mike Harley (whom Jonah captured), as well as from
another bunch of fellas out for revenge against Harley. DeZuniga’s figures were occasionally a little
more stout than they used to be, but overall he still delivered on his initial
“filthy and dirty” premise he’d come up with 34 years earlier, adding to it
some great atmospheric effects and the best close-ups of Jonah's ugly mug he’d
ever done in his career. Over the course
of the story, bullets fly, blood flows, and Harley does manage to get away, but
Jonah catches up with him ten years later to deliver a special Christmas gift:
a Gatling gun fired point blank in Harley’s face. It’s an ending unlike any ever seen in a Hex
comic before or since.
After that lovely image,
let’s take a breather and look at Justice League Unlimited #19 (May 2006), which serves as a sequel to Jonah’s
appearance in “The Once and Future Thing”.
This time around, Wonder Woman ends up in 1879 with Elongated Man (a
wink at JLA#198-199, perhaps?) and Vigilante (Greg Saunders), who join up with
Hex, Lash, and El Diablo to prevent Vig’s great-great-grandfather from being
killed by the Time Commander. The art by
Gordon Purcell and Bob Petrecca echoes the cartoon’s style perfectly, and as to
be expected for a kids-oriented book, writer Adam Beechen has his tongue
planted firmly in his cheek for most of the story, up to and including a moment
when Jonah does a straight-up parody of Clint Eastwood. There are some fine character moments for
Vigilante, however, and it should be noted that, while this comic isn’t
canonical, JLU#19 is the first time Vig and Hex are featured in the same story.
We’re back to Luke Ross
for JHv2#6, which delivers on the ever popular trope of "nuns with guns". On the trail of a murderous woman named Mary
Norton (who bears a striking resemblance to Oscar-Award-winner Linda Hunt),
Jonah arrives in the plague-ridden town of Salvation, where Mary -- now calling
herself Sister Agatha -- has convinced the townsfolk that she’s the only thing
saving them from both sickness and the Apache that keep raiding Salvation. To complicate matters more, one of the nuns
in her employ is an old acquaintance of Jonah’s: a young woman named Evelyn,
whom he hasn’t seen in seventeen years.
Though there’s no exact date given on this story, we can guesstimate
both when it takes place (1876) and when they last parted ways (1859) thanks to
a "One Year Later"-related throwaway gag inserted in the solicit for the issue. Their initial conversation
supports the numbers as well, for Jonah comments that Evelyn has “grown into a
handsome woman”, and she in turn asks how he got the scar on his face. This also means that, whatever shared
experience they had occurred during the same year that Jonah’s fiancée, Cassie
Wainwright, was killed. It’s a damn
shame we don’t get further into it, both because there’s barely any record of
that period in Jonah’s life and because what little is said in this issue
sounds so interesting (at one point, Evelyn quotes back to him: “If
self-preservation is an instinct you possess, I suggest you ride on and don’t stop until the past is behind you.” What in blazes happened to warrant Jonah saying
such a thing?).
Everything gets tossed
ass-over-teakettle moments after their reunion, as a soiled dove called Lilly
rats them out to “Sister Agatha”, who then orders the other nuns to burn Hex
and Evelyn at the stake for their “sins”.
Just has they’re lighting the fire, the Apache attack again, and Jonah manages
to free himself in the chaos.
Unfortunately, he’s not fast enough to keep Evelyn from getting terribly
burned, and the scene that follows is both beautiful and tragic:
Palmiotti gave Ross all
the credit for making that scene work, saying, “Luke caught the look in the
eye, and the horror, and the head going back, and you see it in Hex’s
face. The acting was brilliant.” Ross continued to deliver through the rest of
the story as Jonah goes on the warpath, killing anyone who stands in the way
between him and Mary/Agatha, although it’s Lilly who ends up shooting her
dead. The last page has Jonah carrying
Evelyn’s body to the cemetery and telling Lilly to get a doctor and meet him
there. When she asks if she should bring
shovels, Jonah answers, “No. You’ll be
digging with your nails.”
There’s even more carnage
in JHv2#7, so much so that it nearly spilled onto the cover: the original
solicits featured a grindhouse-caliber image that was soon switched out for a tamer one (both were done by Giuseppe Camuncoli & Lorenzo Ruggiero). It’s an unusual story in that Jonah’s
intended target keeps switching: first it’s a groom on his wedding day that
Jonah believes to be a wanted man, then it’s a man who shoots the groom in cold
blood for marrying the gal he was sweet on (by the by, the groom really was
innocent), and steals a high-quality rifle the bride gave her new husband as a
wedding gift. Jonah pursues the fella
for a week, only to see him cut down by nine skunks that took over the town
Jonah and his quarry had the misfortune of riding into...and to make matters
worse, there’s a wicked thunderstorm ripping open over their heads. Not giving a damn about anything else by this
point, Jonah tells the men surrounding him, “Give me the rifle an’ all a ya
live,” but they laugh him off. Lucky for
Jonah, a bolt of lightning hits an oil rig in the center of town, and the
bounty hunter starts cutting down skunks left and right. Unluckily, he runs out of bullets before he
can kill the leader, but don’t fret, ‘cause Jonah whips out a surprise from
inside his coat: a throwing-star in the shape of a sheriff's badge, the
signature weapon of lady gunfighter Cinnamon.
Did Jonah acquire that when they first crossed paths in JLA#198-199, or
is it perhaps a souvenir from a later encounter? Hard to say, but it’s a darn good thing he
had it on him. Too bad the bride ain’t
alive to hear all about it when Jonah arrives at her home, having chosen a
lethal dose of laudanum over living without her husband. Always true to his word, he leaves the rifle
beside her before departing.
Luke Ross also departs
with this issue (though he will supply the cover issue #12), and a few other
folks will come and go before we see the one who’ll become the title’s
“regular” artist. JHv2#8 is a bit on
oddity on the art front, with Dylan Teague drawing pages 1-13 and Val Semeiks
& Dan Green polishing off pages 14-22.
The differences in style and -- most especially -- the depiction of Hex make for a jarring experience. JHv2#9
more than makes up for it, though, starting with the gorgeous DeZuniga covered
rendered in black and white with a literal splash of blood-red. A great deal of this tale takes place in a
fever-dream, as Jonah -- who’s lost a copious amount of blood -- relives a
gunfight that took place four years earlier that inadvertently caused the death
of a little girl. DeZuniga’s art on this
takes on a wonderful hallucinatory quality, so that the reader has just as
hard a time distinguishing illusion from reality as Jonah’s having. Palmiotti & Gray don’t pull any punches
with the story, either, with Jonah later facing the wrath of the dead girl’s
mother and (in that twisted way you only get in Jonah Hex stories) making
amends. On a side-note, there’s a
tombstone in the background of one panel with the name “Patrick Wedge” on it,
the first of many shout-outs to actual Hex fans the writers snuck onto the pages
over the next decade.
Phil Noto -- who gave us
a great cover on issue #3 -- moves to the interior for JHv2#10 (and like
issue #7, this one also had a different cover shown in the solicits). As with Palmiotti & Gray’s first outing,
this issue shares similarities with another classic tale, specifically 1978’s
JH#12, wherein Jonah tussles with some swamp folk. In this case, Jonah goes into said swamp to
avenge the death of a black man whom no one else seems to care about. He soon finds the family responsible and
learns that the victim’s wife is still alive, but their baby was fed to the
gators (bad move!), and they immediately try to do the same to Jonah (even
worse move!). Unbeknownst to them, Jonah
survives the ordeal, then shows up on their doorstep to teach them a lesson...and
we should be glad that the majority of it happens behind closed doors.
David Michael Beck
illustrates his first Hex story in JHv2#11, and we also get our second
guest-star in the form of El Diablo, as well as our first bit of continuity for
the new title when the two of them cross paths with some of the carnies from
issue #1, who want to get even with Hex for killing their
boss, Victor Romanoff. This version of
El Diablo is slightly different from what we’re used to, as it forgoes the idea
of Lazarus Lane being a catatonic invalid during the day, and Wise Owl is
nowhere to be seen (we’ll presume this is due to the events of 1989’s Swamp Thing #85). For the first time, we actually get to see
Lane as himself, attempting to have a semblance of a life when El Diablo is
slumbering within him (to be sure, they are two separate entities, with the
demon only coming out when Lane is unconscious). We can also deduce that the story takes place
after JHv2#3, for Hex makes a passing reference to Bat Lash, and Lane asks,
“How is that scoundrel?” It’ll be
another year before we see the three of them together, so we’ll just move on to
the rest this story. The carnies try to
hang Jonah, but El Diablo rescues him, and the two men go out the next night to
extract vengeance, only to find some other fellas beat ‘em to it. Seems Romanoff was paying protection money to
the Pearson gang, and with him dead, they’ve decided to extract payment from
the freaks. El Diablo and Hex stop the
gang from killing all of them, but the demon then has to stop Jonah from
slaughtering the rest. “They have
suffered enough, Hex. To kill them would
be of no importance,” El Diablo tells him, then
points out that, by having previously killed Romanoff, he’s partially
responsible for the gang’s rampage.
Before Jonah rides off,
one of the carnies -- a tattooed woman who claims to have “the sight” -- says
he’s no different from herself or the other freaks, and that “Some day they’ll
put you on display and people will
pay money to stare at the dead body
of Jonah Hex. You’ll be a sideshow attraction!” to which the
bounty hunter simply replies, “If ya could truly
see the future...then why didn’t ya stop all this from happenin’?” The reader, of course, knows all this will
eventually come to pass...and if this story takes place after Jonah’s trip into
the future, he may know as well, presuming his memories of 2050 are intact post-Infinite Crisis.
While there’s no explicit
date on the story in Jonah Hex (vol.2) #12 (December 2006), it’s inferred by some of the dialogue that the event
depicted led to Jonah becoming a bounty hunter.
We’ve covered this ground before -- in 1979’s JH#30-31 and 1987’s Secret Origins #21 -- but I think we can easily integrate this new information in with the rest, placing it
after Jonah getting humiliated by veteran bounty hunter Arbee Stoneham. Jonah’s travelled all the way to Utah, only
to nearly freeze to death up in the mountains.
He’s soon rescued by a group of Mormon settlers who have problems of
their own. A local general store owner
named Dice not only refuses to sell them any supplies, he’s hired a group of
bounty hunters to kill every last Mormon up in the mountains. Noting both his uniform and large supply of
guns, the Mormons try to talk Hex into killing Dice, but he instead does his
best to act as intermediary, going to the general store and requesting simply
“Fifty pounds of beef an’ all the blankets ya have ta sell.” Dice knows exactly why Jonah’s there, and
proceeds to tell him about the Mountain Meadows Massacre, a real-life event
in 1857 that did nothing to help folks’ opinions about Mormons. The bounty hunters then show up and force Hex
to lead them to the settlement, only to find an ambush waiting for them -- most
of the bounty hunters are shot down by the settlers, and Jonah polishes one off
himself. Once the fight is over, Jonah
confronts the Mormon leader about his actions, both on that day and in
1857. The man points out that what he
did -- though he’s not proud of it -- isn’t much different than what Jonah himself
did during the War. The man’s words must’ve
struck a chord with Jonah, for this time he does strike up a deal with the
settlers, then pays Dice one last visit, a scene rendered in fine detail by
Paul Gulacy:
It appears the events of
this new story were the last push Jonah needed to fully take on the role of
bounty hunter. With the incident in
SO#21, he collects a bounty by sheer dumb luck, and in JH#30-31, he’s first
pressured into participating by the law, then he does it voluntarily in the
hope of saving his friend (which he fails to do). JHv2#12 would be the first time he truly
takes on a bounty for pure financial gain, with the added incentive of knowing
that he’s protecting innocent women and children (something that’ll influence
his decisions for many years to come).
Had the series ended there as Justin Gray feared it might, this would’ve
been a fine capper to the run.
Thankfully, he and Jimmy Palmiotti were allowed to go on bringing us new
adventures every month, and as they moved into their second year, the writing
duo expanded their scope, delivering longer stories and more insights into
Jonah’s past, along with (dare we say it?) finding the ornery ol’ cuss a
soulmate.
ERRATA: The same day I posted Appendix B, I was alerted by my friend and Matching Dragoons blogger Dwayne Hendrickson that I totally omitted Jonah's adoptive Apache family. I corrected the oversight a couple of days later.
