Big things are a-happening...

Still working on the details, but I might have a huge announcement for you guys very soon.  Stay tuned for that.  In other news, the tenth installment of "An Illustrated History of Jonah Hex" will be up this Friday, just in time for Jonah's 175th birthday (I may not be the most punctual person, but I'll always put up a history post on November 1st!).  And if you're not already reading All-Star Western on a regular basis, I implore you to do so.  Palmiotti & Gray are putting out one of the best titles DC has to offer, and I'm not just saying that as a fan: the recent reviews on it are the most-positive I've ever seen, but the sales numbers still aren't great for some unfathomable reason.  Please pre-order ASW and any other Jonah Hex stuff so DC's marketing department can see just how many people out there really like to read Hex's adventures (once it's on the shelf for general consumption, DC stops counting).  I want the old man to stick around for many more years to come...or at least until I can arrange a crossover with a certain younger cowpoke.

New fanfic: Shades of Gray #13

I really thought I'd get this issue done faster, and as always, it just didn't happen.  But it's here now, so rejoice!  Be sure to click the link at the end of the issue for some info regarding this tale versus Jonah's current adventures in All-Star Western (which you should be reading as well -- yes, my stuff is free, but Palmiotti & Gray work too damn hard to be ignored!).

Also, if you want a more regular dose of Hex in your life, be sure to check out https://www.facebook.com/ViaPonyExpress -- we're working to be the best Hex page out there, so give us a "Like" and help us out!

It pays to know your history.

You see odd things working in retail.  I'm not talking about the customers here, I mean what I find in the till.  People do strange things to coins like punch holes in them, or take tin snips and actually slice off bits, or just warp and bend them to the point where, if you put them in a change machine, it would jam the darn thing up.  Then there's the foreign coins that folks pass around without realizing it's not legal U.S. tender.  Since we're right next to Canada, we of course get our share of Canadian coins, but I've also found copper 2-euro coins in the penny cup, British fivepence mixed in with dimes (same diameter, but almost twice as thick), money from Thailand and Panama and all sorts of places.  Most customers don't think twice when they dole them out because many of the coins are roughly the same size and shape as U.S. coins, so I'll slide 'em back when they give it to me and let them know that this isn't going to work.  But some cashiers don't bother to look, hence how these oddballs end up in my drawer.  I remember somebody once took a 2-dollar Canadian coin, which looks like a silver dollar with a gold center...how could you not give that a closer look?  Then there was the time I found a plastic penny (the kind that come in "play money" packs at the toy store) sitting in the till.

And then you get what happened two nights ago.  My boss was collecting up drawers from the various registers around the store so he could count them in the back, and as he passed near mine, he said, "I need you to look at something."

"Sure, whatcha got?" I asked, having no clue he was about to drop these two curiosities in my hand:

Now keep in mind that it's a little after 9 o'clock at night, and I was getting pretty tired.  But I did recognize the "seated Liberty" image right off the bat.  Then I saw "1861".  Then I flipped it over and read "Confederate States of America Half Dol." but didn't notice the middle yet (which you might've picked out already).  I looked up at my boss and said, "It has to be fake."

"How do you know?  It could be real.  Look at it!"

"Yeah, and it looks too good for being 150 years old," I replied.  Keep in mind that, around five years before, I found two U.S. half-dollars from the 1890s in one of the tills, so this was plausible...but those other coins had also been worn down so much from being in circulation that the images on both sides were almost obliterated.  I bought 'em off the till anyways because they're still interesting and (more important) pure silver.  If you've got any silver coins, take one and drop it on a table, it'll make a very bright ping when it hits.  Modern coins have a slightly duller sound.  As for those two Rebel beauties... "If these were real, they'd be made of silver," I told my boss, then dropped one on the counter, where it landed with a metallic thud.  "Silver doesn't thud.  They're also a little thick for half-dollars."

He wasn't convinced.  "I don't know.  I've got some coins at home that..."

"And I've also studied up on the Civil War and the 1800s in general," I interrupted.  "Precious metals were scarce during that time.  The Union had to issue 'shinplasters' instead, little slips of paper with coin denominations on them.  And I know for a fact that the Confederacy was dead broke, so I somehow doubt they were minting coins.  Paper money, yeah -- I've got a few reproductions at home -- but I've never seen coins."  I held one up and flipped it so he could see the front, saying, "Plus it's got a 'seated Liberty' on the obverse.  Those were on Union coins.  Why would the Confederacy use a Union symbol?  I'm 95% sure this is a fake, probably a souvenir from a Civil War site.  I'll give you a dollar for 'em, since they were probably cashed in as half-dollars."

"Now hold on, what if they are real?" he said.  "They could be worth a lot of money!"

"Don't worry, I was going to check them out online tonight.  If they're real...and I'm almost positive they're not...you'll get half."

My boss still hemmed and hawed a bit, since he wanted one for himself.  Trouble was, he didn't have any cash on him, and I did.  He wanted to leave one in the drawer until tomorrow, but I told him, "If somebody was dumb enough to take 'em, they'll be dumb enough to give it out.  Then we'll have a customer complaining that we gave them fake money...or worse, they'll call us racist because it says 'Confederate'."  So he took my dollar, and since there were no customers at the moment, I continued to look over the coins.  When he came back around for my till, I said to him, "I'm now up to 99%."

"Why is that?" he asked.

"Because this coin has a seam."  I held one of the coins up edgewise so you could see the line running through the milling (which was in poor shape).  "That means this was done in a mold."

"What're you talking about?  I've seen that on quarters before."

"No, that's sandwiching: the little stripe on the edge of quarters is where the copper core is showing through.  Ever see how coins are made?"  The boss said he hadn't, so I put my fist on the counter and said, "They make one die with the reverse image on it, then place a blank coin on that."  I laid the coin on my fist.  "Then they take another die with the obverse image on it, and slam 'em together."  I took my other fist and brought it down on the coin.  "You've never seen a coin where the blank slipped and the image is off?"  Turned out that he hadn't.  "Also," I added, "this thing smells like a Slinky.  What do they make those out of?  Aluminum?" (I looked it up later: Slinkys are made of steel, so presumably these coins are as well)

The boss still had his doubts as to my assessment, and began to walk away with my drawer.  Before he got too far, my eyes finally fell upon the indentation in the middle of coin, which just looked like damage at a glance.  It was only when you held it at the proper angle that the evidence became clear, probably due to the florescent lighting in the store.  After checking the other coin, I ran up to my boss, holding out both coins.  "I'm 100% now!" I told him, and pointed at the "damage": the word COPY etched into the metal.  We'd both missed it every damn time we looked at the coins.  "You still want one?" I asked, and he said yes, so until he gives me fifty cents, I'm gonna be walking around with fake Confederate money in my pocket.

Before I wrap this up, I have to admit that it turned out I was wrong on one point: the Confederacy did have plans to make half-dollar coins, but they never went into circulation.  All that exists are 4 examples, which the copies we found are based on.  The reason why the "seated Liberty" is on the obverse is because they were made at the New Orleans mint, which the Confederacy took over when Louisiana seceded.  Since most engravers lived in the North and the mint already had a bunch of half-dollars partially stamped, they simply made a new die for the reverse and used the coins on hand to show what the finished product might look like.  In 1879, a man got a hold of the Confederate die and re-stamped 500 Union 1861 half-dollars to make replicas, which are worth thousands today.  There's also been many other replicas made since then out of high-grade metals, but the two we found are just what I thought from the beginning: cheap copies that you can get for around three bucks at historical sites.

I gotta tell ya, though, you should've seen the look on my husband's face when I got home that night and said, "Hold out your hand..."

52 Pick-Up: And then there were two...

A few weeks back, I finally got the guts to drop Green Lantern from my pull list.  And since just about everything other title I was buying as of March 2012 has either come to an end or joined Hal by the wayside, I now only buy two DC titles on a monthly basis: All-Star Western and Batman: Li'l Gotham (more on those later).  This notion is still a bit of a shock for me.  When I started buying comics regularly over 20 years ago, I started with only two, and they were both DC.  Specifically, I bought Batman and Detective Comics, because I was obsessed with the character thanks to the Tim Burton movie.  DC was my comics foundation, and Batman my first building block.  The next title I got hooked on was The Demon, and I wouldn't have even looked at it if Batman hadn't made an appearance in it.  I slowly began to pick up other comics from other companies, but DC got more dollars out of me than anyone in the those first few years, to the point where, in the late 1990s, I had at least 10 DC titles in my pull box (half of which here written by Chuck Dixon, so they crisscrossed each other quite a bit, making one HUGE story).

I'd drop a title from time to time, of course, but DC overall never lost its luster for me.  That was home.  I lived in Gotham, commuted to Bludhaven, occasionally visited Metropolis (and Hawaii when Superboy lived there), spent time in Manchester, and would jump in a time bubble to travel to the 30th Century (with rare visits to the 19th as well to see how Jonah Hex was doing).  But then, not long after I made Coast City a regular stop, things got shaky for me.  After Infinite Crisis wrapped up in 2006, DC had their "One Year Later" event, wherein every title suddenly jumped ahead, and many readers found themselves in unfamiliar territory.  Friends became foes (and vice versa), characters changed for better or worse, and I began to develop a bad taste in my mouth when reading titles I'd once loved.  The Bat-family suffered the most, as I just stopped liking the people I'd spent the past 15 years with.  Nightwing went first, then DC made the hard choice for me and cancelled Robin and Birds of Prey around the same time they "killed" Bruce Wayne, an event I used as a good excuse to stop buying Batman and 'Tec as well.  The version of the Legion of Super-Heroes I liked had vanished months earlier, so I vanished from that era as well.  I kept trying to hang on to the DCU as best I could, but it was becoming harder to find something I enjoyed, at least when it came to new offerings.  I found myself diving into back-issue boxes, looking for titles I'd missed the first time around, and enjoying them much more than what currently populated the comics racks.

Then "The New 52" hit like a final nail in the coffin.  I tried like Hell to find something new to buy, I really did, but there's so many strangers with familiar faces looking back at me now when I peruse the racks.  I even tried the Earth 2 stuff, but I couldn't bring myself to care about these people who just happen to share names with Golden Age legends.  Congratulations, DC, you've done a lovely job of making me feel like an old woman with outdated tastes...except for the two titles that continue to entertain me.

All-Star Western: The current storyarc actually makes me giddy.  I managed to unload many of the feelings I had regarding "Future Hex" years ago, but that doesn't stop me from wishing that it could be done over again, and done right.  I think J&J are, so far, doing it right.  They familiarized Jonah with the notion of time travel in ASW#19-20 before chucking him ass-over-teakettle in #21, and though I wish we could slow down a little, Jonah's reactions to the situation so far are wonderful.  Plus I think the fact that we're dealing with here-and-now 2013 as opposed to blasted-to-Hell 2050 will help in the long run: there's no need to invent and explain everything to the reader, just to Jonah (if he cares to listen).  However, I am pissed off that there's no ASW in September.  Pardon my French, but I don't give a shit about Villains Month, and 3D covers ain't gonna sway me otherwise -- matter of fact, this whole event is what convinced me to finally drop Green Lantern.  I also pray that J&J don't repeat Fleisher's mistake of leaving Jonah in the "future" with no feasible way back.  That won't win any points with me or any other Hex-nut.

Batman: Li'l Gotham: This comic reminds me of Batman: The Animated Series, in that it can be serious when the moment calls for it, then it'll hit a humorous note without being overly silly.  All the characters are perfectly-distilled versions of themselves poured into chibi-style bodies, and Damien...I actually like Damien here!  I thought he was a little psychotic bastard in the regular Bat-titles, but here he's toned down to the level of a kid that just needs restraining from time to time.  But the most remarkable thing about it?  The cast is unaffected by all those "The New 52" changes.  Barbara is still Oracle and in charge of the Birds of Prey, plus both Stephanie Brown and Cassandra Cain make appearances.  I can live in this Gotham happily, with its turkey rampages and Mr. Freeze making slides out of ice because he likes slides.

My only fear is that Batman: Li'l Gotham will be a limited series, as it's actually reprinting a digital-first title.  If it comes to an end, then all I've have left is Jonah in All-Star Western, and if DC ever decides that keeping Hex-nuts happy isn't worth the title's low numbers, then I'll be left out in the cold.  No more DC titles, not unless things seriously change over there.  I won't be bereft of comics, of course.  I buy about a half-dozen other titles from various companies, so don't worry about me having nothing to spend my money on.  But still, it'll be a sad day when I go into the shop and my pull box has no DC offerings in it.

I don't want to lose my home, but I feel like I'm being evicted.

An Illustrated History of Jonah Hex (Part 9)

1983-1984: Doin’ Hard Time

The comic book landscape is constantly in flux, with some changes coming and going so fast that they can, at times, seem inexplicable.  Take a simple thing like a book’s page count, for example: When Jonah Hex got his own title in 1977, each story was 17 pages long, same as in Weird Western Tales.  By JH#16, it had jumped up to 25 pages, then was slowly scaled back to its original 17-page status by the time we reached JH#28.  Starting with JH#40, a 8-page backup had been tacked onto the book in order to use up leftover stories commissioned for the now-defunct WWT, and though Jonah occasionally squeezed out his costars for an issue or two, the backups appeared on a fairly regular basis until JH#61 hit the stands.  With that issue, Jonah Hex once again became a 25-page-long, single-feature book.  So why is it that, after a full year of solo stories, we’re suddenly back down to 17 pages plus a backup El Diablo tale in Jonah Hex #73 (June 1983)?  Well, young’uns, we can chalk that up to an old tradition known as the fill-in: a continuity-light tale that’s prepared in advance and held in a file by the title’s editor (or done on-the-fly by whomever’s available at the moment) in case the creative team is running late or simply needs a breather.  We’ve speculated earlier that WWT#37 and JH#12 may have been fill-ins (due to art inconsistencies in the former and no mention of the then-current storyarc in the latter), but JH#73 and the two issues that follow it are the strongest candidates yet, mainly due to the shortened page count.

Okay, enough about the “why” and the “how”, let’s move on to the “what”...as in what a mixed bag JH#73 is.  On the plus side, we get art by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, who we last saw in JH#32 (in fact, when you consider that Garcia-Lopez was the artist on this title when it launched, it’s possible this story has been sitting in the file for years), but on the minus side, the story Michael Fleisher wrote becomes more unbelievable the further it goes on.  Our tale begins with Jonah getting caught in an explosion set by a gang he was trying to ambush.  They leave him for dead, but in truth, Jonah makes it through just fine...save for both of his legs being broken.  A young Mexican boy manages to get him to a doctor, who puts Hex in casts from his ankles up to his knees.  He realizes this will make him a sitting duck when that gang discovers he’s not dead, and sure enough, one of the owlhoots breaks into his room that night to blast him with a shotgun, but Jonah had already wrestled himself into a wheelchair and got the drop on him first.  From there, “The Wheelchair Bounty Hunter” and his new sidekick Manuel go riding across the countryside on a buckboard, tracking down the gang members one by one.  Jonah kills about half of them before the rest of the gang bushwhacks our duo, wounding Manuel and shoving Jonah off a cliff!  Thanks to some quick-thinking lariat work, Jonah survives, and after recovering his wheelchair, we are treated to one of the craziest stunts we’ve ever seen the man pull:

After that silliness, Fleisher gets a mite serious again with JH#74 &75, a two-parter drawn by regular artists Dick Ayers and Tony DeZuniga.  In addition to the short page count, the lack of Emmylou Hartley in this tale points to it being a file story.  Also of note is the cover to JH#74, done by Dick Giordano and Jonah Hex editor Ross Andru, which not only switches back briefly to the “classic” logo, it imitates a die-cut cover, putting “holes” in strategic places so you can see portions of the splash page beneath.  The effect isn’t perfect, but since it came out nearly a decade before such gimmicks became rampant in the comics industry, I’ll cut them some slack.  The story itself appears to be based loosely on the life of Frank and Jesse James: like the brothers, “Railroad Bill” Clinton (no relation to the 42nd President, I’m sure) rode with William Quantrill during the War, and now uses his talents to rob trains and banks.  These facts win him a lot of fans among the poor farmers in the area, who see those institutions as being just as oppressive as the Union they fought against a decade earlier, and therefore look upon Clinton as a Robin Hood figure.  A group of Pinkertons, led by Archibald Graphus, have been after him for a year with no luck, so the head of the Western Pacific Railroad has decided to hire Jonah Hex “off the books” to do what Graphus can’t.

One week later, Graphus and his men try to ambush Clinton’s gang as they rob a bank, but the impetuous Pinkerton orders his men to take them out before the civilians can clear the street, leading to a shooting gallery that kills eight of the outlaws along with a handful of innocents.  As the remaining outlaws escape town, Graphus shoots Clinton’s horse out from under him, thereby finally capturing his quarry.  He’s not interested in arresting Clinton proper, however, and makes ready to hang the man on the spot.  Luckily, Jonah rides up at that moment and tries to talk Graphus out of it, saying that Clinton deserves a trial.  Seeing as how Jonah’s hanged a man or two himself in his day, one has to wonder if he’s stopping this so he can collect his fee, or if Jonah, like the farmers, commiserates with ex-Confederate Clinton.  To be sure, Graphus thinks it’s the latter, and when Clinton escapes, he shoots Hex in the back when the bounty hunter rides after him.  Despite knowing who Jonah Hex is (and why he’s most likely shown up), Clinton turns his horse around to help Jonah out.  The two men ride off together, eventually stopping at the house where Clinton’s mother and sister live -- Jonah gets patched up there with the understanding that he won’t pursue Clinton any longer.  Jonah not the one he should be worrying about, though: after night falls, one of Clinton’s gang members (who arrived at the house before them) sneaks out and meets up with Graphus.  This two-timing skunk is the reason the gang got ambushed during the robbery, and now he’s arranging for a slaughter.

When the traitor gets back to the house at the beginning of JH#75, Clinton is waiting for him, having realized too late that there was a snake in their midst.  Clinton’s gunshots wake up the rest of the house, and as he explains that it isn’t safe to stay there any longer, Graphus and his men sneak up to the house and begin lobbing in sticks of dynamite -- the explosion kills Ma Clinton and his sister along with a couple more gang members.  Hex and the other survivors manage to escape Graphus’ deathtrap, and once they’ve put enough distance between themselves and the Pinkertons, Clinton tells Hex that it’s time for them to part ways, and that the bounty hunter had best steer clear of him from now on:

Jonah agrees to Clinton's terms for now, but three weeks later, he stops Clinton and his diminished gang from robbing a train.  Clinton passes up a good chance to kill Hex and instead rides off, an action that causes one of his men to declare that Clinton’s “gone sweet” on Jonah.  That doesn't sit well with Clinton, and he tells them to hole up in Briar Springs for a spell, while he goes off alone to kill Jonah Hex.  Four nights later, we find Jonah sitting alone by a campfire, himself wondering why he allowed Clinton to get away scot free.  Unbeknownst to him, Clinton is peering down upon him with a rifle, but before the man can pull the trigger, Graphus shows up at Hex’s campsite demanding to know where Clinton is!  With two enemies in his sights, Clinton has to decide to shoot first, and wouldn’t ya know it, Graphus is the one he chooses, killing him with one shot.  Jonah quickly dives for cover as Clinton peppers the campsite with lead, but he soon runs out of ammo and tries to escape, unaware that Jonah has snuck around behind him.  Jonah demands that Clinton surrender, to which the outlaw replies, “Ah’ve told yuh before thet Ah ain’t ‘bout tuh let no man put me back inside a prison!”  He then cocks the rifle, bluffing Hex into thinking that it’s still loaded so that he’ll shoot Clinton dead.  When Jonah realizes he’s been had, it doesn’t sit right with him at all, but as he’ll soon learn, “Railroad Bill” Clinton was right in his assertion that death on the trail was better than life in prison.

Jonah’s normal 25-page count is back with JH#76, as well as his normal problems, namely what to do about Emmylou Hartley.  His love for the gal has dissipated, but he can’t bring himself to tell her so.  Meanwhile, Emmy seems to have fallen back to her old role as a warrior’s squaw, setting up camp for Jonah and preparing the game he brings back, and even wearing a buckskin dress and moccasins like she was when they met in JH#50 -- faced with devotion like that, it’s easy to see why he’s having a hard time talking with her about their relationship.  Still, his diminished feelings don’t stop him from throwing Emmy to cover when three unknown skunks open fire upon them.  Jonah wipes them out fast, and is left to wonder who they were and why they were shooting at them.  The reader soon finds out that this was Turnbull’s latest attempt on Jonah Hex’s life, and he’s none too happy that his agents have failed him once more.  As he rants to his manservant, Solomon, about the situation, he observes a possum Solomon had caged earlier in the day.  “This is what I’ve been waiting for!” Turnbull tells him.  “An inspiration for achieving a fitting vengeance on Jonah Hex!”

That very evening, Jonah and Emmylou ride into town, and as Emmy gets them a hotel room, Jonah takes their horses to the livery, where he’s bushwhacked by some fellas who drag him into the woods.  Seems the governor of the state, McKinley Phelps, wanted to meet with him in private (nobody ever asks nicely in these stories, do they?) to discuss business.  According to Phelps, the state penitentiary is hopelessly corrupt, and he needs a man like Hex on the inside in order to gather evidence against the warden and his staff.  The idea is that Hex -- a man whose profession is already slightly questionable -- will commit of series of crimes so that he can be sentenced to the penitentiary and therefore begin his investigation without suspicion.  After a month, he’d be released, his record cleared, and collect a well-deserved fee.  Jonah didn’t just fall off the turnip truck, however, and wants something more than the governor’s word that everything will be peachy-keen once this is over:

With his true innocence set down in writing, Jonah tells Emmy that he’s going away for a while.  She demands to know where he’s going, but he tells her it’s a secret and that she’s probably better off without him anyhow, which leads to her snapping at him in public that she’s tired of being a stand-in for his wife.  Jonah doesn’t attempt to patch this over, and instead rides off, most likely thinking that this incident will finally shake him free of Emmy.  Two weeks later, Jonah begins his sanctioned crime spree, brazenly robbing trains and stagecoaches until he’s finally bagged by the law.  Charged with four counts of armed robbery, Jonah is sentenced to twenty-five years in the state penitentiary.  The news is soon splashed all over the papers, one of which ends up in the hands of Mei Ling’s brother, who proceeds to berate her with the fact that the father of her son turned out to be a no-good criminal.  Emmylou, on the other hand, isn’t so accepting of the news, and intends to get to the bottom of this.

Jonah is transferred to the penitentiary the following day, where he’s stripped of his distinctive Confederate gray and given prison stripes.  Over the next few days, he learns quite a bit about how corrupt his new home is, and when he comes to the aid of a fellow prisoner that collapsed from being overworked and underfed, the guards beat Jonah within an inch of his life, then chuck him into solitary confinement.  But it’s all worth it, right?  In a month, the governor will order his release, and Jonah can see to it that these skunks get what’s coming to them.

Wrong.  As JH#77 opens, we find Jonah’s gone half-mad from having spent several weeks in the hole with nothing but rats for company.  Then after a quick recap, we get a scene reminiscent of The Shawshank Redemption as Turnbull himself shows up at Jonah’s cell door to gloat over his predicament.  Seems Governor Phelps is a longtime friend of Turnbull’s who just happened to owe him quite a few favors, so Turnbull coerced the man into helping him with his mad scheme to get Hex thrown in jail...and unlike the situation Turnbull engineered that led to the “fugitive” storyarc in JH#2-16, Jonah is actually guilty of these crimes.  “You’re going to rot in here forever, my young friend,” Turnbull says, “can’t you see that?  You’re going to be hemmed in by these four dank walls until your mind turns to jelly and your body to dust!”  Too bad all this gloating blinded him to the fact that Jonah wasn’t restrained:

The guards come in and pummel Jonah before he can harm Turnbull, then lock him away in solitary once again.  Unbeknownst to either Hex or Turnbull, Emmylou Hartley is meeting with the warden at that very moment and doing her level best to arrange a visit with Jonah (thankfully, she had the sense to put on a nice proper dress as opposed to the buckskin she’d been running about in earlier).  The warden is blocking her request, however, saying that Hex has been sentenced to a full sixty days in solitary, and that it’ll be two weeks before he’s allowed any visitors.  Emmy vows to be back once the time is up, but she’s in the shock of her life when the warden tells her upon her return two weeks later that Jonah Hex is dead, even going so far as to show Emmy the grave -- this is all a ruse, of course, in order to continue torturing Jonah down in solitary without fear of anyone else looking in on his welfare.

After news of Jonah’s “death” reaches the papers, one of the guards taunts Jonah with the notion that, since everyone thinks he’s dead, “we can keep you locked up here just as long as Mr. Turnbull wants us to--”  Jonah responds by bashing the guard’s skull into the wall, a remarkable feat considering that Jonah himself admits that he feels worse now than when he had cholera back in JH#63 (no wonder, since he’s been in the hole subsisting on nothing but bread and water for over two months).  Still, he manages make his way to the prison storeroom to retrieve his usual duds and weapons, then takes out a passel of guards before hightailing it out of the prison on foot, intent on reaching the governor and making him straighten out this mess.

At the governor’s mansion several days later, Phelps tells Turnbull (whom he calls Quentin, making this the first time we learn the full name of Hex’s longtime foe) that Jonah has escaped and, even worse, he mentions the letter Jonah made him write last issue declaring his innocence.  Turnbull is livid, brandishing his eagle-headed cane at Phelps, who backpedals so fast he trips and smacks his head upon a marble fireplace, killing him instantly.  Such things are of no consequence to Quentin Turnbull, and he’s already planning his next move as he departs the mansion...while Jonah Hex watches him from a nearby tree.  Jonah doesn’t know what transpired inside until someone rushes out yelling that the governor is dead, and when they spot Jonah, the blame is quickly pinned upon him, and he runs off before he can be shot.

At a hotel that night, Emmy is still holding on to the hope that Jonah is alive, and when someone knocks upon her door saying they have a message for her, she presumes that it’s from him.  In reality, it’s Turnbull and three cronies demanding to know where the governor’s letter is!  Thank goodness Jonah shows up at the beginning of JH#78 to save the day -- presumably, he tailed Turnbull after he left the mansion.  While he’s busy taking out Turnbull’s cronies, the old man escapes, and Jonah tells Emmy to go hide out in the next town south of there until all this blows over...but not before he bestows a very passionate kiss upon her lips (there goes that notion of not really being in love with her, but then again, he did just spend over two months in jail).

After a brief scene with the warden of the prison having to explain to the press why he’d told them earlier that Jonah Hex was dead (“a slight mix-up in our record keeping” is his lame excuse), the story meanders a bit, first to a couple of hayseeds-turned-bounty hunters who decide to go after the $10,000 reward on Hex, then to Hex himself riding out to wherever he hid the governor’s letter, only to come across a bunch of massacred Ojibwa women and children beside a river, and finally jumping to Mei Ling and her son out in the family garden as J.D. Hart rides up.  Neither we nor Mei Ling have seen the marshal since JH#44, and her exclamation of “Is that really you?” is certainly called for: though previously depicted as dark-haired, Hart is now inexplicably a blond, and his fringed buckskin clothes have turned a lurid shade of blue!  We could dismiss this easily if there had been some change in the staff, but the issue was done by the exact same people who worked on JH#44, and the error will persist throughout this storyarc, so it’s a serious fumble on everyone’s part here.  On a more positive note, Jonah’s baby boy finally gets a name -- Jason -- and Mei Ling states that he’s nearly two years old now, so even though the comic’s still in a constant state of 1875, time’s been moving along at a regular pace for lil’ Jason Hex.  As for the reason J.D.’s dropping in out of the blue, he’s concerned about the mess Jonah has gotten himself into and wants to help -- I don’t know how going to see Jonah’s estranged wife is supposed to help things, but there he is.

Back on Jonah’s end of the story, it appears that one of the Indians survived the massacre: Little Raven, the bossy twelve-year-old son of the chief.  He insists that Jonah help him avenge the death of his fellow Indians, and together they track down the men responsible before Jonah returns the boy to the Ojibwa.  In a ceremony that night, the chief makes the two of them blood brothers, and Jonah gets back on the trail the next morning, where he runs into those two hayseeds that’re out to collect the bounty on his head.  They almost get the drop on him at the beginning of JH#79, but Jonah gets away with a bullet in his side after blasting one of them in the face.  What follows is an issue-long chase through the desert, with Jonah’s pursuer, Walter, slowly chipping away at his quarry with a high-powered Sharps rifle.  First he shoots Jonah’s horse out from under him, then Walter blasts a canteen out of Jonah’s hand when he pauses for a drink.  Jonah comes across a water hole hours later, but in a cruel twist, there’s a sign posted next to it reading “Poison”, which he destroys in a fit of rage.  Delirium sets in not long afterward, and he imagines his parents hovering above him, ashamed by his weakness:

It getting near dusk when Walter finds Jonah collapsed near the poisoned water hole -- with the sign destroyed, Walter doesn’t know it’s unsafe, and takes a deep victory drink.  Not until he’s doubled over with pain does he realize that Jonah didn’t collapse there by accident, and he finally dies just a few feet away from Jonah.  J.D. Hart (who’s been following Jonah’s trail for quite some time) rides up moments later, but it’s not until JH#80 that we learn Jonah is still alive.  A sheriff and his posse soon arrive as well, and take Jonah into custody despite Hart’s protests.  After being deposited in the local jail and looked over by a doctor, Jonah manages to tell Hart about the letter, and as the marshal sets out to go fetch it, three of Turnbull’s men tail him, and he gets jumped once they’re out in the wilderness.  Sometime later, Jonah gets a visitor: Emmylou Hartley, who read in the paper about Jonah’s capture.  He reassures her that everything will be right as rain soon, unaware that Mei Ling has also come to visit -- she walks in just as Hex and Emmy are in a lip-lock, and though the sight of them together  upsets Mei Ling, it’s Emmy that leaves, saying, “I-it’s always been you he’s loved anyway!  Not (sob) me!”

Later on, Turnbull joins his men at the shack where they’re holding Hart, and gives the marshal until sundown to cough up the location of the letter, or else suffer the consequences.  Being a man who detests violence, Turnbull doesn’t stick around to watch them work Hart over, and instead returns to town, where an inventor is lobbying for Hex to take a ride on his newfangled electrocution device instead of being hanged (unfortunately, it requires a lightning strike to spark up, so we’ll have to wait another decade or so for the AC-powered electric chair to take its first victim in 1890).  Hex isn’t keen on being killed in any sort of fashion, so he’s glad to see Little Raven show up outside his window, all ready to free his blood brother with a lit bundle of dynamite!  After collecting up his gear, Jonah bolts out of town alone on horseback, unaware that Turnbull is following not far behind.  There’s a brief aside wherein J.D. Hart manages to overpower his captors, then we’re back to Jonah out in the wilds as he approaches a pile of rocks -- finally, we’ve reached the place where he hid the letter.  Turnbull suddenly appears, gun in hand, and demands that Jonah step away from the rocks.  Keeping his eyes fixed on the bounty hunter, Turnbull thrusts his free hand into a hole in the rock pile, then screams.  “Thet’s whut’s alluz bound tuh happen when yuh go an’ stick yore hand in a rattlesnakes’ nest!” Jonah says as he picks up a forked branch to pin the rattler with, thereby letting him retrieve the letter within.  The proof of his innocence secured, Jonah turns to leave, not caring that his longtime enemy will most likely die  from the snakebite.  Turnbull isn’t about to go down so easily, however, and aims his gun at Jonah’s turned back.

This cliffhanger becomes somewhat anticlimactic when we get to JH#81, as the story backs up to when Turnbull and Hex first arrive at the rock pile, then unspools in a slightly different order: Turnbull gets bit, then he tries to shoot Hex, but passes out cold.  Only after this does Jonah retrieve the letter, but as he turns to leave, Jonah has a change of heart about letting Turnbull die, and instead sucks the venom out of the unconscious man’s wound, then bundles him into Turnbull’s surrey to drive him back to town.  When the old man comes to, he’s rather surprised by Jonah’s kindness, but he doesn’t have long to contemplate it before the two of them are attacked by El Papagayo, last seen rotting in jail back in JH#72.  The bandito and his men open fire upon the surrey and drive them into a cave, where Turnbull decides  that his own hatred of Hex should exempt him from Papagayo’s vendetta.  Jonah knows better, and when Turnbull tries to surrender, Jonah yanks him away from a fresh volley of gunfire (though he admits that he debated with himself about whether or not he should let Turnbull get killed!).

While the two men are occupied, the ladies in Jonah’s life begin to move on without him: Emmy arranges to leave town on the stagecoach to St. Louis, and Mei Ling shares a meal with J.D. Hart who, after getting back to town and explaining to the local law about Turnbull’s plot, has decided to start courting Mei Ling!  Such things are the least of Jonah’s concerns at the moment, for after fending off a direct assault from Papagayo’s men, he and Turnbull make a break for the surrey, only to discover as they drive away that Papagayo had previously snuck over and strapped dynamite to the undercarriage!  They manage to leap to safety at the beginning of JH#82, landing on a ledge jutting out from the cliff face they were riding alongside -- the bandito spots Hex and Turnbull down there when he comes over to examine the wreckage, and inexplicably decides to leave them be for now, promising to kill him next time they meet.  “Good grief, Jonah!” Turnbull says to him.  “What is all this, anyway?  Some kind of crazy game you two play?”  As they make their way back to town, though, Turnbull tells Jonah that he’s in the bounty hunter’s debt for saving his life so many times over the course of the past day, and swears he’ll file a sworn affidavit saying the death of Governor Phelps was an accident.  Between this and the governor’s letter, the criminal charges against Jonah will be dropped...but their old feud still stands, and Turnbull declares, “For your role in bringing about the death of my only, beloved son, I hereby renew my vow to put you in an early grave!”

All these threats fade into the background for Jonah once they reach town, because when he catches sight of a commotion in front of Mei Ling’s hotel, he immediately fears the worst.  And he has good reason to: a passel of skunks called the Riordan brothers kidnapped Mei Ling right outside the hotel in order to lure out Hex.  They winged J.D. Hart in the process, but he insists on coming along with Jonah as he tracks them down.  They ride out so fast that Jonah never thinks to ask what Hart was doing with Mei Ling in the first place, though he figures it our real quick when he sees the marshal -- who rescued Mei Ling while Jonah took out the bad guys -- holding the woman a mite too closely.  Jonah doesn’t even bother to ask for an explanation, he simply begins pounding on Hart with one hand behind his back (he wants to be fair about it, ol’ J.D. being wounded and all).  After knockin’ the stuffing out of Hart, Jonah storms off, leaving behind any notions that he and Mei Ling could ever again be a happily-married couple.  Of course, he’s still got Emmylou to fall back on...or he would if she hadn’t taken the stage to St. Louis, remember?  Emmy thought leaving Jonah would bring an end to her problems, but a new one arises when the stagecoach gets stopped by bandits before it reaches its destination, and along with the strongbox on board, they decide to take Emmy as well!  She demands in Jonah Hex #83 (April 1984) to know why she was abducted, to which the man in charge replies, “‘Cause you were the only good-lookin’ female in the bunch, that’s why!”  We then discover that the other two bandits are women, though whether they were kidnapped as well is uncertain.  To be sure, the man seems intent on beating up Emmy until she learns to obey him, but considering the treatment she got during her years with the Crow Indians, she may be able to endure whatever punishment he puts her through.

Jonah returns to the hotel they were staying at, then throws a fit when the desk clerk tells him that Emmy checked out yesterday and left on the stage.  Despite knowing that she was heading to St. Louis, Jonah chooses to go to the local saloon and get drunk all day, pausing only briefly to gun down a couple of idiots looking to make their reputation off of him.  By that night, the townsfolk have decided they don’t like the idea having of a drunken, trigger-happy gunfighter hang around, so they set fire to the barn Jonah’s sleeping in (the hotel refused to rent him another room).  Jonah escapes, and eventually settles down by the edge of a lake, cursing the mess his life has become.  He decides right then and there to devote his life to being the best damn drunkard he can be, tossing his prized Colt Dragoons into the water for good measure:

Considering the number of  times he’s risked his neck to recover those Dragoons, this turn of events is rather shocking -- I seriously doubt he would’ve done such a thing if he’d been sober.  Jonah falls asleep not long after, and wakes up the next morning to find a lady named Catherine Rebecca Smollett berating him for his slovenly state.  She talks him into accompanying her back to the a nearby temperance farm, where she plans on making a God-fearing teetotaler out of him.  Considering that Hex was probably suffering from the mother of all hangovers, it’s surprising that he didn’t just cuss Smollett out and stumble off in the opposite direction, but perhaps there was some unpickled part of his brain that realized he really couldn’t go through life like this (if nothing else, there may have been a small desire to not end up like his father).  Jonah spends the next few days working on the farm, trying his best to remain sober as well as put behind him all the grief he’s gone through over the past few months -- this is the first opportunity he’s had to relax since getting thrown into prison back in JH#76, and though he most likely has to sit through Bible readings and temperance lectures every day, the man desperately needs the break.  Too bad it doesn’t last long, for soon some friends of the two men Hex gunned down show up looking for revenge.  Jonah quickly makes short work of them with his Bowie knife and various farm implements, and afterward, Smollett reluctantly asks him to leave the farm.  “I do wish you could have stayed here with us long enough to be truly saved, Jonah!” she says as he makes ready to ride off.  Jonah replies that he figures he’s been pretty nearly saved already, silently adding, Leastways as saved as Ah’m ever likely tuh be!

It’s doubtful that Jonah’s time at the temperance farm has truly changed him on a personal level, but out in the real world, Jonah Hex the comic book was undergoing changes that would have a long-term effect on the character, the first of them beginning this issue, as Michael Fleisher became both writer and editor of the title.  Fleisher exercised his newfound powers right from the get-go, making Tony DeZuniga the main artist (no more sharing the byline with Dick Ayers) and hiring Ed Hannigan to do the covers.  The logo also switched back to its classic look for good with this issue, but whether it was the doing of Hannigan or Fleisher is unclear.  All this was just the tip of the iceberg, for as Fleisher himself said in a note to the readers two issues later, “Jonah’s got some surprises up his sleeve you wouldn’t believe if I told them to you!  Because if I get my way, there are things that are going to start happening in this magazine that’ll scramble your brains around!”  By the summer of 1985, readers will know he ain’t just whistlin’ Dixie.

<< Part 8 | Index | Part 10 >>
Appendix A  |  Appendix B

Untold Tales of Jonah Hex?

Today my husband and I went to The Motor City Comic-Con, or as we call it, "The Geek Jamboree".  We've been going for about a decade now, and as always, we picked up lots of neat stuff and met some cool people.  It was while doing the latter that I also received a slight buzzkill.

Let me rewind a bit.  Eight years back, not long after DC announced they were giving Jonah Hex a new series, I stumbled across some sketches by Tony Moore, the original artist for The Walking Dead.  Suffice it to say, I got a mite excited: I love his work, and the notion of him doing Hex just lit up my brain like wildfire.  I went so far as to hunt down his email address and ask him directly if he was indeed working on the upcoming book (this was long before DC revealed Luke Ross would be doing the initial art chores).  Mr. Moore was kind enough to send me a reply saying that, sadly, we wasn't the lucky artist, but he loved the character and wished he could do something with him in the future.

Cut to this afternoon, and my husband and I walking up to Tony Moore's table to get our Walking Dead Season 1 DVD signed (we already had Michael Rooker sign it last month at Motor City Nightmares, and we  were hoping to add Norman Reedus as well today, but his line was -- no joke -- at least a half-mile long, all twisty-turny like you see at Disneyland).  After he signed it, I mentioned the email, and said that I'd still love to see him do at least a cover.  That's when the buzzkill happened: Tony Moore was slated to do a Jonah Hex story before the "New 52" reboot occurred.  Jimmy Palmiotti & Justin Gray had written a story just for him, an "evergreen" that wasn't time-sensitive -- this was common practice on the series, as it allowed many artists who may not have time to do multiple issues to do the story at their own pace -- and just as Moore cleared his schedule so he could get to work on it, DC changed Jonah Hex to All-Star Western, thereby tossing the "done-in-one" format out the window and committing the title to a single artist.

I was so surprised by this that I didn't think to ask what the story was about, but that's kinda beside the point.  How many other Jonah Hex stories will we never see because DC decided to reboot everything?  How many scripts were written by J&J and passed out to various artists that never made it to pencil stage...and were there any that actually got finished, but now sit in DC's files unused because they don't fit the new format?  I'm reminded of an anecdote told to me by Mark Texiera during another Motor City Comic-Con, about a Jonah Hex story he claims to have illustrated before the character was tossed into the future, but was never printed (Texiera did draw one "Old West" issue of Jonah Hex that saw print, in addition to the majority of his 2050 jaunt).  It can't be verified that Tex's "lost" story ever existed at all, as no one's been able to locate the pages, and the artist seems to be the only one who recalls it.  Now we can add at least one more tale to the M.I.A. list.

If I can find Moore's email again, I'll drop him a line and ask if he can give a summary of the script J&J wrote for him, so we can at least ponder what might have been.

New fanfic: Shades of Gray #13

Got a decent turnaround this time for Jonah Hex: Shades of Gray #13 over on DC2, which starts a new storyarc for our resurrected bounty hunter.  It's called "Narcocorrido", and will either be three or four parts long, depending on how it paces out.  Let me know whatcha think of the end of Part 1!