2008-2009:
Riding High
By the beginning of
Jonah’s third year under the care of Justin Gray & Jimmy Palmiotti, it was
clear that our favorite bounty hunter was firmly ensconced in the comics
landscape of the 21st Century. Though
sales on the title were low compared to most superhero comics (at this point in time, Jonah Hex moved roughly 14,000
copies per month, whereas Batman would
sell at least 70,000 copies during the same period), Dan Didio believed it was
important for DC to offer a variety of genres, so Hex survived the chopping
block despite numbers that would’ve killed many other books. Such an attitude may have been why one of
Jonah’s fellow cowpokes also experienced a brief arrival around this time, as
Bat Lash received a 6-issue miniseries written by Peter Brandvold and Lash’s
co-creator Sergio Aragones, with art by the legendary John Severin. Jonah even managed to earn a spot in DC Direct's Showcase line (which was inspired by the Showcase black-and-white reprint
collections), when in June 2008 they released an action figure done in Tony
DeZuniga’s classic style. Also, Jonah’s
continued presence on the racks as opposed to comic-book limbo was possibly
what brought the prospects of the long-dead Jonah Hex feature film back to
life, as reports began circulating in mid-2007 that a new script was being
worked upon by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor.
Movies take a long time to move from script to screen, however, so we’ll
push that to the back burner for now and continue our focus on Jonah’s monthly
adventures.
In Jonah Hex (vol. 2) #26 (February 2008), Gray & Palmiotti gave a shout-out to three fans who frequented their Paperfilms website -- specifically Lewis Himelhoch, Mike Hewison, and Loy Turns -- by bestowing their monikers upon a group of outlaws Jonah is in pursuit of. His search leads him to a remote farm owned by two women with a penchant for quoting the Bible -- recites the King James version of Jonah 4:10-11 when the bounty hunter informs her of his name -- as well as a dark secret luring upon their property. Seems some men wronged them in the past, so these ladies have decided to wreak vengeance upon any man who comes ‘round by hacking off their limbs at the knees and elbows, cutting out their tongues, and forcing them to live like pigs in their barn...which is exactly what happened to Himelhoch, Hewison, and Turns (in a way, this little name-drop ain’t too far off from the “tribute” Lansdale & Truman cooked up for the Winter Brothers back in 1995). Suffice it to say, Jonah makes sure the gals won’t be adding any more guys to their pigpen, in a scene that artist Guiseppe Camuncoli (previously the cover artist for JHv2#7) renders in gory detail. The story wraps up with Jonah delivering the mutilated outlaws to the local sheriff, who is horrified by what he sees, but as Jonah points out, the warrant on them stated they be brought in alive, so he was just following the letter of the law.
In Jonah Hex (vol. 2) #26 (February 2008), Gray & Palmiotti gave a shout-out to three fans who frequented their Paperfilms website -- specifically Lewis Himelhoch, Mike Hewison, and Loy Turns -- by bestowing their monikers upon a group of outlaws Jonah is in pursuit of. His search leads him to a remote farm owned by two women with a penchant for quoting the Bible -- recites the King James version of Jonah 4:10-11 when the bounty hunter informs her of his name -- as well as a dark secret luring upon their property. Seems some men wronged them in the past, so these ladies have decided to wreak vengeance upon any man who comes ‘round by hacking off their limbs at the knees and elbows, cutting out their tongues, and forcing them to live like pigs in their barn...which is exactly what happened to Himelhoch, Hewison, and Turns (in a way, this little name-drop ain’t too far off from the “tribute” Lansdale & Truman cooked up for the Winter Brothers back in 1995). Suffice it to say, Jonah makes sure the gals won’t be adding any more guys to their pigpen, in a scene that artist Guiseppe Camuncoli (previously the cover artist for JHv2#7) renders in gory detail. The story wraps up with Jonah delivering the mutilated outlaws to the local sheriff, who is horrified by what he sees, but as Jonah points out, the warrant on them stated they be brought in alive, so he was just following the letter of the law.
JHv2#27 gives us
another masterpiece by Jordi Bernet, as well as adding a new member to Jonah’s cast
of characters. Not long after the end of
the Civil War (and certainly after Jonah received the “Mark of the Demon”,
going by the depictions here), a boy named Victor Sono immigrates from Italy to
New York with his father, a former soldier and peacekeeper who’d lost his leg
at some point. When the elder Sono goes
looking for employment with the police, the “native” New Yorkers mock him and
gun him down, an act that justifiably sends young Victor into a rage. Grabbing a pistol off a stranger in the
street, Victor opens fire upon the tin-star-wearing murderers, only to soon be
clubbed across the head by Jonah Hex, the rightful owner of the pistol (what
exactly he’s doing in New York City at the time is uncertain -- there’s mention
of a transfer of funds to Hex, but not the why of it). While at first Jonah seems unconcerned as to
what the lawmen may do to Victor, he quickly reconsiders and finishes the job
the boy started, then takes the unconscious Victor to an orphanage.
Many years later, Victor
is known by the moniker of “Star Man”, in reference to all the badges pinned to his coat, each of them taken off of a crooked lawman Victor has killed (by the
way, there are no apparent ties between Victor and any of the other Starman
folk to come after him in the 20th Century).
When Jonah comes looking to collect the $1,000 bounty on his head,
Victor recalls what the man did for him as a boy and refuses to kill Hex, even
going so far as to give him the majority of the bounty money in the hopes that
Hex will leave him be -- it appears Victor’s sense of honor is just as
ingrained as Jonah’s. Seeing as how
Victor was about two hundred short, though, Jonah ain’t done with him yet, and
after a series of twists and turns -- as well as a couple more lawmen gettin’
what’s comin’ to them -- both men eventually end the tale satisfied with their
respective outcomes.
John Higgins joined the
ever-growing list of Hex artists with JHv2#28, which features a tale of
revenge taken to the extreme. Jonah is
approached by a gay man whose lover was lynched by some townsfolk who objected
to their lifestyle. The man blames the
entire town for the deed, and wishes Jonah to kill everyone within, to which
Jonah replies, “So yer of the mind Ah’m an orphan maker, or would you have it
that Ah slaughtered their offspring in crib and stroller alike?” He then turns down the job offer, for while
Jonah doesn’t really give care one way or another that the man is homosexual,
he certainly doesn’t relish the idea of leaving behind a bunch of orphans who
may come looking for him someday. The
man, however, decides to take matters into his own hands by wiring the town
church with explosives and detonating it when all the folks are inside (don’t
have to worry about vengeance-seeking orphans when you blow ‘em up all at once).
When the man later seeks out
Hex again to brag about the deed, the bounty hunter literally cuts the tongue
out of the man’s head as punishment (only thing worse to Jonah than killing
kids is being proud of it), and he likely would’ve done worse if the whore
Jonah’s been visiting with throughout the story hadn’t stepped in to stop
him. “You fancy yourself a martyr and
misunderstood saint of killers,” she says to Hex. “Cast that anger inward, you son of a bitch,
and the reflection of truth shows you the face of a coward not one boot heel
taller than them he’d call law-breakers.”
Jonah blows her off and leaves, but a few issues down the line, we’ll
discover that her words cut deeper than he let on.
We return to Devil’s Paw in JHv2#29, this time with Rafa Garres on art chores, and in JHv2#30, we get more Bernet in a story that, continuity-wise, appears to take place directly after the events of 1982’s Jonah Hex #53. There’s a sepia-toned double-page spread that acts as a highlight reel for Jonah’s life all the way through his marriage to Mei Ling, the birth of their son Jason, and ending with Mei Ling leaving him:
Jonah becomes a drunken wreck after this, stumbling into a nearly-deserted town called Desperation (how fitting). A few days later, a gang of outlaws led by a man named Lucky Dave arrives on a train they hijacked, intent on blowing the safe in one of the boxcars -- they picked this town to do it in since there’s only six people living there. They begin rounding up the folks, who tell them about the “mean drunk” who’d arrived, gathered up all the booze in town, and locked himself in a hotel room. The outlaws figure they can handle him and send a huge fella named Samson upstairs to get him. Too bad for Samson that Jonah managed to rouse himself from his stupor enough to kill the man as soon as he entered the hotel room. When Samson doesn’t come down, another fella goes up, and Jonah kills him as well, tossing him out the window and into the street for good measure. By this point, blowing the safe has already gone terribly wrong (rather like the scene in Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid), so Lucky and his gal try to get out of town, but Jonah -- haggard, shirtless, and probably nursing a mean hangover -- catches up to them and challenges Lucky to a gunfight. By this point, Lucky hasn’t had one damn thing go right on this job, so he’s more than happy for the opportunity to blow Hex away. Too bad his gun misfires. “Yore just a no good drunk!” Lucky yells as he throws his pistol as Hex. “A whiskey hound with an empty heart he’s tryin’ ta fill with whiskey! Ya ain’t even got nuthin’ worth stealin’!”
We return to Devil’s Paw in JHv2#29, this time with Rafa Garres on art chores, and in JHv2#30, we get more Bernet in a story that, continuity-wise, appears to take place directly after the events of 1982’s Jonah Hex #53. There’s a sepia-toned double-page spread that acts as a highlight reel for Jonah’s life all the way through his marriage to Mei Ling, the birth of their son Jason, and ending with Mei Ling leaving him:
Jonah becomes a drunken wreck after this, stumbling into a nearly-deserted town called Desperation (how fitting). A few days later, a gang of outlaws led by a man named Lucky Dave arrives on a train they hijacked, intent on blowing the safe in one of the boxcars -- they picked this town to do it in since there’s only six people living there. They begin rounding up the folks, who tell them about the “mean drunk” who’d arrived, gathered up all the booze in town, and locked himself in a hotel room. The outlaws figure they can handle him and send a huge fella named Samson upstairs to get him. Too bad for Samson that Jonah managed to rouse himself from his stupor enough to kill the man as soon as he entered the hotel room. When Samson doesn’t come down, another fella goes up, and Jonah kills him as well, tossing him out the window and into the street for good measure. By this point, blowing the safe has already gone terribly wrong (rather like the scene in Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid), so Lucky and his gal try to get out of town, but Jonah -- haggard, shirtless, and probably nursing a mean hangover -- catches up to them and challenges Lucky to a gunfight. By this point, Lucky hasn’t had one damn thing go right on this job, so he’s more than happy for the opportunity to blow Hex away. Too bad his gun misfires. “Yore just a no good drunk!” Lucky yells as he throws his pistol as Hex. “A whiskey hound with an empty heart he’s tryin’ ta fill with whiskey! Ya ain’t even got nuthin’ worth stealin’!”
“Sure Ah do,” Jonah
answers as he thumbs back the hammer on his own pistol. “Ah got my reputation.” Though there is no gunshot, it can be assumed
that Jonah took Lucky Dave out. Overall,
the issue is a great “between the panels” sort of story that shows us Jonah didn’t exactly jump right back into bounty hunting after his marriage to
Mei Ling fell apart. It also won’t be
the last time Palmiotti, Gray, and Bernet visit that particular period in Hex
history.
Jonah reputation doesn’t
serve him well in JHv2#31, as it nearly gets him killed by lawmen as well as
framed by a masked outlaw. Artist Paulo
Siqueira -- whose style is reminiscent of rags Morales -- made a good story
even greater with wonderfully-detailed panels and expressive faces (including
probably the most evil grin I've ever seen on Hex’s ugly mug!). In JHv2#32, the bounty hunter heads to Mexico
during Dia de los Muertos (meaning this takes place around November 1st,
Jonah’s birthday) to meet a powerful man named Esteban who wants Hex to kill a
famed matador that had an affair with Esteban’s wife. It’s soon evident to Hex that the man is off
his rocker (Esteban carved up his wife’s face as punishment for her infidelity)
and he turns down the job, but Esteban won’t take no for an answer and arranges
for Hex to be gored to death by a bull in the same arena the matador performs
in:
Ironically, Jonah is
rescued by the same matador Esteban wants dead, and gets nursed back to health
by the matador and his younger sister Chula (who apparently has the hots for
Hex, going by all the not-so-subtle advances she makes on him -- Jordi Bernet’s
art makes this scene all the more hilarious).
Once he’s recovered, Jonah sneaks back into the bullfighting arena and
stabs the very-surprised Esteban in the gut, then informs the wife that the
matador still loves her.
After his ordeal in Mexico, Jonah gets
about as far away from there as possible...all the way to the Great White
North, to be exact. For JHv2#33, Gray
& Palmiotti managed to get the award-winning Darwyn Cooke to step away from
superheroes for a bit and join them in the Old West. In a Newsarama article published around the time of the issue's release, the three men revealed that they’d all known each
other for a few years, with Gray admitting to Cooke, “Once you made a
casual comment about wanting to maybe do an issue of Hex it was all over, we
were going to lure you into it one way or another,” and Palmiotti adding that
Cooke had been on their “short list of dream artists” for Jonah Hex, “but never thought you would actually be interested. We’re very glad you did, but somehow I have a
feeling it’s a favor I will be repaying for the rest of my life.”
The duo always took pride in delivering
scripts tailor-made for the selected artists, and with Cooke, it was no
different. “One night in
San Diego last year,” Cooke revealed, “I gave Justin my ‘laundry list’ for a
Hex story. It had to take place in
Canada, it had to break the cliché of the squeaky-clean Mountie, it had to
feature a knife fight with wolves and so on. Two weeks or so later, I’ll be damned if the
script didn’t appear, better than I’d hoped. You boys took my caveats and made them window
dressing to what is one of the best stories they’ve written. That main story is pure J&J and it’s what
elevates the issue to something resonant.”
Indeed, it’s a remarkable tale, told from the perspective of
a young mute boy, whose father dies while they’re traversing the Canadian
wilderness. Jonah saves the boy from a
pack of wolves, and soon after, a group of Mounties comes across them with a
prisoner in tow. Seems Jonah came north
to collect the bounty on said prisoner, and the Mounties don’t take kindly to
such things. Jonah tries to fake his way
out of the situation, telling them he’s a trapper by the name of “Fleisher”,
but the Mounties are well aware of Jonah’s infamous scar, so it don’t do him
much good. Stripping him down to his
longjohns, the Mounties crack open the ice over a frozen lake and let Jonah
fall in, then go on their way, leaving the boy behind as well. Jonah being Jonah, he eventually manages to
drag himself out of the lake and -- half-frozen and angry as Hell -- he tracks
the Mounties back to their fort, slaughtering them one by one:
Once the task is complete, Jonah collapses, and the boy drags
him inside one of the buildings in the hopes that he’d recover. The bounty hunter does, of course, and to the
surprise of both the boy and the reader, Jonah proceeds to literally push the boy away, at one point smacking him across the face when Jonah goes to leave
the fort. Considering Jonah’s reactions
when other folks harm children, such a thing seems out of character, but it
appears Jonah was trying to show the boy that, despite his muteness, he could
take care of himself, and that depending upon a surly cuss like Hex would be a
mistake in the long run. As Cooke said
in regards to the issue, “The story’s power lays in its ability to be both
heartfelt and heartless at the same time.
There is a remarkable slow build to the final scene and it is one hard
ending...this bitch out-Shanes Shane.”
Mark Sparacio handily
took care of the art for JHv2#34, which contains multiple references to fans
within its pages, as well as acting as a sequel to JHv2#28, with the opening
giving us a recap of the events of that issue (said to have taken place in New
Mexico). Seems the angry words leveled
at him by the whore apparently struck a nerve with Jonah, causing him to leave
the open plains behind and head for Oregon in an attempt to make a life for
himself that doesn’t involve killing people for money. To that end, the first page shows Jonah
literally burying his past: he places his guns and uniform in a box marked with
the Confederate battle flag and inters it in a cemetery. After spending the winter in a log cabin
built by his own hands -- the one practical skill passed on to him by his
father -- Jonah heads to the hardware store over in the nearest town for
supplies, where the owner, Mr. Clarkson, and his daughter Sandy strike up a
conversation with him. When they inquire
about his name, Jonah tells them it’s “Hillwig”, borrowing the surname of a
certain Hex historian (full disclosure: while I’d known Jimmy & Justin for
a few years by this point, and they were well-aware of all the Jonah Hex fan
fiction I’d written, I had no clue they were going to work my name into a
story. See the blog post I wrote back in 2011 for more info on my fanfic career).
As they help Jonah load
supplies onto his wagon, a group of men ride into town and begin causing
trouble. The leader, Elmsford, is
modeled after Jonah Hex fan and podcaster Matt Herring, while his buddy Blackie
is based on Brian LeTendre. Both
Palmiotti and Sparacio were already familiar with Herring’s work, so when the
artist was working on the issue, Herring gave him some reference material for
the character, which soon turned into Herring and LeTendre going over to Long
Island for a photo shoot, under the assumption that they’d be featured in a
panel or two. Little did they know,
Sparacio would turn them into the two main baddies for the story, having them
harass shopkeepers for protection money and make rather lewd remarks about
Sandy. Jonah witnesses all of this but
does his best to ignore it, even as the days pass and the violence amps up,
leading to the hardware store burning down, killing Clarkson. Faced with having to turn tricks at the
saloon to survive, Sandy heads out to Jonah’s cabin, and though they spend the
night together, Jonah’s attitude changes drastically in the morning:
Some time after she
leaves, Jonah is sitting in his cabin before the fireplace, a Bible in his lap
as he mutters, “You press me ta action against muh will. Set a bush ta burnin’, why don’t Ya?” Since the very first issue of Gray &
Palmiotti’s run, we’ve seen references to Jonah’s feud with the Lord, and it
all comes to a head here, with the bounty hunter speaking plain about the
hypocrisy he finds in the Word of God: “Love thy neighbor and thou shall not
kill stand at odds with each other an’ Ya prefer Ah take up the work of Yer
angels who ain’t but assassins with wings!
And when Judgment Day comes, Ya’ll put these deeds in shadow an’ condemn
me nonetheless as a killer and a sinner.”
He then throws the Bible into the fireplace and heads into town, only to
find Sandy already dead and buried in the same cemetery he was in at the
beginning of the story (the date on Sandy’s tombstone states the year as 1871,
so all this may have taken place before Jonah’s marriage to Mei Ling and his other attempt at hanging up his
guns). Jonah spends little time mourning
her loss, for he already knows what he has to do: he grabs a shovel, digs up
his uniform and guns, then seeks out Elmsford and his crew so he can cut them
down in a hail of gunfire. As much as he
loathes it, Jonah has faced up to the fact that God will never let him have a
moment’s peace, not so long as evil walks in the world.
Though Gray &
Palmiotti were essentially able to do whatever they wanted within the pages of Jonah Hex, there were occasions when
DC’s higher-ups would rein them in. Such
was the case when the duo got the idea for a story that would make Jonah Hex an
ancestor of Harvey Dent, AKA Two-Face.
Someone in Editorial shot down that notion real quick, so the references
to Dent were removed and the script reworked into what became JHv2#35,
gloriously illustrated by J.H. Williams III.
Jonah assists some lawmen in wiping out a band of outlaws, and
afterward, the elderly sheriff tells Jonah he’ll have to wait until tomorrow
for payment since the bank is closed. In
the meantime, the sheriff invites Jonah back to his home for a bit of supper
with himself and his young wife. Once
their stomachs are full of fine vittles, the two men take a seat on the porch
and share some whiskey, during which the sheriff makes an unorthodox
proposal. Seems the man is impotent, and
his wife is longing for children, so he’d like Jonah to play surrogate father
-- between the bounty hunter’s wandering lifestyle and his unsightly
appearance, the sheriff thinks his wife would be less inclined to run off with
Hex should he do the deed.
Considering that it’s
been implied more than once that Jonah’s mother was a whore, it’s
understandable that he isn’t in favor of prostituting himself, no matter how
good the cause. Too bad for him the
sheriff has already put a contingency plan into motion, i.e. he slipped
something into Jonah’s whiskey. The panels in the comic begin to twist about and turn wild colors as the drug takes
effect, letting the reader experience the same level of disorientation as Jonah
while fights off both the sheriff and his wife, who at one point literally straddles
him with her skirt hiked up. Jonah
manages to get away without being sexually assaulted -- let’s not mince words,
that’s exactly what this is -- but there’s still the matter of him getting
paid, so before he leaves, he gasps, “Be...at the...bank come...mornin’
or...I’ll come...fer ya...” then tells the sheriff to “think real hard” about
why Jonah didn’t kill him outright. The
next day (after puking up whatever it was they slipped him), Jonah heads into
town to collect, and though the sheriff does cough up the dough, he also
threatens to shoot Hex, who points out that the sheriff doesn’t seem to realize
he’s better off than most men. He and
his wife may not have children, but they have each other, along with a roof
over their heads and a comfortable life, so they should be happy with
that. In saying this, Jonah is silently
pointing out that he himself has none
of these things, and that the couple’s actions the night before nearly stripped
Jonah of one of the few things he does
have -- his dignity -- just for their own selfish gains.
Rafa Garres returned to
do the art for JHv2#36, set in 1866.
Unusually, it takes place before Jonah received the “Mark of the Demon”,
and certainly long before he took up bounty hunting. Also unusual is the narration throughout, as
it takes the tone of a historian writing about Jonah’s life (perhaps this is
from Professor Lawrence’s book on Hex?), focusing mainly on the question of
whether or not Jonah was a racist. While
our unknown narrator cites facts about Jonah’s enslavement by the Apache, his
marriage to Mei Ling, and his actions during the Civil War (see Appendix A for more on the latter), we see Jonah travelling through Tennessee, whereupon
he stops beside a riverbank to ask a black woman for directions to the nearest
town. Upon seeing his Confederate
uniform, she cries out, “Oh Lord! You’re
one a’ them!” and tries to flee, only to fall into the fast-moving river. Jonah does his best to save her, but she
strikes her head against a rock and dies.
Just then, a group of blacks finds the two of them and, presuming Jonah
murdered her, pummel him and attempt to string him up. Jonah is soon rescued by four white men, who
kill every black person present without mercy, then take an unconscious Hex
back to their place.
As Jonah recovers, his
rescuers talk long about all the injustices they perceive around them -- namely
the laziness and general uppity attitude of the black populace since the South
lost the War -- and how they plan on turning things around. When they realize their guest doesn’t share
the same sentiment, they immediately brand him a spy who must’ve stolen a
uniform. Jonah informs them that his
uniform was rightly earned in battle, “but as time has passed and reflections
bolstered by several attempts at surrender have taught me...the thinkin’ behind
both blue an’ gray leaves a bitter taste.”
He also mentions that a longing to live amongst whites again after years
with the Apache may’ve caused him to take up a “foolish” cause. All this perplexes the bigoted men, as they
can’t understand why someone who thinks as Jonah does would still be wearing
that uniform a full year after the War ended, but Jonah is through trying to
explain himself, and instead pulls leather and kills three of the men. The fourth survives, but his kneecap is
shattered, a fact Jonah pays no mind as he drags the man back out to the
riverbank. Once there, he forces the man
to dig seven graves -- one for each black person the bigots killed -- and after
the man dies from both exhaustion and his wounds, Jonah dumps his body under a
tree and proceeds to dig an eighth grave...this one for the woman Jonah was
unable to save. As the story closes, our
unseen narrator surmises Hex was not racist in the sense that we usually know,
for in truth he “loathed every human
soul with equal enthusiasm”, and by
continuing to wear Confederate gray, he could more easily judge what truly lay
in a person’s heart by how they reacted to the uniform. If good people feared him and stayed away,
that was fine by him, and if it lured evil folks out into the open for him to
snuff out, so much the better.
Next up, we get a
double-dose of Jordi Bernet, starting with JHv2#37, wherein Jonah has to
contend with three female circus performers looking to get into the bounty-hunting
business, and in JHv2#38, we learn that the sheriff Jonah delivered those
mutilated outlaws to back in JHv2#26 (which apparently took place three years
earlier) was turned out of office due to the townsfolk losing confidence in him
that day. Feeling that the bounty hunter
is to blame, the man hunts down Hex to get revenge, during which time we learn
their lives were more entangled than just that one encounter (and the sheriff
isn’t as much of a victim as he implies).
Then Garres comes back again for JHv2#39, as Jonah helps a reluctant
lawman take down three escaped convicts (and later prevents a beloved saloon
from being shut down by temperance folk).
Artist David Michael Beck
-- who’d previously done the pair of Hex/El Diablo team-ups -- is on hand for
the two-parter in Jonah Hex (vol.2 )
#40 & 41 (cover-dated April-May 2009), which takes place in 1879. Jonah is put on the trail of a man believed
to have killed seventeen young girls in a gruesome manner -- when the details
are given, Jonah finds a note of familiarity in them. He recalls stories he heard during the Civil
War about a doctor from Louisiana -- William Zimmerman, known to many as
“Sawbones” -- who took sadistic pleasure in torturing and performing medical experiments
upon Yankee prisoners. The man had
learned “hoodoo magic” from some slaves proficient in it, and used the War as
an excuse to partake in the dark arts.
Despite this reputation, Jonah takes on the job, but a month later, as
he closes in on his quarry, he’s accidentally shot in the chest when mistaken for
a member of an outlaw gang. When Jonah
wakes up, he discovers himself bound hand and foot, with Sawbones standing
before him. The good doctor knows who
Hex is and why he’s in town. “It’s a
true crime that I so rarely get to speak freely with my own kind,” Sawbones
says as he begins to go to work on the soles of Jonah’s bare feet, slashing
them with a knife, then cauterizing the wounds shut, over and over again.
After a while, Sawbones
leaves to go fetch some of his disciples, and Jonah uses the opportunity to
free himself, repeatedly slamming his back against the support pole he’s tied
to until the wood snaps. Exhausted and
feverish from both the effort and the infection setting into his chest wound,
Jonah staggers on bloodied feet out of Sawbones’s lair and into the night,
eventually collapsing into a stream when he pauses for water. The issue ends with his semi-conscious form
being found around dawn by none other than Tallulah Black, whom we haven’t seen
since they parted ways in JHv2#17.
The next issue opens two
weeks later with Jonah waking up screaming from a nightmare, wherein Sawbones
was taking Tallulah apart one organ at a time.
Fortunately, Tallulah is just fine, and has been tending to Jonah’s
wounds with both bandages and “Mr. Chow’s special deliveries” (presumably
opium-laced cigarettes, knowing of Tallulah’s previous experience with the
drug). Jonah has told Tallulah nothing
about how he came to be in such a state, nor does he want her hanging around,
but she feels indebted to him and refuses to leave (there’s also the fact that
they still fancy each other a bit -- “Just holler if I break anything
important,” Tallulah says as she pulls off her shirt and climbs into bed with
him). Four days later, Jonah feels well
enough to leave the hotel they’ve been holed up in, and Tallulah has managed to
ferret out where Sawbones is now.
Apparently, Jonah did fess up about what happened to him, but he still doesn’t
want Tallulah to help out. He’s faced people
as depraved as Sawbones before, and he’s never shied away from doing some
rather gruesome stuff to folks what deserved it, yet going by the nightmares,
Jonah is genuinely afraid of Tallulah falling victim to this mad doctor. Keep in mind that one of Jonah’s first loves
-- Cassie Wainwright -- was tortured to death, so perhaps his feelings towards
Tallulah combined with this situation are dredging up those dreadful memories.
Whatever the reason,
Jonah does go after Sawbones alone...and nearly gets captured again when one of
the doctor’s disciples bushwhacks him.
Lucky for Hex, Tallulah decided to ignore his warning to stay away, and
together they eliminate all of the disciples, then strap Sawbones to his own
operating table so Jonah can extract a bit of justice for all those girls the
doctor killed. “Ah like fire. Always have,” the bounty hunter says as he pours
a literal bucket of blood into the doctor’s open mouth. “There’s somethin’ ‘bout it that brings a
smile ta muh face.” He then takes a lit
kerosene lantern and smashes it over Sawbone’s head, making for an exaggerated variation
of the “bleed and cauterize” torture Sawbones had inflicted upon Jonah. Tallulah makes a wry comment about it
smelling like a barbecue as Jonah repeats the procedure upon the doctor,
followed by an admission that “Watchin’ you work makes my blood hot.”
Despite his initial reluctance to
let her help, it’s plain to see that Jonah Hex and Tallulah Black are perfect for
each other. Palmiotti & Gray made the right decision two years earlier when they let her survive in her debut tale, and Jonah's world is all the better for it. In less than a year, however, their
relationship will be tested in ways that no one should ever have to endure.
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