An Illustrated History of Jonah Hex (Part 16)

2007-2008: Reliving the Past, Revealing the Future

When it comes to superheroes, it’s common for their “secret origin” to be anything but.  It seems that, for many of them, it’ll be referred to on an annual basis, either in passing or as the foundation of a multi-issue storyline.  Writers love to tinker with it, to put their own spin on it, to alter some integral fact of it or bring about some heretofore-unknown revelation or chuck the entire thing out the window and start over again, all to ensure that the hero’s life “will never be the same again!”  However, as longtime readers of Jonah Hex are aware, he ain’t no superhero, nor has he been subject to the whims of countless writers over the course of his existence.  In the three decades prior to Jimmy Palmiotti & Justin Gray taking on the character, only six men had chronicled Jonah’s life within the confines of his headlining books: John Albano, Arnold Drake, Michael Fleisher, Russell Carley, David Michelinie, and Joe R. Lansdale.  Of those six, Fleisher wrote the lion’s share of the stories, cranking out four times as much material as the other five men combined.  Thanks to this, Jonah Hex maintained a consistency of character that few other comics properties have ever achieved.  Fleisher felt no need to retell key moments from Jonah’s past ad nauseum or tinker with them: he’d relate an event once, then never mention it again unless it was relevant to the story at hand (such as the Fort Charlotte Massacre), and even then, he’d usually be very brief about it (the scene of Jonah receiving the “Mark of the Demon” -- shown in full in Jonah Hex #8 -- merits only a single panel in JH#30 and Secret Origins #21).

The drawback to this was new fans who wanted to learn anything about Jonah’s backstory would have to hunt down the original issues or (if they were lucky) grab one of the few reprint digests available.  Even in Jonah’s heyday of the 1970s-80s, this would’ve taken a little work, but as time passed and a whole new generation of fans discovered the character though the Vertigo minis and his appearances on Batman: The Animated Series and Justice League Unlimited, those old issues became harder to find, not to mention more expensive (DC’s haphazard approach to releasing trades of classic Hex tales -- partially due to royalty issues -- didn’t help matters much either).  Luckily, Jimmy Palmiotti & Justin Gray were aware of how long it’d been since certain aspects of Jonah’s past had been dealt with, and decided to fill readers in during their second year of writing the character.  To do this, they enlisted the help of Spanish artist Jordi Bernet, who was already a long-established legend in European comics, having worked on numerous genres since 1960, when at age 15 he took over art duties on his late father’s comic strip Dona Urraca.  With a style evoking the bygone adventure strips of Milton Caniff as well as the gritty linework of Joe Kubert, Bernet brought an entirely new flavor to a familiar tale.

The three-part “Retribution” storyline kicked off in Jonah Hex (vol. 2) #13 (January 2007), opening on the Wyoming Badlands, circa 1868.  Four men sit around a campfire, and we can tell by their talk that not only are some of them former Union soldiers who served under a Colonel Ackerman, they’re also running a wagonload of guns down to Mexico, with a posse presumably on their trail the entire time.  One man goes off to take a piss, but soon staggers back with a tomahawk buried in his back so as to better pin a wanted poster there.  The three men jump to their feet, weapons drawn and on the alert, but it does them no good, as their unseen attacker continues to take them down until the last man, Fulsome, grabs one of the women they’re holding hostage in the wagon and shoves his pistol in her face, threatening to kill her if he’s not permitted to leave unharmed.  “I should’ve killed you at Fort Donelson, but I didn’t!” Fulsome yells into the darkness.  “You hear me, ya galvanized Yankee?  I let you live!  Remember?!?”

He most certainly does: cut to September 1862, as the Union Army of West Tennessee returns to the aforementioned Fort Donelson one rainy, gray evening.  A band of Confederates lay in wait outside the gates, with two of them -- including Lieutenant Jonah Hex -- dashing out from hiding to sneak into the fort under the Union wagons.  Once inside, they take out the guards and open the gates wide for their fellow Rebs, who are soon cut down by a Union-wielded Gatling gun.  Hex survives the barrage of bullets, only to have the Yankees decide to make an example of him:

Set adrift upon the Cumberland River, the nearly-dead lieutenant is later found by a kindhearted doctor and his family, and he spends the next 4 months under their care before returning to his regiment (all of which we've discussed in further detail elsewhere).  When we cut back to 1868, Fulsome is now declaring that he’ll keep moving on “till I hit water” if his assailant -- who now has a gun pointed at the back of Fulsome’s head -- will have the decency to let him go, but that isn’t going to happen, and the former Union captain knows it.  As he’s forced to his knees, he taunts, “Ackerman will have you dangling from a tree and eaten by vultures, you hear me?  You’re gonna die bloody -- like them Indians you love so much.”

“Maybe so,” Jonah Hex replies, “but you won’t live to see it.”  After pinning Fulsome’s wanted poster to the man’s chest, the bounty hunter shoots him through the heart, bringing the issue to an explosive end.  At the time, it appeared as though the writers were revising the origin of Jonah’s facial scar by placing the blame squarely upon Ackerman and Fulsome: the right side of his face is either heavily bandaged or in shadow during the remainder of the flashback, plus the cover shows it positively dripping from fresh wounds.  However, Jonah’s time among the Apache does get a brief mention in the issue, and as the story progresses, we’ll find ourselves on more familiar ground.

When JHv2#14 opens, we once again begin in the “present”, wherein Jonah watches from the back of a saloon as a boy tries to get his drunken father to come home with him, only to earn a slap across the face.  The sight causes Jonah to reflect back to 1851, specifically the day before he and his Pa set out for California.  For the first time, the location of his boyhood home is given as Greeley, Colorado, thereby usurping Joe Lansdale’s assumption that Hex was a Texan.  Young Jonah is quite vocal in his objections to the journey ahead, and Woodson Hex decides a lesson needs to be taught.  After breaking a bottle over Jonah’s head, he drags the boy over to the outhouse, explaining that he named his son after the biblical Jonah, “on account a’ me not wantin’ children in the first place.”  As he relates the trials that the boy’s namesake went through, the man chucks Jonah into the cesspit below the outhouse...just another one of his endless efforts to toughen the boy up.  By the time Jonah climbs out, night as fallen, and Woodson is sitting outside with a pistol in hand, daring him to take it and gun his old man down.  Jonah doesn’t move a muscle, so Woodson instead imparts to him a set of rules that longtime readers will realize adult Jonah has been living by since his very first appearance:

From there, the life of young Jonah proceeds essentially the same as it did when Michael Fleisher first related the tale three decades earlier: Woodson once again offers up his son as a slave to the Apache -- a tribe living in Arizona’s Black Hills, to be exact -- but here, Jonah is being used as collateral in exchange for his father’s safe passage, not to help raise a grubstake.  Jonah still saves the chief two years later from being killed by a puma, thereby winning his freedom, but this time, immediately after the ceremony, Jonah and White Fawn confess their love for each other, to Noh-Tante’s disgust.  “There will be no impure mixing of blood in my tribe,” Noh-Tante tells Jonah, who curtly replies that it ain’t his tribe yet.  The timeline gets shifted forward a bit here, as the two of them go off to raid the Kiowa camp that same night, as opposed to a year later in the original telling, but Noh-Tante still betrays Jonah and leaves him to die at the hands of the Kiowa.  In this version, however, Jonah isn’t captured, as he manages to defend himself with little trouble, yet he doesn’t return to the Apache because he knows Noh-Tante will already be spreading lies about what happened.  “He would see the tribe again one day,” our ever-present narrator informs us, “but it would be on the other end of another great and terrible war between brothers.”

Back at the saloon, Jonah pulls leather on the abusive father, who’s wielding both a knife and a gun now -- when the man refuses to lay off the kid, Jonah shoots him dead between the eyes.  “You killed my pa!” the boy cries out, to which Jonah simply replies “You’re welcome” (in his opinion, he’s just saved the boy from a lifetime of pain and grief).  As Jonah leaves the saloon, he finds more of Ackerman’s men waiting for him -- they want the wagonload of guns he took after killing Fulsome and the others.  A shootout commences, with Jonah taking out nearly all of them easy as you please.  The last man standing tries to shoot Jonah in the back, but the boy from the saloon shoots the man in the knee with his dead father’s gun.  “You’re welcome,” the boy says right before Jonah finishes the man off.

The two disparate threads from the past finally weave together in JHv2#15, as we learn within the first few pages that Colonel Ackerman -- who has designs on raising a private army and taking over Mexico -- recently slaughtered the same Apache tribe Jonah had been a part of.  The issue then gets the final flashback out of the way right quick, giving us a virtual beat-for-beat retelling of JH#8’s fight of honor between Jonah and Noh-Tante in 1866, right down to the busted tomahawk and Jonah receiving his infamous scar.  It should be noted that, since the rest of JHv2#15 takes place in 1868 -- and the “present-day” events of JH#7-8 were set in 1874 and involved Jonah crossing paths with his tribe once more -- either that portion of Fleisher’s story has now been retconned out of existence or certain key players escaped the slaughter.

In either case, Jonah means to have his revenge on Ackerman for having twice wronged him, and enlists the help of a huge Iroquois called Widow Maker and about a dozen other Indians he breaks out of an Army-run internment camp (but not before trading a few insults with Widow Maker).  They head to the fort that Ackerman and his remaining men -- some of whom still wear their Union togs -- have taken over in Mexico, and once has night fallen, Jonah boldly walks up to the front gate and demands to speak with the former colonel.  “My God, man, you’re still wearing that ridiculous jacket?” Ackerman proclaims when Jonah walks into his quarters, but the bounty hunter is undeterred as he calmly tells Ackerman about killing Fulsome and the others, then says he was a member of the Apache tribe they’d so thoughtlessly slaughtered.  Ackerman immediately tells his men to go on alert, but it’s too late: the Indians allied with Hex are already over the wall and opening fire with Ackerman’s own guns.  Jonah quickly dispatches the other men in the room, then goes mano a mano with Ackerman, eventually killing the man by stabbing him in the chest with a busted chair leg.  Once the battle is over, Widow Maker tells Jonah that he and the other Indians plan on moving further into Mexico to avoid the authorities, and he invites Jonah to join them.  Jonah declines the invitation as well as a share of the gold they found in one of the storehouses, and instead rides off, intent on continuing to do “the only thing Ah’m good at.”

While Hex goes in search of another new bounty in the comic-book world, we’re gonna step over to a whole ‘nother type of storytelling for a bit.  March 2007 saw the publication of Trail of Time from Warner Books, a full-prose novel by Jeff Mariotte set within the DCU, and featuring not only Jonah Hex, but also Scalphunter, Bat Lash, El Diablo, and Johnny Thunder.  The overall story involves a team-up between Vandal Savage, Mordru, and Felix Faust as they cook up an overly-complicated, centuries-spanning scheme to take over the world, which comprises the bulk of the novel’s 343 pages.  In truth, despite Hex appearing on the cover alongside Superman, Lois Lane, and Etrigan, he and the other cowpokes are somewhat removed from the main story: if one were to read only the parts set in May 1872, you’d still get a decent oater out of the deal, as Mariotte’s experience with Westerns -- honed on comics like Image’s Graveslinger and Desperadoes from Homage Studios -- shows through well.  Though he borrowed from John Albano’s tenure by naming Jonah’s horse General, it’s Michael Fleisher who gets the lion’s-share of the nods, as there’s references to Jonah’s failed marriage to Mei Ling, the 4th Cavalry, and his matching pair of Colt Dragoons, as well as a direct shout-out when Lois speaks briefly with a fella who works at a place called Carley & Fleisher, Inc. (he even goes so far as to name an unseen character “Russ”!).  On the downside, while Mariotte does establish in the tale that Scalphunter and Bat Lash share a history, he treats the other Western heroes as if they’re all meeting for the first time, which is a shame when compared to the camaraderie that pervades amongst the modern-day heroes appearing within (and the mindwipe they pull on the cowpokes at the end adds insult to injury in that regard).  If you’re interested, you can pick up a copy of Trail of Time for cheap on Amazon, but keep in mind that you’ll have to wade through a good amount of plodding scenes chock-full of superheroes in order to find Jonah and his cohorts.

Back in our usual format, Gray, Palmiotti, and returning artist Phil Noto introduce someone new into Jonah’s life in JHv2#16 (April 2007): Tallulah Black, a woman with a past and face scarred nearly as bad as his own.  “Tallulah had been hanging around for a long time,” Justin Gray said in regards to the character’s creation, “she started as this boisterous and more aggressive counterpart to Hex, but evolved into her own person in a very short period of time. I see them both as tragic figures, but I always saw Tallulah as being capable of having a normal life if the circumstances came together in just the right way. Unfortunately, that wasn’t ever going to be the case unless something incredible happened.”

As originally written, Jonah was barely present in Tallulah’s debut story: the opening scene where he meets a little barefooted girl with a fishing pole isn’t present in the early script drafts, having been conceived separately (I can verify that the idea for it dates back to at least April 2006, for when I met Jimmy Palmiotti at Pittsburgh Comic Con, he took gleeful pleasure in describing the scene to fans visiting his table).  Little did anyone know at the time -- including Palmiotti & Gray -- that the addition of the little girl to this story would have a lasting impact on Hex history.

Our first glimpse of Tallulah comes immediately after that scene, as she and her family are confronted by seven men affiliated with the government.  Though there’s no date on the story, the dialogue indicates this is taking place in Tennessee during the Reconstruction era, during which some ex-Confederates had their lands seized and redistributed.  This policy is being taken to extremes in the case of the Black family, who are ruthlessly slaughtered when they refuse to sell their land to the government men.  Despite taking a bullet to her left eye, Tallulah survives and has her own visit from the little girl, who pays no mind to Tallulah’s bloodied appearance and invites her home for supper.  Tallulah declines, saying she has graves to dig.  “Mind the woods,” the girl advises before leaving.  “There’s a bad man in them.”

Cut to one year later in a place called Little City, where we find Tallulah -- a patch now covering her missing eye -- has turned to opium to deal with both the loss of her family and her present profession in a cathouse.  Unfortunately, one of the government men -- a cruel man named Simon -- comes a-calling one day, and though Tallulah does her best to fight back, Simon not only has his way with her, he takes a knife and mutilates her face and body afterward.  Once again, Tallulah survives, and the owner of the cathouse takes sympathy on her:

After another three weeks of searching and running afoul of some other unsavory characters, Tallulah and Jonah finally cross paths.  When she tells him about what befell her family, he presumes she wants to hire him and turns her down.  She replies, “Ah don’t want ya ta kill them men.  Ah want ya ta show me how ta do it.”  If you recall, Jonah went through a similar situation three decades ago in Weird Western Tales #37, wherein the fella he trained in the ways of the gun turned out to be an unsavory sort who outright lied about his motivations, so Jonah has a damn good reason to dismiss Tallulah’s request.  He soon discovers that Tallulah ain’t the sort of gal you dismiss easily, and after a little more convincing on her part, Jonah agrees to train her.

JHv2#17 opens three months later, with Tallulah -- dressed in her now-signature black outfit -- engaging in one last gunslinging lesson prior to heading out after the seven men who killed her family.  She passes the test with flying colors, and after they turn in for the night, Tallulah tries to sidle up to Hex.  He blows her off, but later on, when she’s beset by nightmares and starts screaming, things take a different turn:

When you look back at the other women Jonah has fallen for over the years, the majority have acted as a yin to his yang, balancing out his rage and rough edges with gentleness and grace.  Tallulah Black is the first one who can stand toe-to-toe with him: she’s just as tough, just as driven, just as broken both inside and out...and perhaps on some weird, narcissistic level, that appeals to him.  To be sure, whatever the cause of the spark between them, it doesn’t deter Tallulah from her mission of vengeance, which she carries out easily the next day (Jonah does assist with taking out one fella sneaking up on her, but as he put it, “Couldn’t be helped, not when I got the smell of blood an’ gunsmoke in my nose.”).  The only snag is Simon, the man who carved her up in the cathouse: his last shot before dying tears through her gut.  Jonah gets her to a doctor, who does what he can but believes Tallulah isn’t long for this world.

After sending the doc away, Jonah throws Tallulah a lifeline by performing an Apache ritual for those lost on “the trail between”.  Things get a mite dreamy, and we see Tallulah -- unscarred and in a simple white dress -- meeting the little girl once more.  “I hear him callin’ you,” the girl tells her.  “There ain’t nuthin’ back there fer ya.”  For a moment, it appears that Tallulah is going to follow the girl into the afterlife...and in truth, Tallulah did die in one of the early drafts (in that version, Hex would’ve closed the issue by saying, “She’s better off where she is.”).  As Justin Gray explained, “Tallulah was initially intended to be shorter story but as we worked with her and developed her I realized she needed more space to grow.”  So in that great comic-book tradition, Tallulah Black escaped death in the final panels, but with the drawback of Jonah leaving her to convalesce on her own.  “Maybe we’ll meet again down the road,” he tells her, and indeed they shall, but we’ve got a few other tales to get through before that reunion.

Val Semeiks shows up again in JHv2#18 to help relate a sad tale of madness and misunderstanding, then we get more from Noto in JHv2#19 &20 in a two-part tale with an interesting side-plot.  We start in Sulfur Springs, Texas, as Jonah is employed by businessman Wiley Park to locate his missing nephews -- Park believes they were kidnapped, but with no ransom note, Jonah believes otherwise.  Cut to one month later in Kansas, where we’re treated to the machinations of a lady of the evening called Madam Blood, who has no qualms about murdering itinerant miners up in her room so she can pick their pockets.  After one of the whores in her employ discovers her dealings and tells the sheriff, Blood flees town, leaving behind a massive amount of evidence:

Another month passes, and Hex is back in Texas with two coffins in tow.  We soon learn the coffins contain Park’s nephews, and just as the reader would be presuming they were killed by Blood, Hex tells Park that they were strung up by Kansas lawmen...after Hex turned them in for the bounty on their heads!  Though he’s incensed by the way Jonah handled the whole affair, Park pays him as promised, but once Jonah is out of town, Park turns to one of his men -- a well-dressed fella by the name of Horace -- and says, “I want that sick devil in the ground!”

Three weeks later, Jonah is in Oklahoma and hot on Madam Blood’s trail.  Jimmy & Justin manage to slip in a Vertigo-caliber joke right before Jonah gets caught up in a four-page chase scene as he pursues Blood through a two-story saloon, eventually catching her when she falls off the roof and into a horse trough.  After she’s cooled off, Jonah takes her to the abandoned mine she’s been dumping her newest victims into and ties her up, saying, “Ah’ll tell the sheriff back in Kansas ya wuz already dead when Ah found ya.”

“What kind of a man are you?  You can’t leave me alone here!” Blood screams as Jonah walks away, causing him to pause.  “Alone?” he replies, looking over his shoulder.  “Seems to me you know all these fellas personally.”  It’s a classic Hex ending, and likely the reason it’ll be revisited three years down the line.  Long before we reach that point, however, we need to wrap up our business with Wiley Park in the next issue, which takes place a few months later.  Horace and his men catch up with Jonah one night while he’s sleeping off a wicked drunk: when Jonah wakes up, he finds himself hanging upside-down in the desert with the words Courtesy of Mister Park scratched into the dry earth below him.  Though he frees himself in a manner worthy of Conan the Barbarian, Jonah is soon confronted by Horace, who oh-so-kindly offers to not kill Hex so long as he never rears his head in Sulfur Springs again, then breaks most of Jonah’s fingers by stomping on them.  Though a couple of digits have an odd bend to them for the rest of the story, his hands are in much better shape overall than they were after a similar incident in JH#11 three decades earlier, and he even risks punching Chako in the face when he runs across the “little mosquito” later on as he’s heading for the nearest town.  Having apparently severed his relationship with the mute girl from JHv2#4, Chako is more than happy to pal around with Hex again, but Hex certainly doesn’t want him around, and quickly dumps him as soon as Chako’s won enough money at a gambling table to pay for some grub and the beginnings of a plan.

Cut to three weeks later in Sulphur Springs, as Park and Horace -- who was made Park’s business partner as payment for “killing” Hex -- discuss how to improve business.  Some of Park’s men come into the office, believing they’ve been summoned, but the note they were passed was phony.  That’s when Hex calls out from the street, “Evenin’, boys.  Ah reckon ya missed me these last few months.”  Standing next to Hex is a soiled dove he met the same night he parted ways with Chako: Hex paid her handsomely to be his “inside gal” at Park’s establishment, enabling the bounty hunter to plant dynamite in Park’s office.  One simple push of the detonator, and his business with Park, Horace, and their cohorts is concluded.

Jordi Bernet returns for JHv2#21, which reads more like two short tales stitched together, each focusing on brutality of varying sorts.  It opens on a trio of women travelling by stagecoach to the town of Plimpton: three days’ sort of their destination, they make a rest stop at Red Mesa, only to be set upon by a gang and molested (a trope so prevalent during Palmiotti & Gray’s run that Dwayne Hendrickson began including a "rape percentage" with his reviews of the series).  Meanwhile, over in Plimpton proper,  Hex is hired by the Pinkertons to track down some bank robbers led by a murderous man named Montana, and their trail leads Hex to a bizarre rock formation known as “the Devil’s Paw”, due to its resemblance to a giant hand reaching up from the earth.  Within the stony maze below the Devil’s Paw, Jonah finds not only the bank robbers, but piles of skulls, strange pictograms, and a crazed Indian who slaughters all the robbers save for Montana, who literally runs into Hex, leading to a gruesome scene:

The issue ends with Jonah riding into Red Mesa -- which lays not far from the Devil’s Paw -- and coming across the trio of now-dead women and the drunken men who did the deed.  In true Hex fashion, he sets fire to the building he found them in, then stands in the street and shoots the men as they run out.  After such a grim issue, the premise of JHv2#22 is like a breath of fresh air: Jonah has to retrieve stolen blueprints for an automated “steam man”, which are now in the hands of Thomas Edison!  The story is chock-full of historical references, with mentions of dime novels, Nikola Tesla, and Sherlock Holmes (the latter allowing us to date the story no earlier than 1888), though as far as I can find, the research facility in Denver where much of the story takes place is a fabrication.  There’s some interesting lines in Jonah’s dialogue as well: he makes a passing reference to Gotham City (which’ll pay off in a few years), and he muses a bit about the future folks like Edison are building.  One major drawback to the tale is, surprisingly, Phil Noto’s artwork, which comes off as unusually dark and muddy, blunting the impact of scenes like the dinner shared by Edison and Hex, during which they’re served by glowing-eyed, crudely-shaped robots (one has to wonder if Jonah was having flashbacks to 2050 as he warily watched the things clunking about).

We’re back to our normal levels of brutal frontier justice -- gloriously illustrated by Bernet once more -- in JHv2#23, followed by Hex teaming up with El Diablo and Bat Lash in JHv2#24 as artist David Michael Beck returns for a “Special Halloween Issue” (according to the cover blurb).  Going by the dialogue, this takes place before the events of JHv2#11, as Lash is unfamiliar with Lazarus Lane and his “better half”, but Jonah’s apparently had previous experience with them, since El Diablo specially summoned him to the town of Coffin Creek.  Seems Esmeralda Moorland -- ancestor of a Starman baddie known as the Prairie Witch -- has managed to separate Lane and El Diablo, trapping the latter in a hotel room via a binding spell.  Though the demon can’t leave to rescue Lane, it can transfer part of its power to “a man strong-willed and mean-spirited enough”, and if that ain’t Hex, I don’t know who is.  The issue surpasses the Vertigo era for weirdness as Jonah walks around with glowing eyes and Hellfire-shooting pistols, but thankfully, he’s all back to normal by the end, as is Lane/Diablo.

After such an ordeal, I’m sure Jonah needed a good stiff drink, and he was lucky to find one that same month over in Booster Gold #3, written by Geoff Johns & Jeff Katz, with art by Dan Jurgens & Norm Rapmund..  The titular time-travelling hero heads back to the mid-1800s (no specific date given) to check on an anomaly that would lead to the death of Jonathan Kent’s great-grandfather, thereby eliminating both Superman’s adoptive father and the Man of Steel himself.  Just like the similar setup in 2003’s Superman & Batman: Generations III #8, part of this tale hinges on Jonah Hex’s presence, so Booster -- dressed in duds that make him look like Woody from Toy Story! -- seeks him out to see what’s what:

While the scene that follows doesn’t have tremendous consequences for the story or Jonah’s life in general, it’s fun to watch Jonah and Booster slowly get drunk together (and Booster’s booze-fueled ramble after he parts ways with Hex is hilarious).  When we reach Jonah Hex (vol. 2) #25 (January 2008), however, it’s time to sober up real good, ‘cause we get a rare glimpse of Jonah’s twilight years.  Set in 1899 and illustrated by the legendary Russ Heath, the story makes a fine companion piece to his work on 1978’s “The Last Bounty Hunter”.  Right from the first page, Palmiotti & Gray take this opportunity to fill in a few gaps in the historical record, telling us not only did the Hex lineage continue on well into the 20th Century, but Jonah Hex’s grandson, Woodson -- who would author a book about the Old West -- also carried on the family business as a bounty hunter and private detective.  This tale is about ol’ Jonah, though...and I do mean old, for he’d be about 61 when this takes place.  While his impending death in 1904 is noted, there’s no mention of Tall Bird or Cheyenne, Wyoming within the context of the story, so presumably Jonah hasn’t met her yet, or at least they haven’t settled down together.  Instead, Jonah is busy playing prospector down in Mexico when he spots some bandits riding his way, a group of Rurales on their tail.  Sensing an opportunity to make some bounty money, Hex starts taking shots at the bandits from his cliffside location.  The bandits stop in their tracks, and Hex can only hope the Rurales catch up before the bandits take him out.

Though his vision isn’t as sharp as it used to be -- “Ah ought a git me some spectacles,” he muses -- Jonah takes out a good amount of them by the time the Rurales reach him.  Among them is a young white man who senses something familiar about Jonah.  “Isn’t it possible we met somewhere?” he asks, but Jonah shakes him off with a terse “You don’t know me.”  The young man isn’t swayed so easily, though, and continues to press the issue when they get to town, offering to buy him a drink.  Jonah reluctantly accepts, then tells the young man his name is “Mister Albano” and that he prefers to drink alone.  That’s when the young man speaks aloud what Jonah’s known all along: “My name’s Jason Hex.”  Like his father before him, Jason became a tracker, and he came down to Mexico to help the Rurales, who don’t object to Jason being half-Chinese the way folks back in America do.  Jason then begins to talk about how his father was a bounty hunter, and he never got to know him very well...and Jonah decides this charade has gone on long enough:

Despite Jonah attacking him, Jason has no wish to do the old man any harm, saying, “I only wanted to talk to my father.”  But Jonah doesn’t feel they have much to say to each other, even after Jason informs him that Mei Ling -- Jonah’s ex-wife and Jason’s mother -- is dead.  In between swigs of booze, Jonah tells his son, “Whutever it is ya think yore gonna hear or learn...whut ya see in front a’ ya is what Ah am.  It’s the reason yer ma took ya away.  She didn’t want ya ta know me.  An’ that’s the way it goes.”  That last line states in simple terms an immutable fact that Jonah accepted long ago: no matter how much you may desire otherwise, the past cannot be changed.  He can’t go back in time and be the father Jason wishes him to be anymore than he can go back and prevent Colonel Ackerman from killing his adoptive Apache family or his fellow Confederates.  He can only go forward, enduring the weight of his mistakes with every step and numbing the pain however he can.

The issue ends with Jonah riding away, unaware that he just passed by his daughter-in-law and newborn grandson.  Going by what Tall Bird said in Secret Origins #21, Jason will someday meet a horrific end, but we know now that the Hex legacy will stretch on all the way into the 21st Century, with each generation making their mark in their own way.  We’ll eventually discuss a couple of those latter-day descendants, but we still have many other tales about the family patriarch to get through, including one featuring the work of a modern comics legend.

ERRATA: Appendix B has been updated with an entry for Jinny Hex, Jonah's newly-revealed descendant.  Very little is known about her at this time, but we'll keep adding information as it becomes available.  Also, keep an eye on the main blog page for news about an expansion of the Jonah Hex history project!

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Appendix A   |   Appendix B