Rest in peace, Tony

Just found out that Tony DeZuniga passed away on Wednesday.  Those who've been reading my Jonah Hex history posts will know that he co-created the character in 1972 with John Albano, who passed away himself in 2005.  Please keep Tony's family in your thoughts and prayers.

An Illustrated History of Jonah Hex (Part 6)

1981: From Horse Opera to Soap Opera

“One thing’s certain: from here on out I’m gonna be leadin’ a whole new life!” our scar-faced hero says to himself near the beginning of Jonah Hex #45 (February 1981).  “No more gunfightin’!  No more bounty huntin’!  No more killin’ other men an’ givin’ other men a shot at killin’ me!”  Seems hard to believe, but Jonah means every word of it, as he truly desires to keep Mei Ling happy now that she’s agreed to marry him.  The issue begins with the engaged couple picking out a wedding dress, much to the distaste of the other ladies in the shop, then moves on to Jonah heading over to the bank to finish up the paperwork on the house they’re buying (though it’s never stated outright, it appears they’re still in Feldons’ Gap, the location used in the last storyarc...and since the town banker died during that tale, this must be an associate Jonah’s dealing with).  Before he gets there, though, an outlaw who has a beef with Jonah opens fire.  Lucky for him, Jonah’s decided to be the merciful sort from now on, but that doesn’t stop Hex from settling this guy’s hash:

Later on, Jonah and Mei Ling travel to a farm outside town to meet up with her brother, Mei Wong, and his wife.  We soon learn that Mei Wong is just as prejudiced as those white ladies back in town: he disowns Mei Ling on the spot for her wish to marry not just an Occidental, but a known killer.  Geez, these two kids haven’t even made it to the altar yet, and already their marriage is in trouble.  Things don’t get much better on their wedding day, for just as the ceremony finishes, the outlaw from the day before, along with three of his buddies, turn up outside the church and threaten to burn the whole town right to the ground if Jonah doesn’t come out and face them.  Jonah, being true to his word, refuses to fight, which just puts everybody in the church into a uproar -- why should the town suffer just because Jonah promised his new wife that he’d lay down his guns?  A man fetches Jonah’s Dragoons and the townsfolk all but force him out the door, still wearing his Sunday best (yep, he actually put on something other than his Confederate duds for a change!), so he can confront the bad guys:

After the bodies stop falling and the smoke clears, Jonah apologizes to Mei Ling for what he’s done, then asks the banker for the keys to their new house so they can get away from all this.  Unfortunately, it looks like that little dream’s been taken from them as well: those gossiping ladies from the dress shop got to the banker first, and demanded that he not sell any property to Jonah, what with him being a “notorious gunfighter and miscegenationist”, as they put it.  So our hapless banker spins a yarn about the property already being sold and he wasn’t informed.  It’s very reminiscent of a scene near the end of All-Star Western #10, right down to Jonah saying to Mei Ling as they leave town, “Ah never really wanted tuh live around here anyhow!”

At the opening of JH#46, we learn that three weeks have passed since the wedding, and our star-crossed couple has been turned out of every place they’ve tried to settle in.  “Folks ain’t exactly scurryin’ tuh lay out the welcome mat fer a yellow-skinned woman an’ a scarred-up ex-bounty hunter!” Jonah grumbles as they ride their buckboard through the rain towards a roadside inn.  Once there, it’s the same old story, and Mei Ling has to talk Hex out of busting the heads of the racist skunks they run into there.  Back on the trail again, the rain finally stops, but the ground’s so muddy that one of the wheels on the buckboard jams up and breaks, throwing its passengers violently off.  Mei Ling’s okay, but Jonah landed  damn-near on his head, putting such a strain on his back that he can barely move.  With the buckboard ruined, Jonah tells Mei Ling to get on the horse and ride to the next town for help, which she reluctantly does.  Not long after, their “friends” from the inn spot Hex from afar, and they decide to have a little fun with the “coolie lover”.  Luckily, Jonah sees them coming and, after crawling into a tall patch of buffalo grass, proceeds to take out two of the three men (not bad for somebody that’s close to crippled), then sets the grass on fire so as to provide himself some cover as he tries to make his way to a nearby farmhouse.  It’s abandoned, though, so Jonah has to fight through the pain a little longer and eventually takes out the last man with the help of some rotted floorboards, a lot of straw, and a well-placed pitchfork.  Sometime later, Mei Ling and the doctor she found track him to the house, where the doc informs Jonah that his paralysis is most likely temporary, and few weeks of bed rest should help him heal up.  Laying on a bed within the abandoned house, Jonah mentions that they’re looking for a place to settle, and he’s wondering who owns this particular spread.  “As a matter of fact, I own it!” Doc Pedersen says.  Seems he bought it off a family that moved to California, “But I’d be more than happy to see two nice young folks like you have it!”  And with that, Jonah and Mei Ling finally have a place to call home.

By JH#47, Jonah’s all healed up and taken to fixing up the house, though it soon proves difficult as some men on horseback try to cut him down in a hail of gunfire.  Jonah responds with a few sticks of dynamite (it was meant for stump-clearing, but it clears owlhoots just as well), and when it’s all over, Mei Ling wants to know who they were and why they were trying to kill them.  His lack of answers doesn't exactly please her, but the reader soon learns these men were part of yet another attempt by Turnbull to avenge the death of his son Jeb.  As “Fort Charlotte Brigade” stories go, this one seems a mite weak: after learning that Jonah’s taken a wife, Turnbull hires some men to kidnap Mei Ling, with the intent of shuffling her between multiple locations so that Jonah will never be able to track her down, but Jonah manages to rescue her from the train the bad guys try to get away on...and that’s about it.  Turnbull doesn’t bother ‘em again for the rest of their marriage.  I think he gave up too easily.

Another old acquaintance of Jonah’s shows up in JH#48.  Samson Graves worked alongside Jonah when they were scouts for the U.S. Cavalry before the Civil War broke out.  Matter of fact, Jonah saved Samson’s life when he was captured by Paiutes and tortured.  The incident left Samson scarred in more ways than one: not only did he lose a few fingers, but he now has a near-phobic reaction when around Indians.  Jonah doesn’t know this when Samson shows up on his doorstep looking for help with some Crow warriors on his trail, and therefore agrees to help Samson sort things out with them.  Once they meet up with the Crow, however, Samson begins shooting them with no provocation, so Jonah tries to knock some sense into him with his fists.  He then finds out that his old buddy had previously attacked an group of Crow children, which is why these warriors are after him.  Terrified at the prospect of being tortured again, Samson begs Jonah to kill him, which he does.  This isn’t the end of Jonah’s troubles, though, because when he gets home, he finds that Mei Ling has packed her bags and left!  He jumps back on his horse and hightails it down the road, where he eventually catches up to her:

Mei Ling’s actions are understandable: Jonah may have retired from bounty hunting, but that hasn’t stopped him from killing over a dozen men since they’ve been married.  It doesn’t seem like there will ever be a point where Jonah permanently lays down his guns.  Despite this, Mei Ling gives him the benefit of the doubt and comes back home with him, though this doesn’t mean it’s the end of their squabbling over his behavior.  She lays into him pretty hard in JH#49, accusing him of intentionally setting fire to their corn harvest (in reality, it was an errant flick of Jonah’s cigarette butt that did it), which they needed to pay off their mortgage (what, you didn’t think the doc gave ‘em that house for free, did ya?).  “Now don’t start throwin’ a hissy fit, blast it!” Jonah snaps back.  “Ah’ll get the *&#!@!! money!  Ah promise Ah’ll get it!”  He then rides into town, storms into the sheriff’s office, and begins cherry-picking bounty posters off the wall -- looks like Jonah’s retirement is over, folks.  He manages to track down six men over the course of one day, cashing in to the tune of $6,500 (six grand for the mortgage, and five hundred for “pocket money”), then rides home that night and dumps all the money on the table right in front of Mei Ling, claiming he did some odd jobs around town.  She quickly sees right through this ruse and gets him to admit the truth, and while he’s in the midst of defending his actions, she manages to shut him up with two little words:

Well now, as if getting married wasn’t enough, now Jonah’s gonna be a daddy!  It’s yet another wrinkle in a situation that, going by the letters beginning to appear in the back of the book, is making readers nervous.  While many seem glad for Jonah’s newfound happiness, a few are concerned about the surly cuss they’ve come to know and love being watered down, while others who are aware of Jonah’s terrible track record with loved ones are wondering how long before Mei Ling dies.  A whole ‘nother set of concerns was probably raised after those letter-writers got a hold of JH#50, wherein a new character is introduced who has the potential to break up the happy Hex homestead.  It takes place on Jonah’s birthday, firmly establishing it as November 1st (which is the same day as Michael Fleisher’s...you can do things like that when you’re the writer), and this must be some time after the last issue, because Mei Ling definitely looks pregnant now.  With winter setting in, Jonah’s off on a hunting trip so as to stock up their larder, but he runs afoul of some Crow Indians, who attack him without warning.  After taking out the majority of them, he goes after the last one and gets a good shock:

She ain’t just any old girl, though: Emmylou Hartley is the last surviving member of a party of settlers who’d been overrun by Crows about four years ago.  Married off to one of their warriors, Emmy had been held captive by them until three days before, when she finally managed to escape.  Lucky for her, she’d fled right into Jonah’s hunting grounds, and with the braves on her trail wiped out, Jonah sets her on his horse and begins the long trek out of the mountains and back to civilization.  But since nothing’s ever easy in a Jonah Hex story, they soon encounter one problem after another.  First fierce snowstorm sets in, then Emmy and the horse slip over the edge of an icy cliff -- Jonah rescues Emmy, but the horse is a loss -- and when they try to take shelter from the storm inside a cave, they accidentally rouse a grizzly bear, which Jonah has to kill with his knife because his rifle’s jammed up.  This is probably one of the worst birthdays Jonah’s ever had, so maybe that’s the reason why he kinda loses his head and gets a little sugar from Emmylou.  It doesn’t go any further than a kiss, and he’s certainly in a foul mood as they continue on down the mountain, but whether that’s because of him slipping up with Emmy or all the trouble they’ve run into is uncertain.  He drops her off at the McCabe ranch near the base of the mountain, where they also fix Hex up before he heads on home to Mei Ling.  Does he mention Emmy to her?  Nope.  Matter of fact, he’s fixin’ on crawling straight into bed without another word, but Mei Ling has other plans:

A rather sweet ending, though Mei Ling openly saying it’s Jonah’s 37th birthday (making this 1875, since he was born in 1838) does throw a wrench into the works when it comes to trying to figure out a proper timeline for his adventures because, even after this tale, Fleisher will continue to set the majority of these stories in 1875.  This would be no problem if Jonah had been born in, say, February, then you could pack in most the stuff that supposedly will happen in within that year and not pull your hair out (I say “most” because there’s at least two instances that will occur down the line which will really test the mettle of even the most battle-hardened chronologist).  But we’re going to ignore these gaffes for the most part since others have tried to work it out and gone insane for their efforts.

Speaking of time, another decent chunk of it must have passed when we weren’t looking, because when JH#51 opens, Mei Ling’s just about to go into labor, and Doc Pedersen will be arriving shortly.  Meanwhile, Jonah’s insisting that he needs to head into town, and that he’ll be back before the baby comes.  The reason for his departure is to fetch a surprise for Mei Ling, specifically a new comforter to wrap the newborn in -- who would’ve thought that he’d be such a big softie?  Too bad there’s an unknown gunman waiting for him when he rides into town, one who’s just itching to make a name for himself by killing Hex.  When he confronts the former bounty hunter, he’s shocked that not only is Jonah refusing to fight, but he isn’t even wearing his guns anymore!  The man calls him a coward right in the middle of the street, and there’s a few murmurs of agreement from the gathered crowd as Jonah walks into a cafe for a bite to eat...not that he really does eat so much as push the food around his plate.  Seems our father-to-be is dwelling upon an incident with his own Pa when Jonah was just a boy: Woodson entered Jonah into a contest at the county fair, wherein he had to box three rounds with an older boy so Woodson could win ten dollars.  Jonah did his best, but after being savagely beaten and counted out, Pa still smacked him around, calling him “a snivelin’, mushy-spined coward!”  Surely there have been other outlaws who’ve tried to get Jonah’s goat by calling him such, but perhaps knowing that his own child is on the way, and not wishing to repeat the same cycle of abuse, is making those taunts harder to ignore at the moment.

Shaking free of his ruminations, Jonah realizes how much time has passed and leaves the cafe, where he crosses paths with a youngster named Petey, who’s sporting a good shiner courtesy of the blowhard gunman -- seems the boy stuck up for Hex and got a good whack for his trouble.  Well, y’all know Jonah ain’t fond of grown men that whup on little kids, so he gives the gunman a good beat-down, to which the gunman responds by shooting Hex in the arm when his back is turned.  Jonah, deciding he’s had enough of this bullroar, grabs the comforter he dropped in the street, tosses it in the gunman’s face, then takes hold of a rifle Petey fetched out of Jonah’s saddlebag and lets the guy have it point-blank in the chest -- congratulations, mister, you got your gunfight.  Gathering up the comforter, Jonah heads home and discovers there’s a little baby boy waiting for him.  He begins to apologize to Mei Ling for not being there like she wanted, but she says it doesn’t matter, then smiles and tells him that he’s so good to her when Jonah pulls out the comforter.  “Ah ain’t half as good as Ah’d like tuh be, sugar,” he replies, “but darn it, Ah shore am tryin’!”

After seeing Jonah standing there with his little boy in his arms, one might hope that, for a change, things will finally go his way.  Sadly, things begin to fall apart in JH#52, which takes place just a month later.  Petey’s out at the Hex homestead helping Jonah out with the farm work, and Mei Ling comes out and asks them to watch the baby for a spell.  Setting the lad under a nearby tree, Jonah and Petey continue with their chores, unaware that a scorpion is wandering through the grass.  The baby reaches for it and gets stung, but Jonah acts fast and sucks out the venom.  He takes the baby inside, and Mei Ling proceeds to read Jonah the riot act, accusing him of not caring about his own son, as well as berating him for all the gunfights he’s been involved in since they got married.  It’s like she saved up all her grievances just to unleash them right at that moment.  Seeing that’s she’s acting a bit squirrelly, Jonah reacts the same way he did when they first met and gives her a good slap...though one has to wonder if, down the line, he ever made any conscious connection between his actions at that moment and the beatings his father used to inflict upon his mother.

Meanwhile, the brothers of that gunman Jonah killed last issue head out to his place looking to get even -- they’d heard that Jonah had a son and, upon seeing Petey ride away from the farm, mistakenly kidnap the boy.  The next day, his mother shows up at the Hex homestead and tells Jonah that Petey was spotted with a trio of strangers, so Jonah offers to go find him.  This just makes Mei Ling livid: not only is he doing a job she believes is best left for the sheriff, she also thinks Jonah cares more about Petey then their own son, who’s a mite feverish from that scorpion sting.  “If you walk out that door, we won’t be here when you get back!” she threatens.  “I’ll be gone, Jonah, and so will the baby!”  Considering that she tried to leave him once before, you’d think Jonah would take this more seriously, but instead he rides off without another word.  He soon tracks down one brother and gets him to ‘fess up about where they’re holding Petey: an old miner’s shack outside town.  Jonah heads out there and storms in the place, unaware that he’s been set up.  The issue ends with the bad guys blowing up the cabin with Hex in it, then picks up a split-second later in Jonah Hex #53 (October 1981), wherein we learn that Jonah spotted some dynamite stick wrappers inside the cast-iron stove, so he lit out the back way just in the nick of time.  He then gets the drop on the two remaining brothers, and though one is strangled by Hex’s lariat, the other experiences an unthinkable fate, at least in terms of what Albano & DeZuniga originally had in mind when they created the character: Jonah shoots the gun out of the bad guy's hand!  Though he claims he was aiming for the man’s heart and the gun just so happened to be in the way, it could also be seen as a sign of Jonah trying to be less bloodthirsty.

Sadly, it’s a case of too little too late, for when Jonah gets home after returning Petey to his mother, he finds a farewell note from Mei Ling waiting for him...and unlike the last time she left him, there’s no trail for Jonah to follow, for a sudden storm has wiped out her tracks.  Unbeknownst to him, Mei Ling’s already made it as far as the McCabe place, where she meets Emmylou Hartley -- it’s the first we’ve seen of the gal since JH#50, and her presence here seems like an afterthought.  Mei Ling tells them that she’s leaving her husband, then bundles up the baby and rides off in the rain.  But what of Jonah?  How’s he reacting to the notion that his wife’s flown the coop?  Well, after trying to pick up her tracks and failing miserably, he comes home and proceeds to get stinking drunk, to the point where he begins hallucinating.  First El Papagayo shows up, offering to put Jonah out of his misery, so Jonah draws his Dragoons and blasts him (or at least the window he was standing in front of).  Then Turnbull and Solomon come along to mock him, causing Jonah to destroy damn-near everything in the house in an effort to drive them away.  After that, Woodson Hex turns up to tell Jonah how to be a proper drunk, to which Jonah responds by screaming that the last thing he wants in the world is to be like his Pa, then runs outside and into the yard, where he comes face-to-face with the Chameleon, the master of disguise who helped Turnbull frame Hex during the “fugitive” storyarc of JH#2-16.  He says that he’s come to kill Hex, and Jonah lets a flurry of bullets fly out, “killing” a scarecrow as Jonah screams that he’ll never die so long as he’s the fastest.  It’s at this moment that the full weight of what’s occurred crashes in on him, and he realizes that his reputation as the fastest, deadliest gunfighter is all he has left in life, and he just can’t take it:

After nearly a decade of stories, this is the lowest point we’ve ever seen him knocked down to.  He’s lost loved ones before, and even been abandoned before, but it appears that Jonah had truly believed Mei Ling would forgive him no matter what, and now...now it’s over.  No more wife and child, no more happy home, and he can’t bear the notion that he’s the one responsible.  Self-hatred wins out again, leaving him broken and sobbing in the rain.

The final page shows Jonah saddling up his horse, his mind already back in bounty-hunter mode -- with his family gone, he has no desire to stay in that house full of memories and be a farmer.  Emmylou shows up and begs Jonah to take her along, but he refuses, thinking that, in time, she’ll forget about him.  There’s a bit of an unspoken question here: Why does Emmy want to go off with Hex?  This is purely speculation, but I think there may have been a subplot excised from the last few issues, for there really seems to be no point in introducing Emmylou three issues before -- and having Jonah kiss her -- then not even mentioning the gal again until now.  Perhaps Fleisher wanted Jonah to participate in some infidelity before breaking up his marriage to Mei Ling, but someone at DC or the Comics Code Authority put the kibosh on it (two years later, however, DC's Code-approved Sword of the Atom miniseries kicks off with an extramarital affair, so either attitudes changed rather quickly or there were other factors at work).  Quashed subplot or no, we’ll discover in the years to come that Emmy does care deeply for Jonah, and even Mei Ling still holds feelings for him, plus there will be other women along the way, but it’ll be decades before we again see Jonah make a serious effort to break away from the killer’s path, and when he does, he’ll do it for his own sake, not for love.  As for right now, he’s back to wandering the West alone, and God help the first person to incur the wrath of this heartbroken man.

<< Part 5 | Index | Part 7 >>
Appendix A  |  Appendix B

New fanfic: Shades of Gray #10

I'm embarrassed to say that it's been six months since I put up #9.  I didn't realize how far behind I'd fallen until a few weeks ago, as I was sending SoG#10 out to a fellow Hex-nut for review.  I'll be honest, this one was a toughie for me, mainly because I had so much to explain within the context of the story, yet still have it make sense to both myself and you folks out there in Internet-land.  Anyhow, give it a whirl, let me know what you think, and I"ll try not to make you wait another six months for #11.

An Illustrated History of Jonah Hex (Part 5)

1979-1981: Those Who Don’t Learn From the Past...

Having appeared in well over 50 stories by this point in his career (25 in his own title, 28 in All-Star/Weird Western, plus the Jonah Hex Spectacular and Justice League tales), one might think there isn’t much new ground for Jonah to cover.  And indeed, there’s a fair share of flashbacks and rehashes to be found as we move into the 1980s, the first incident of which occurs in Jonah Hex #26 (July 1979).  Though the story by Michael Fleisher is fresh and action-packed (not to mention rendered in fine detail by E.R. Cruz), it brings to mind Weird Western Tales #12, Jonah’s third outing and written by creator John Albano.  Both feature epidemics (Albano’s is smallpox, while Fleisher goes for cholera), but that’s not where the déjà vu comes in.  It’s the ending, wherein Hex gives both villains (who by this point in the story are afflicted with their respective diseases) what’s coming to them in the same manner, namely offering up a cure right before he blasts it out of their hands.  No one can deny the drama of such a scene, so perhaps it’s mere coincidence that the two writers used the exact same device seven years apart.

In JH#27, drawn by Vicente Alcazar, we’re treated to a tale of Jonah’s childhood, told by the man himself to a boy who wishes to run away with Hex and become a gunfighter.  Back in 1849 -- two years before his Pa sold him to the Apache -- an eleven-year-old Jonah became enamored with a gunfighter as well, though this man was an outlaw.  Bart Mallory has a charisma that young Jonah finds irresistible, and the man treats him with far more respect than Pa’s ever shown him, so when he offers to let Jonah help him rob the bank over in Haverville, Jonah’s all for it.  After giving the boy a pistol, Mallory stations Jonah outside the bank to act as a lookout, then goes inside to do the deed.  Unfortunately, the local law got wind of his plan and ambushes him -- with his dying breath, Mallory lies to the lawmen and says he kidnapped Jonah, therefore absolving the boy of any wrongdoing, so they let Jonah go.  When he gets home, he stashes the pistol (which the lawmen didn’t take from him) under the floorboards right before his father walks in and starts smacking him around for not doing his chores.  It’s an interesting look at just how early Jonah’s experiences with death and gunsmoke began.  Also of interest is the fact that, while the end of the story shows young Jonah pulling out the gun and practicing his quick-draw skills, we never see him turn that gun on his abusive father...though about eight years later, we’ll learn of an incident not long before this one that may have discouraged him from doing so.

Around the same time JH#28 was hitting the stands, Hex fans got something extra to look forward to every month.  Jonah Hex and Other Western Tales was part of DC’s Blue Ribbon Digest series of reprint books, and consisted of three issues (a fourth issue was advertised but never released), containing not only pocket-size versions of Jonah’s early days, but other Western folk such as Scalphunter, along with little factoid pages like "Notebook of a Gunfighter", which appeared in the digest’s first issue.  We get to revisit Jonah’s past in another fashion with JH#30, the first installment of a three-part tale that spans a decade.  It starts somewhere near the end of the Civil War, when Jonah and his comrade-in-arms, Corporal Eddie Cantwell, manage to capture a Union paymaster’s wagon, along with the Yankees guarding it.  To Jonah’s dismay, Cantwell guns down the Yankees after they surrender, then suggests that he and Hex bury the money and reclaim it once the War’s over, which he believes is right around the corner.  Jonah nixes the idea, but it turns out Cantwell wasn’t too far off:

Sharp-eyed readers might notice an oddity in the panel above, as it states that Jonah served in the 7th Cavalry, not the 4th as previously mentioned in WWT#29-30.  This isn’t a spur-of-the-moment alteration: a gold-colored “7” had begun to appear sporadically on Jonah’s coat collar as far back as JH#13, the first of three issues written by David Michelinie, making either him or artist Vicente Alcazar the most likely candidates as to the source of the change.  As for why Fleisher would perpetuate the error, he may have simply forgotten that he’d previously assigned Jonah to another regiment and went with the most current reference.  Whatever the cause, from this issue onward, any story mentioning Jonah’s service record will only refer to the 7th Cavalry, and it’ll be three decades before his time with the 4th Cavalry is brought up again.

Moving back to the issue at hand, we get a quick gloss-over of Jonah’s battle with Noh-Tante and tragic scarring, then move on to the winter of 1866, where Jonah is drafted into a posse to hunt down some bank robbers.  The sheriff is impressed when Jonah captures the bad guys single-handedly, and recommends Jonah should take up bounty-hunting, starting with the capture of “a Satan-born, mad-dog killer” named Eddie Cantwell!  The story continues in JH#31, wherein Jonah tracks down Cantwell, unable to believe that is old friend is a thief and killer.  After subduing Cantwell’s cohorts without bloodshed, Jonah tries to talk things out with the man, but they’re interrupted by Arbee Stoneham, a tracker of great renown and little mercy, who proceeds to give Jonah a crash-course in bounty hunting:

You’d think this would be the end of our story, with Jonah chastised and his old friend dead, but in reality, this two-issue flashback is mere preamble for JH#32, which takes place eight years later in the Spring of 1874.  Jonah’s older, wiser, and much more skilled than he was during that first encounter, and he’s decided to hunt Stoneham down and give him a taste of his own medicine.  It’s an abrupt change in tone from the tale’s first two parts, emphasized by the art chores being passed from Luis Dominguez to Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez.  After a quick recap, Jonah rides into the town of Murphysburg, where Stoneham now lives, and while inquiring about him, a member of the Jason Crowley gang catches sight of Hex and reports to his boss about it.  The gang is a dozen strong, and none too eager to be caught by Hex, so they set up an ambush for him.  Lucky for Jonah, one of the locals tipped him off, and he spends the majority of the issue taking Crowley’s men out in a variety of ways: a Bowie knife, bullets, a lit kerosene lantern, a bundle of dynamite, all topped off with death by stampede for the ringleader (look close to spot Jonah at the extreme left behind the gate).  It’s a jaw-dropping spectacle, and you just know that what Jonah has planned for Stoneham is going to blow it all away...so it’s a bit of a shock when he finally reaches the steps of the boarding house where Stoneham lives:

Turns out a bullet to the spine ended Arbee Stoneham’s bounty-hunting career a few years back, and even worse, he doesn’t even remember Jonah!  This puts the kibosh on whatever revenge Jonah had planned, as well as giving him a glimpse of what his future might be like if he continues down the path of a professional gunfighter (of course, we do know what his future will be, and I’d say Jonah got off lucky that his biggest complaint in old age was failing eyesight).

Jonah belies his usual ornery demeanor when he takes the time to deliver a double-dose of Christmas cheer, the first occurring in DC Special Series Vol. 4 #21, with is more commonly known as the Super-Star Holiday Special (Spring 1980).  Now before you go wondering what idiot decided to publish a holiday-themed comic so long after the fact, keep in mind that, like most magazines, comics tend to be dated months in advance, so this did indeed come out during the proper season.  The special features five stories -- including the very first Batman tale drawn by Frank Miller, which causes some secondary-market dealers to jack up the price, so be warned -- with Jonah appearing in a short 10-pager, penned by Fleisher and drawn by Dick Ayers & Romeo Tanghal.  While Jonah’s tracking down some outlaws one Christmas Eve, he comes across a settler who’s fixing to shoot his daughter’s pet fawn so they can have a proper holiday dinner -- the winter’s been hard, game is scarce, and that fawn is all they have left to eat.  Jonah stops the man and says that he’ll scrounge up something else for the family without giving him a reason why, though we soon learn, via flashback, that Jonah went through a similar situation when he was ten years old.  After rescuing a raccoon from a trap, he brought it home to nurse it back to health, but his drunken Pa kills it later on so his wife could serve it up for supper...and for those keeping score, this marks the first time we ever see Jonah’s mother, Ginny:

As you can imagine, Jonah’s outburst earns him a smack across the face, along with a threat of worse punishment if he dares to lash out again.  Thus is the source of Jonah’s desire to save that little girl’s pet from the same fate, though he can’t seem to flush out any game either.  On a lark, he decides to follow a bright star in the sky -- an element used in all five stories -- and it leads him not only to the outlaws he was looking for, but after Jonah wipes them out, he recovers the provisions they were toting, thereby saving the fawn’s life with a knapsack full of hardtack and beef jerky.  Despite the somewhat-gruesome flashback in the middle, it’s a rather heartwarming story, with an uncharacteristic (for Hex at least) happy ending.

Our second Christmas story in JH#34, with art by Dan Spiegle, revolves around Jonah crossing paths with his Pa once more, this time in a ghost town taken over by outlaws.  Seems it was Woodson’s idea to set up this “haven fer owlhoots”, so when Jonah comes riding in on the trail of some of the town’s “citizens”, Pa pins on a sheriff’s badge and tosses his son in jail!  Even worse, Woodson is cooking up plans for a train robbery with the very men Jonah’s tracking, so our favorite bounty hunter has to break out of jail and take them out before any innocents get killed.  In the end, it’s just Jonah and Woodson, and though the old man doesn’t fake a coronary like he did last time, he does plead for his life, and Jonah agrees to let him go...if he does Jonah a favor.  Remember how I said this was a Christmas story?  One of the reasons Jonah was tracking those outlaws is because they’d killed a kindly philanthropist who played Santa at the local orphanage every year.  But the man’s dead now, and Woodson Hex has a white beard and rather portly build, so Jonah gets an idea:

There’s not much to laugh at in JH#35 &36, as Fleisher, Ayers, and Dominguez give us a two-parter dealing with the Fort Charlotte Massacre, which of course means we’re dealing with Turnbull once again.  Seems the old man has formed the “Fort Charlotte Brigade” with the remaining survivors of Jonah’s regiment, and they’re all eager to get even with him for his betrayal.  The issue then rolls into a retelling of WWT#29, or at least the flashback portion of it.  If you lay both comics side-by-side, you’ll find that the rendition in JH#35 is nearly verbatim, with only a few scenes removed...and even though this was originally the story that introduced the 4th Cavalry, all references to it have been changed to the 7th, so Fleisher’s sticking with the retcon!  Another notable change is when the Yankees deduce where the rest of the regiment is camped: in both versions, it’s some telltale red clay caught in the hooves of Jonah’s horse that gives their location away, but where Noly Panaligan drew a black soldier in the scene, Ayers &Dominguez made him white (for the record, the latter would be more historically accurate, as the U.S. Army wasn't integrated until after World War II).

The next issue begins with Jonah getting kicked out of the town of Painted Butte, Texas, as it seems the holier-than-thou townsfolk don’t want a known gunfighter walking their streets.  A saloon gal comes to Jonah’s defense, and they send her packing too (oddly enough, they appear to have no problem with the saloon this all takes place in), and Jonah finds himself with an unwanted traveling companion.  After an incident with a collapsing bridge (during which Jonah utters a throwaway line about his Aunt Aretha, who has never been mentioned before and will never be again), the duo gets captured by the Fort Charlotte Brigade and hauled off to the infamous fort, where Jonah and the saloon gal are locked away in the same building the Yankees tossed him in back in 1863.  It doesn’t take long for Jonah to figure out what comes next:

What Hex doesn’t figure on is the saloon gal -- who feels she owes him for saving her life -- knocking him out, putting on his uniform, and acting as a decoy so Jonah can get away while their captors are focused on her.  It’s great plan, really, with the exception of neither of them knowing that the Fort Charlotte Brigade stacked the odds against them and rigged the barbwire perimeter fence to explode, which it did once that poor girl tried to cut through it.  With “Jonah Hex” dead, Turnbull’s goons leave, and the real Jonah escapes right out from under their noses, stopping long enough to bury the woman who saved his life on the outskirts of the old fort.

JH#37 also deals with Jonah’s Civil War days, telling a tale that edges mighty close to “urban legend” territory.  It starts off with an old man and his grandson spotting Jonah Hex in a Confederate graveyard, and from there, the old man spins a yarn about how Hex saved General “Stonewall” Jackson from being killed by a band of Union soldiers.  Impressed by his skills, Jackson enlisted Hex to help him blow up a key bridge right before the battle of Harpers Ferry, after which the two men parts ways.  Months later, Hex is part of the force fighting at Chancellorsville, and after a hard-won victory, he and his men are holding position on a ridge overlooking a possible Yankee escape route.  It’s dark, they see a mounted force coming, and...

That right, kids: according to some old codger, Jonah Hex is the Confederate soldier responsible for accidently shooting “Stonewall” Jackson, who died a week later from his wounds.  As if Hex doesn’t have enough things in his life to feel guilty about, Fleisher tries to pin this on him, too.  At least there’s something for both Jonah and us to smile about in JH#39, because for the first time in six years, Tony DeZuniga is back to draw the character he co-created.  And it’s a fine tale to return on, as Jonah crosses paths with a samurai who’s come to America in search of his kidnapped daughter (in the midst of their first meeting, Fleisher managed to sneak in a reference to Jonah's birthday, though it’ll be another year before we learn the full date).  Upon finding out that he and the samurai are on the trail of the same man, Jonah teams up with him, and though it doesn’t end well for his new friend (no surprise here), the bounty hunter manages to help the samurai keep his honor and bring down the bad guy.  The issue was so good that DC selected it as one of their  top ten stories of 1980, but elsewhere that month, things weren’t so rosy, as Weird Western Tales was cancelled with the publication of issue #70 -- consider it the final shockwave of the “DC Implosion”.  Unlike all the other times the title was canned, there would be no last-minute rescue, but Scalphunter briefly found a home in the back of Jonah’s book when JH#40 came out the following month, and back-ups featuring a variety of Western characters would become an on-again/off-again feature over the years, though none of these stories would ever cross over with Jonah’s.

Oddly enough, right around the time WWT was cancelled, Michael Fleisher and artist Gerald Forton were grooming a new Western character for DC, with the intent being to give him his own title.  Though this lofty notion never came to pass, Jeremiah “J.D.” Hart debuted in JH#42 as a U.S. Marshal who embodies the old-school “Western superhero” archetype: he shoots guns out of the hands of bad guys, does trick shots with silver dollars, and even has a doting aunt and a freckle-faced younger cousin who just love him to pieces.  This is the sort of character that Jonah Hex was designed to supplant, and yet here he is, filling up the middle of the issue with his aw-shucks attitude.  Even worse, Hart is soon set on Jonah’s trail by the mayor of Feldon’s Gap, who claims Hex killed the town’s banker -- in reality, the mayor and his accomplice want the bounty hunter eliminated before he finds out about them hiring outlaws to drive the locals off some prime real estate they want to sell to the railroad (they’re also the ones who killed the banker, who was in on the scam).  Meanwhile, Jonah’s distracted by a familiar face turning up in his life once more: Mei Ling!  Turns out her brother lives near Feldon’s Gap, and she was on her way to visit when her buckboard lost a wheel, the jolt causing her to injure her leg.  Luckily, Jonah was riding nearby and swooped in to rescue her.  After taking her to a nearby farmhouse, the two of them talk about what happened when they parted ways:

Holy Hannah, did Jonah just retire from bounty-hunting?!?  Not quite, for as we find out in JH#43, Jonah still has one last job to do, which is to find the owlhoot who killed that banker.  Yep, the mayor set things up so Hex and Hart would have no choice but to cross paths!  When they do, all it takes is a few minutes of talking before they both realize something screwy is going on here, but Jeremiah Hart is a very by-the-book sort, so he still feels the need to bring Jonah in until this is all straightened out.  On the way back to town, they get jumped by Apaches, who quickly recognize the “Mark of the Demon” Jonah bears.  This leads to over three pages of flashback, explaining Jonah’s time among the Apache -- it seems like the only reason Fleisher included this was to refresh the memories of those fans who missed JH#7-8 three years before, as well as give these Apaches a reason to burn Hex and Hart at the stake!  Our duo escapes, then they make like Butch and Sundance over the edge of a cliff, though Jonah gets knocked out after they hit the water and Hart has to drag him out.  He recovers right at the beginning of Jonah Hex #44 (January 1981), just before they’re shot at by the Spast brothers, whom Hart tossed in jail during the previous issue -- they broke out, tracked the fellas down, and are itchin’ to get even.  Both men take bullets as they dive back into the water, staying under until the gunmen figure they’re dead and gone.  Hart’s too badly wounded to go on, so Jonah leaves him at a farmhouse and rides back to Feldon’s Gap to settle things up with the two-timing mayor and his buddy.  Meanwhile, Mei Ling also heads to town in the hope of finding Jonah, but instead finds the Spast brothers openly bragging about killing him!  Moments later, Jonah himself shows up and eliminates all the Spast brothers in a way J.D. Hart probably wouldn’t approve of:

Back at the farmhouse, J.D. and his hosts soon find themselves fending off an attack by the mayor’s hired thugs.  Hart manages to capture them all and, after hauling them back to town, he and Jonah engage in a gunfight right in the middle of the street, wherein  Jonah kills the marshal in cold blood...or at least that’s what the two men arrange for it to look like.  It’s really just a cover so Jonah can play at shaking down the mayor and his accomplice for some hush money -- once they ‘fess up to all their wrongdoings, Hart steps out of hiding and places them under arrest.  The story wraps up with Jonah and J.D. talking rather amicably, and Mei Ling standing next to Jonah with a loving look in her eyes.  Seems our favorite bounty hunter is staying true to his word about retiring, and though J.D. wishes the happy couple all the best, he can’t stay for the wedding.  “There’s rumors of another range war brewing up in Lincoln County, and I’m afraid I’ve got to ride up there and poke my big nose in it!” he says, a line that probably alludes to what would have been the first storyarc of Hart’s own title had it manifested (too bad it didn’t, since the mention of Lincoln County implies the marshal would soon be trading slugs with Billy the Kid!).  This will be last we see of Jeremiah Hart for quite a while, but luckily Tony DeZuniga will be sticking around for the long haul: starting with this issue, he’s once again the main artist for Jonah’s adventures, missing only a handful of stories between now and the title’s last days.  It’s a grand time for him to come back on board, as he’ll soon be illustrating some major milestones in the life of his creation, beginning next month with a "Blood Wedding!"

<< Part 4 | Index | Part 6 >>
Appendix A  |  Appendix B

52 Pick-Up: 6 Months In

I know we're technically on Month 7 now, but as the majority of books I'm still buying come out near the end of the month, I figured I could get away with being a tad late.  Plus the last few weeks have been one disappointment after another so far as DC goes, so I needed time to get my thoughts in order.

We'll start with what's no longer in my pull box.  I ditched Batgirl after #4 because A: I got the answer I was looking for regarding how come Babs can walk again (it was brief, yeah, but it was an answer) and B: I felt Gail Simone was beginning to write Babs/Batgirl too far off-model.  The first two issues were fine, but #3 just didn't sit well with me at all, what with Batgirl beating the crap outta Nightwing for no apparent reason.  I did peek at #5, but there was nothing there to convince me to stay (and no, that whole "fan service" shot on the first page didn't offend me, though it did look rather uncomfortable for her).

Also gone after #4 was Resurrection Man.  Like Batgirl, it started off pretty good, then slid into "I don't care" territory.  I apologized to Tremo after I dropped it, since he was the one who convinced me to give it a whirl, and he in turn apologized to me, saying what Abnett & Lanning was giving us didn't live up to what they'd done with the character in their original run.

The next casualty was DCU Presents, right after #5.  The Deadman story was good, and my only reason for dropping it was the next storyarc: Challengers of the Unknown.  I don't hate the Challs, I just have no desire to read about them.  I will keep an eye on this title, though, and if the next arc sounds good, I'll jump back on...but I'm not going to do like I did with Showcase in the mid-90s and buy every issue just to have a solid run.

So, where does that leave us compared to what I started with six months ago?  Well, All-Star Western ain't going nowheres (unlike DnA, J&J ain't dropped a stitch with ol' Jonah, though the backups are hit-or-miss), and I'm still hanging onto Green Lantern at the moment, but if there was a way to buy just the Hal Jordan parts and leave the Sinestro parts at the store, I'd do it.  Oh, and I'm still getting Aquaman.

Nope, that's not a typo.  I jumped on Aquaman with issue #1.  The only reason it wasn't included on my "Final Shuffle" list is I bought it after I posted that, and was too lazy to amend said list.  A buddy of mine who brought every single "New 52" book and posted reviews of each chatted it up really good, so I took a peek next time I was at the store (I also peeked at Demon Knights because of him, but it did nothing for me in person).  I'm shocked at how much I enjoy this -- I've never been a major Aqua-hater, but I've laughed at my fair share of degrading jokes leveled against the guy -- and though issue #6 was a tad shaky (mostly in the art, it just looked a tad funny), I'm still looking forward to #7.  Ever once in a while, I have a thought along the lines of, "Dear God, I'm buying Aquaman and enjoying it!" but hey, I enjoy a good underdog story, and Arthur fits that bill to be sure.

Okay, what else is in the pull box that wasn't before?  The Shade miniseries came out, and I've been buying it just like I said I would.  We're up to #6 by now, and though James Robinson is rambling on in places, I'm enjoying it overall.  Besides, we got to see Greg "Vigilante" Saunders in action, if only for one issue.  Yay, Vig!  Another mini I'm picking up is The Ray: I peeked out of loyalty to Palmiotti & Gray, and liked what I saw.  If this new Ray goes monthly, I'd consider keeping on it.  So in the end, I dumped three and picked up three, so that still leaves us with five books...though The Ray is only a 4-issue stint, so we'll be down to four by the end of this month, which will become three once The Shade wraps up in six months.  Three titles....my DC Comics quota hasn't been that low since I started buying on a regular basis two decades ago.

What's that you say?  What about that Earth-2 project I mentioned a while back, now scheduled to start in May?  Funny you should mention that.  Turns out it's not even close to what we were hoping for.  Essentially, it's what we're already getting in the DCNu, with a few extra tweaks: Power Girl is Supergirl, Huntress is Robin, and Supes might have been married to Lois, but she's dead now.  Jay Garrick and Alan Scott are there, but they're new heroes...in a modern-time setting, not the 1940s, so there goes all that whole "legacy" notion the JSA has built up for so long and Robinson was so good at writing.  Oh ,and they'll be fighting Darkseid in the first arc, just like the first arc of Justice League.  It's like going to to the ice cream shop and getting a choice between scoop of vanilla in a dish or a scoop of vanilla on a waffle cone.  I do like me a waffle cone, but dangit, I was expecting chocolate!

just this.  Now you have to be a member of Facebook or Twitter if you want to contribute to the propaganda-feed in any way.  Lucky for us, a long-standing DC fansite did us the favor of replicating the DCMB on their own message boards, where we got the changes we REALLY wanted: easier interface, avatars, emoticons, private-message capabilities...and we can swear.  Okay, I don't think anyone was asking for the ability to swear, but it's nice to know innocent phrases like "Dave Cockrum" won't be censored now.

And before you ask...no, I don't like the newly-released DC logo.  Then again, I wasn't all that keen on the previous logo when it first appeared in 2005, but at least they had the decency to make it a logical progression between the old and new designs.  This new-new logo looks like it's for a tech firm or pharmaceutical company, not comics.  However, this article does make an interesting point of comparing it to the current logos of many other comics companies.  Grouped with the rest of 'em, it seems serviceable.

Of course, if the DCNu trend continues unabated, what DC slaps on its covers may not even be a concern for me next year, as I'll be funneling the rest of my money into finishing up my late-90s/early-2000s JSA collection.  Read what you enjoy, kiddies.

An Illustrated History of Jonah Hex (Part 4)

4 - May You Live in Interesting Times
(Text updated April 1, 2026)

If a comic-book character’s popularity can be measured by how many issues they appear in during a given month, then Jonah Hex hit one of the highest points in his career in the midst of “The DC Explosion”.  During a two-month period, he was featured in not only his self-titled book, but one of DC’s flagship titles and his very own one-shot special.  Taken singly, each of these stories is an odd little side-trip away from his usual stomping grounds, and seeing them altogether on the newsstand must have presented a bizarre picture to any new reader discovering Hex for the first time.  Atypical stories or no, each of them would prove to be life-altering for our favorite bounty hunter on one level or another.

We’ll start off with Jonah Hex #17 (October 1978), drawn by Vicente Alcazar.  Jonah’s been lured to Charleston by a promise to $5,000, though when he gets there, he discovers that the money is to be payment for flying a hot-air balloon to Europe.  The inventor wishes to remain on the ground in order to drum up the proper press, and knows Jonah’s the sort of man who will do anything for the right price.  In this case, though, five thousand bucks ain’t it, so he refuses, which doesn’t stop the inventor from bashing Jonah on the head and forcing him into the balloon’s gondola.  He comes to as the balloon lifts off and manages to grab the inventor, but that action doesn’t turn out as planned, with the inventor plummeting to his death soon after.

Adrift in a balloon with no experience in how to control it, Jonah spends the next three days at the mercy of the winds, which carry him out over the Atlantic Ocean and all the way down to the coast of South America.  When he’s finally spotted by a ship, it blasts him out of the sky and takes him captive -- turns out this is a slave ship bound for Brazil, and they think he’s going to rat them out (slavery was on the decline in Brazil during the 1870s, but it wasn’t officially abolished until 1888).  After being thrown in with the “cargo”, Hex finds that the enslaved Africans were working on an uprising, led by their king, Mbwasi, who luckily for Hex speaks English.  Also in the hold is Cricket, a Black man tossed down there after disobeying the captain.  Unfortunately, when they break out of the hold and make their way up to the main deck, they discover Cricket was actually put down there as a spy, for he goes running to the captain the first chance he gets (also, just like with WWT#29, the Comics Code Authority lets the word “darkies” make it into print).  In the midst of a terrible storm, both sides fight it out, and the Africans eventually take over the ship, wiping out the crew in the process, along with Cricket and Mbwasi.

With no one left to control the ship, it soon crashes against the Tortuga shoals (though exactly which Tortuga shoals those would be is unknown, as many places in South America are known by that name and none appear to be located off the coast of Brazil).  Hex and a handful of Africans survive the wreck, and are soon rescued by a tribe of Blacks in canoes.  Now, this isn’t the happy ending it sounds like: At the beginning of the tale, Jonah overheard the slavers talking about a tribe of cannibals that lived on an island in the area, and when Hex sees their blue-painted faces, he realizes that’s who picked them up!  Jonah tries to warn the Africans, but since none of the survivors speak English, it’s no use -- the only good thing is that the Africans talk the cannibals into letting Hex go since he helped them escape.  Jonah is given a small canoe, and as he paddles away, we’re left to wonder if the Africans will end up on the menu.

Jonah’s Brazilian adventure continued in JH#18, which featured Val Mayerik and Danny Bulandi on art.  Now paddling his canoe up the Amazon, Jonah comes across a group of men torturing a native boy, so he jumps the guys and guns them down with their own pistols (Jonah lost his when the ship went down).  As he frees the boy, another native hiding in the trees zaps Jonah with a poison dart (that’s gratitude for ya), but he manages to stumble back to his canoe and escape before passing out.  Sometime later, he gets dumped into the water after his canoe tumbles over a waterfall, and his unconscious body washes up on the outskirts of a rubber plantation.  When Jonah recovers, he finds himself in the company of siblings Paul and Vanessa Venal, who own the plantation.  Hex is rather surprised that they know his name, and any sharp-eyed reader should be surprised as well: They claim to know it because his name was written on the sweatband of his hat, which was recovered along with all his other possessions when they found him...but Jonah lost all that stuff when the slave ship was destroyed!  Fleisher must’ve hoped the readers wouldn’t notice this continuity error, and would simply be happy to see Jonah in his Confederate duds again.

Of course, there’s still the matter of him being unarmed, but Paul soon remedies that by lending the bounty hunter some guns from his own collection, which leads to the introduction of something that would come to be considered part of the “classic” Jonah Hex look: A matched pair of ivory-handled Colt Dragoons.  Though there are errors in both the text and the art this first time out, it’s specified in the letter column of Jonah Hex #31 that these guns are meant to be Whitneyville-Hartford .44-caliber Dragoon pistols, manufactured by Colt Firearms back in 1848, with a limited run of only 240 (a few dozen are known to still exist).  It’s not only a rare handgun, but deadly as well, with a firing power that wasn’t surpassed until the invention of the .357 Magnum in the 1930s, so you know Jonah didn’t just pluck those things off the wall at random.

Not long after, Paul convinces Hex to help rescue some workers who were kidnapped by the local tribe, the Kre-Ena-Krore, though the reality is the Venals want the natives wiped out so they can acquire their legendary treasure.  What follows is a textbook lesson in the dangers that lurk within the jungle, like boa constrictors, quicksand, and bow-wielding natives who’d rather you not wipe them out.  Jonah eventually learns about the true purpose of his mission, as well as what this “treasure” really is: A hut full of shrunken heads!  Don’t worry, the Venals get what’s coming to them in the end, and Jonah rides off with those ivory-handled Dragoons still on his hips.  We can presume that the bounty hunter must’ve hightailed it for the nearest seaport and the first ship heading to the States, as he’s back home safe and sound by the next issue.  Looking back, it’s strange that Fleisher would go to all the trouble of inventing a way to get Hex down to South America, then only do two stories there.  It’s a bit of a letdown that we didn’t get more.

At the same time Jonah was wandering around Brazil, he also turned up in Justice League of America #159-160, marking his first guest appearance in someone else’s book...and if you’re one of those fans who likes to imagine that Jonah Hex exists in a universe separate from the DCU, please skip the next few paragraphs, because what follows here might make your brain explode.  This tale, written by Gerry Conway -- who’d also taken over penning Scalphunter’s adventures a few months earlier with Weird Western Tales #45 -- and drawn by Dick Dillin & Frank McLaughlin, starts at the annual JLA/JSA shindig.  After four pages of idle superhero chatter, we get an explosion, followed by three pages of the Lord of Time, the villain of our piece, telling us one of the most ridiculous setups you will ever read in a comic book.  Apparently, he’s created an ultimate supercomputer and programmed it to stop all of time, but after activating it, he realized that’s a very bad idea, and he can’t stop it from carrying out the program.  Only the combined might of the JLA and JSA can defeat the computer, but since he’s the villain, the Lord of Time can’t just ask for help, so he instead plucks five legendary warriors out of the timestream and has them literally crash the superheroes’ party, therefore tricking the superheroes into attacking the Lord of Time’s stronghold and destroying the supercomputer...and that, my friends, is the explanation for why Jonah Hex, the Black Pirate, Enemy Ace, the Viking Prince, and Miss Liberty are appearing in a JLA book.

After blowing the place to Hell and gone (and rendering a bunch of the superheroes unconscious in the process), Jonah and his new friends step back to reassess the situation, as none of them are aware of why they did it.  There’s some muttering about being compelled by an unknown voice, and overall, our time-tossed quintet is rather shaken by all of it...except for Jonah.  “Seems somebody, somewhere, up and yanked us away from our own business, with all the good manners of a slimy carpetbagger!” he declares, reloading his gun.  “I figger we owe that somebody for the inconvenience!”  If you believe in retcons, there’s a possible explanation for why Jonah is taking all this craziness better than the rest, and we’ll discuss it much further down the line in Chapter 12.  In the meantime, let’s focus on the fact that, as the issue progresses, these five people kick the collective asses of the JLA and JSA.  Okay, they did have augmented weapons supplied by the Lord of Time, and Jonah even gets a flying horse, but still, we’re talking five against twenty here (going by a head-count of who’s on the first page).  How insane is this?

Not as insane as the next issue, which would later be one of many DC issues reprinted by Whitman Publishing (but not the previous issue for some reason), which means JLA#160 was likely the first introduction to Jonah Hex for many young’uns in the late 1970s and early 1980s whose parents grabbed a Whitman polybagged pack of comics at grocery and drug stores across the United States.  And boy o boy, what an intro!  After the Lord of Time literally puts them on display right outside his stronghold in the year 3786 in order to lure the superheroes there, our five warriors decide they’re not gonna take this abuse much longer and storm the place themselves (I like to think that Jonah goaded the other four into it).  Once inside, they come face-to-face with both a Tyrannosaurus Rex (or “a toad-frog outta Hell”, as Jonah calls it) and a passel of lizard-men, all of which do what the superheroes couldn’t last issue, namely knock these five people flat, thus putting an end to Jonah’s direct involvement in this tale.  We do see a comatose Hex near the end, and there’s a throwaway line on the last page about how the League, after they defeated the supercomputer, returned the five warriors to their respective times, but other than that, those in search of cowpoke action need not concern themselves with the rest of this story.

As crazy as it all was, though, these two JLA issues set a bit of a precedent for ol’ Jonah, and within seven years, his involvement with both time-travel shenanigans and the long-underwear crowd would become part of his main storyline, as opposed to something special trotted out for guest-spots that could easily be ignored.  Love it or hate it, the notion of Hex comfortably mingling with superheroes across time and space starts here.

Another notable thing to be found in JLA#160 is an advertisement -- which also appeared in JH#18 -- for a new offering in DC’s Dollar Comics line.  Technically titled DC Special Series #16 but more commonly referred to as the Jonah Hex Spectacular (Fall 1978), this ad-free special boasted not only a 30-page Hex story, but two 17-page backups featuring Bat Lash and Scalphunter, plus an action-packed Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez cover and a black-and-white mini-poster by Luis Dominguez, making it one heck of a deal for just a dollar.  It’s the plot of the main story, however, that makes the Spectacular an unforgettable landmark in Jonah’s history.

“Well, the first idea I had was to do a story about Jonah Hex being old,” Michael Fleisher said in The Comics Journal #56 (May 1980).  “I've been trying to get DC to let me do a whole separate series about Jonah Hex as an old man.  I'm not having any luck.  But that was my idea to do a story about Jonah Hex in his 60s...and I knew that I'd already established, at least in my own mind, that Jonah Hex was born in 1838.  So I said, ‘Gee, 60s, what year would that be?’ and I found myself in the early 1900s.”

And that’s also where the reader finds themselves as “The Last Bounty Hunter”  opens in 1904, with a white-haired Hex still tracking down outlaws at the ripe old age of sixty-six.  The march of time has changed him a little -- instead of the aimless wanderer he was in the 1870s, he’s settled down in Cheyenne, Wyoming with a young Comanche gal named Tall Bird, and has to wear reading glasses when filling out reward vouchers -- but otherwise Jonah’s just as ornery and dangerous as always.  Unfortunately, the rest of the world is rapidly leaving him behind, a fact pointed out to him by Michael Wheeler, an American History professor from Princeton who wants to write a book about Jonah.  The idea that anybody would want to do such a thing intrigues the bounty hunter just enough for him to let the man stick around.

Wheeler spends months with Hex and Tall Bird, taking down all the details of the bounty hunter’s long life.  One afternoon, when the two men are out hunting, they encounter Lew Farnham, who runs a traveling Wild West show.  Seems he wants Hex to hire on with him so he can turn the old man into a cross between Buffalo Bill and a rodeo clown, complete with a white spangled outfit that bears Jonah’s name “emblazoned across the back in genuine simulated rhinestone diamonds!”  Not surprisingly, Hex turns Farnham down flat, walking away from the man with a grim look in his eyes.

Many days later, Hex and Wheeler return to the homestead and discover that Tall Bird has ben kidnapped by outlaw George Barrow, who lost four of his men to Hex at the beginning of the tale.  Wheeler bravely assists Jonah in rescuing her, but Barrow manages to escape.  Hex dismisses his wife’s worries about his own safety and sends her home, while Wheeler accompanies him to Cheyenne to collect the bounties on the remainder of Barrow’s men.  It’s morning by the time they arrive in town, and as they leave the sheriff’s office with the money, Wheeler excitedly points out a new-fangled 3-horsepower Oldsmobile parked out front (Fleisher and artist Russ Heath had a discussion about what type of automobile to use, and Fleisher said they went with a period-accurate one despite it looking “a little dumpy” compared to, say, a Ford Model T from 1911).

Having no interest in “them noisy contraptions”, Jonah instead sits in on a poker game at a saloon while waiting for Wheeler to get back from a joyride with the Oldsmobile’s owner.  The bounty hunter soon finds that he’s having a hard time focusing on the cards, so he removes his glasses to clean them off, just as George Barrow, eager for revenge, bursts in with a shotgun.  Caught off-guard, Jonah barely has time to draw his pistol when Barrow’s on him, bashing him in the face with the butt of the shotgun, then letting Hex have it with both barrels.  Wheeler returns in time to see the local law take out Barrow, but it’s too late for Jonah, who passes away in Wheeler’s arms after gasping out his final words: “It’s cold...”

Not a hoax, not a dream, not an imaginary story: Jonah Hex was shot dead by George Barrow in the Winter of 1904.  And as the reader is still trying to come to terms with this cold hard fact, the blows keep on a-comin’.  While Wheeler and Tall Bird are preparing a funeral pyre for Jonah’s body, Lew Farnham and his assistant show up to steal it.  Wheeler is shot in the struggle, Tall Bird knocked unconscious, and the cabin set ablaze to cover up the crime.  Farnham then takes the body to a taxidermist to have Jonah stuffed, mounted, and dressed in that godawful costume Farnham made for him.  Despite the indignities, Jonah does manage a spot of revenge from beyond the grave: As Farnham’s assistant tries to wedge Jonah’s gun into his hand, it goes off in the guy’s face (Farnham blames it on the gun’s hair-trigger, but doubt will be thrown on this assessment many years later).

As time passes, Jonah’s corpse is displayed in one town after the next, making oodles of cash for Farnham, who eventually gets his at the hands of a gang of robbers.  Then comes the final insult to Jonah’s afterlife, as the robbers take his body and sell it to an antique dealer, thus setting off decades of Jonah Hex being passed from one owner to the next, until it’s completely forgotten that he’s actually a preserved corpse and not some ugly statue (it’s very likely that Fleisher was inspired by the strange case of Elmer McCurdy, a train robber whose embalmed body was put on display starting in 1911 and eventually misplaced for decades before its rediscovery in December 1976, barely two years before “the Last Bounty Hunter” was published).  The final panel shows his body on display at an amusement park, looking rather pathetic as he stands in the rain, alone and forgotten.

“It made me very unhappy, that story,” Fleisher said in his TCJ interview.  “It made me very sad and upset.  The people who think that story is some sort of a sadistic toying with the reader are really wrong because I got very choked up writing that story, because it was the death of a character that I really loved -- not only loved, but I feel is really me.”  It also may have never been published if Larry Hama -- editor for both this and Jonah’s regular title at the time -- hadn’t supported it.  Keep in mind that not only does this story kill off a major character (not unheard of at the time, but still unusual), but one that will still be appearing in a monthly title once this story is over with.  Fleisher dared to tell the readers how the saga of Hex’s life was going to end long before that saga was even close to wrapping up.  The fact that, technically, every Jonah Hex story is a flashback makes such a thing possible (remember, this is a Western character living well over a century in the past), but there were some in the comics industry who felt this particular revelation would dull the sense of danger in subsequent Hex stories, since the readers now knew how he was really going to die.  In response, Fleisher pointed out that people had no trouble reading Superboy stories when they knew good and well he was going to grow up to be Superman.

Fleisher also related how many people at both DC and Marvel (for whom he also did freelance work) were praising him for it.  “I saw when I was at Marvel a few weeks ago, a British fan magazine, whose readers had selected ‘The Last Bounty Hunter’ as the best story of the year, tied with Superman Vs. Muhammad Ali.”  Unfortunately, I’m uncertain as to which publication Fleisher is referring to here: I did look up the UK’s Eagle Awards for that year in case that’s what he was referencing, and did find nominations for both Jonah Hex (for Favourite Comic Magazine) and Superman Vs. Muhammad Ali (for Favourite Single Story), but they didn’t appear in the same category together…and for the record, both titles lost in their respective categories to the X-Men.  However, I can confirm that the story was “honored” with a three-page parody in The Buyer’s Guide for Comic Fandom #257 (October 20, 1978) by writer/artist Eddie Eddings.  Titled “The Death of Jonah Hoax”, a cartoony version of our favorite bounty hunter spins tall tales for the fella writing down his life story (to be clear, Jonah was never a merman, nor did he work as a lion tamer or take a cruise to Tahiti...though the supposed fib that he’d met aliens would turn out to be true much later in Hex history!).  Overall, it’s on caliber with what John Albano & Tony DeZuniga delivered in their Zany parody a few years prior.

The reception wasn’t all praise and playful jabs, however, as Fleisher went on to say that “there were people who felt angry” in regards to him daring to kill off Hex in such a manner.  “‘How dare he write about a death that's not valiant? Jonah Hex could die, but at least he should die saving a whole city,’” Fleisher said, summarizing the small number of negative letters received for the story, followed by him stating that he didn’t think a person like Jonah Hex would die in a heroic fashion, even if some folks felt that Jonah’s fate in “The Last Bounty Hunter” was pointless.  “You live by the sword, and you die by the sword,” he said plainly, later comparing what happened to Hex to the death of Wild Bill Hickok, who was murdered in 1876 when, in a rare lapse of judgement, he sat with his back to the door of the No. 10 Saloon in Deadwood, allowing Jack McCall to sneak up and shoot him unawares.  “And if you have a psychological bent, you have to say, ‘Why on this occasion did this person do something -- a person who’s at home in this violent milieu -- why did he do that?’  Well, part of him must have thought it was over, and he wanted to go.  And I thought that, to me, it was right that that would happen.”  Such thinking follows a rule Fleisher said he adhered to in his writing: The characters should always be the most important thing in a story, and that an action scene should be sacrificed from a overly-long script before a character moment is.

Before we move back to Jonah’s “present-day” adventures, let me take a moment to talk a little more about Russ Heath.  While his career ran the gamut from war to humor to horror, his first work in the comics industry was on Westerns for Timely Comics in the 1940s.  His deftness at depicting that genre came naturally to him, owing to his father having worked as an honest-to-goodness cowboy, who then passed down to his son a knowledge of practical skills like roping, riding, and shooting, as well as pointing out the inaccuracies in Western serials.  Heath’s keen-eyed attention to detail comes through loud and clear in “The Last Bounty Hunter”, as the art throughout the story was so beautifully rendered, and the expressions so genuine (especially Wheeler’s as he holds Jonah’s dead body), that it gave an already-great story the extra push it needed to be...well, spectacular.  Heath was such an integral part of this story’s success that, 23 years later in Starman #74, James Robinson called upon Heath to illustrate the death of another Western character, Brian Savage aka Scalphunter.

Unbeknownst to some, there was another Fleisher/Heath collaboration which never saw print: Samples for a Jonah Hex newspaper strip.  If you recall, Fleisher worked with Joe Orlando on a brief run of Little Orphan Annie strips early in his career, and Heath did art for various strips both before and after his Hex stint, so the duo was familiar with the demands of newspaper comic strips, which for decades had been seen as a more prestigious line of work than comic books.  According to the listing for the original art -- two daily strips and one Sunday strip -- on the Heritage Auctions website, the material dates back to “circa 1985”, so it may have been an attempt to duplicate the success of The World’s Greatest Superheroes, a strip starring Superman and other JLA members which ran in newspapers across the U.S. from 1978 to 1985.  Sadly, the Hex strip was never picked up by the syndicates, but like the failed attempt at a Jonah Hex movie in the mid-1970s, it speaks to how popular the bounty hunter was at the time that DC tried to launch such a project.

One month after we learned of Jonah’s eventual demise, JH#19 hit the stands, with Vicente Alcazar once again at the drawing table, and Jonah looking hale and hearty as he plays bodyguard for the Duke of Zarkania, who he later discovers ain’t really worth guarding.  Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed a few changes, however, the majority of which were on the cover.  Firstly, cover artist Luis Dominguez had begun adding a “7” to Hex’s coat collar, just as Alcazar had been since JH#13 (Dominguez also included it in the mini-poster he drew for the Jonah Hex Spectacular), and secondly, the price had dropped down to 40 cents, while the story inside was now only 23 pages.  After a mere three months, DC had gone from “Explosion” to “Implosion” thanks to something beyond everyone’s control.  For a two-week period in January-February 1978, the Eastern United States was slammed by a pair of massive blizzards, causing life to grind to a halt.  In New York -- the headquarters for both DC and Marvel -- planes couldn’t land, meaning finished comics pages sent in the mail by artists living in the Philippines couldn’t be delivered, and the trucks filled with comics that had managed to be printed under these conditions couldn’t head out to distributors due to an average two feet of snow burying the roads.

In May of that year, right before the DC Explosion rollout began, those dismal sales numbers from the previous winter fell into the hands of the execs at Warner Bros., and they were not happy.  “When Warners saw those numbers, they decided to take a look at the overall numbers for the last few years,” Mike Gold said in an interview that ran in Mediascene #31 (May-June 1978).  “They finally came to notice the trend we’ve always been aware of: Over a ten-year period, DC has been selling fewer individual books, and compensating by putting out more titles; and that sales vary with the seasons.”  Add in the massive amount of overhead carried by DC, plus a distribution system that boiled down to flooding the newsstands with product in order to retain a foothold in that limited space (comic shops were still few and far between at the time), and Warners decided to put the kibosh on Jeanette Kahn’s new publishing initiative just as it was hitting the shelves.  Multiple titles, both old and new, were cancelled, and those that survived saw their page-counts trimmed.  Reprint titles like Western Classics were an easy cut, while “The Deserter” almost had an 11th-hour reprieve as its own title when Showcase was cancelled, only to get the axe before the first issue could be released (in order to preserve copyrights, many of these “Imploded” stories and covers were printed in the extremely-rare and never-distributed Cancelled Comic Cavalcade, with “The Deserter” in issue #1 and the unused Western Classics covers in #2).  The blizzard affected Marvel’s bottom line as well, but they deleted titles in a much-quieter fashion, with their two remaining Western titles -- Kid Colt Outlaw and Rawhide Kid -- getting put out to pasture as 1979 began.

Though Jonah Hex and Weird Western Tales survived the Implosion, they didn’t do so unscathed.  The backups in WWT were scrapped beginning with issue #50, derailing Cinnamon’s comic-book career just as it was beginning, but instead of assigning those extra pages to Scalphunter, his tales remained 17 pages long for the remainder of the title’s run, thereby charging readers 40 cents for the exact same amount of story that had only cost 35 cents pre-Explosion.  Jonah fared a little better, as his page-count was still higher than it had been, but one has to wonder how many stories were already in the can prior to the Implosion which then had to be trimmed by 2 pages to fit the new mandate.  At the very least, JH#19 was likely trimmed, as the Heritage Auctions website has a listing for an alternate Dominguez cover -- fully dressed and with a 50-cent price tag -- showing a completely different image than what was eventually printed.  Instead of Hex causally leaning against the doorframe and looking at a panicked Duke, who is tied to a chair with a bundle of dynamite strapped to his chest, the alternate has Hex bursting through the door to find the Duke’s cousin, Lucien, surrounded by crates of dynamite, plus a stick of the explosive jammed into Lucien’s mouth for good measure.

In JH#20, both Hex and the reader get a good shock as Jonah’s father turns up!  It’s been nearly 25 years since Woodson Hex dumped his son with the Apache, and the old man’s just as scheming as ever, this time playing the inside man on the robbery of a stagecoach carrying $250,000 in double eagles.  Jonah’s not aware of this, of course, and nearly gets killed by Pa for his trouble.  After escaping the little death-trap Pa and his cohorts set up, Jonah tracks them down and finishes them off, save for his father, who collapses for reasons unknown.  He rushes the old man to a doctor and, after many minutes of pacing in the waiting room, the doc comes out and tells Jonah that Woodson is dying of a heart attack.  The elder and younger Hex talk for a while -- probably the most civil conversation they’ve ever had -- and Pa passes on before he can tell Jonah where the money’s hid.  The doctor takes care of the funeral arrangements, and as Jonah makes ready to ride off, he asks if, deep down, Jonah really loved his father.  “Ah hated thet old man, Doc!” Jonah replies.  “Hated his guts!  But when yuh get down to it...Ah guess a man ain’t got but one Pa!”

Too bad his Pa is the type who’ll pay off a doctor to lie to his son: Woodson Hex is actually alive and well, and now $250,000 richer.  JH#21 picks up just three days later, as Woodson is spending money like water, which catches the attention of some ne’er-do-wells.  They rough him up until Woodson tells them that he’s only got “a few pocketfuls” of coins...and his son, Jonah Hex, has the rest!  The fellas then track Jonah down and try to persuade him with a crowbar, but they soon realize they’re not getting anywhere, so they decide to step it up a notch and haul Jonah out to an old sawmill, where they’re also holding Woodson.  After tying both men to the waterwheel, they set it in motion, hoping a few good dunkings will loosen the Hexes tongues.  Jonah manages to free himself and Pa, and after taking out their captors, Jonah turns his gun on Pa before he can escape on horseback.  “Y-yuh shorely wouldn’t drill yore own dear Paw, w-would yuh, Jonah boy?” Woodson stammers, one foot already in the stirrups.

“Yes, blast it!  Ah would!” Jonah responds, then demands to know where the rest of the money really is.  Seems Pa hid it in an undertaker’s parlor before those guys captured him -- more specifically, it’s in an occupied coffin due to be buried.  They race back to town, figuring on digging up the coffin once the funeral’s done, but unfortunately, the dead man’s last wishes were for his coffin to be sealed inside the played-out silver mine he’d worked in for forty years, and with one push of the detonator’s plunger, the missing money is lost for good.  Jonah and Pa part ways after that, both unsatisfied with the outcome but seeing no point in taking it out on each other.  All in all, the elder Hex comes off as almost comical in this pair of stories, and aside from lobbing insults at him, Jonah seems to want no revenge for the abuse he suffered as a child.  Perhaps now being an adult who has lived through far worse, it doesn’t seem worth the trouble.

We’re introduced to another figure from Hex’s childhood in JH#22, as we meet Pack Rat Benson, who hasn’t seen Jonah since he was “knee high to a[n] armadillo!”  Seems Benson has found himself a rich vein of gold, which he’s eager to tell Hex all about before the two of them ride off to his homestead.  Unfortunately, the conversation is overheard by the brother of a fella Hex just escorted to a hanging, giving him and his two other siblings/gang members more than enough motivation to kill both Benson and Hex.  They ambush the duo out on the trail, and though they kill Benson immediately, they decide to break Hex’s leg and leave him to die in the desert.  The issue then alternates between the gang terrorizing Benson’s family as they’re forced to work the gold mine, and Jonah’s struggles to reach the homestead and rescue them.

The issue is notable because everyone in both the gang and the Benson family is Black, but aside from a few comments from one of the gang members, race is not the main focus of the story.  Seeing as we were approaching the end of the “socially relevant” 1970s, Fleisher could’ve inserted some proselytizing about how many, if not all, of these folks were enslaved just one decade prior (it’s not mentioned if Pack Rat Benson was a slave or freedman the last time he saw young Jonah), but no such thing occurs here.  Instead, he simply wrote all of them not too dissimilar from how he’d write any other character…which is a great improvement over the stereotypes he layered upon Blackjack Jorgis in WWT#22 five years earlier.

With JH#23, drawn by Dick Ayers & Romeo Tanghal, we get to witness a significant moment in Hex history, though we won’t realize it for nearly two years.  The story centers around a group of Chinese workers building a railroad spur who are suffering at the hands of their employers, to the point where they’re being gunned down in order to quell dissent in the ranks.  The elderly leader of this group tries to hire Hex to avenge the deaths, but he’s only able to pay 30 dollars, so Jonah turns him down.  Upon leaving the bounty hunter, the elderly man is confronted in the street by three of the rail bosses.  They goad him into a one-on-one gunfight, but he’s no match for the rail boss, who guns him down easily, an event Jonah witnesses.  The cold-bloodedness of the act must’ve stirred something in him, because he then confronts the rail bosses himself, killing the trio for free just minutes after turning down 30 bucks to do the same deed.

You’d think that would be the end of the story, but we’re only halfway through, as Jonah now has to face the grief and rage of the elderly man’s daughter, Mei Ling, who watched helplessly as her father was murdered.  Blaming Hex for the situation, she beats her fists against his chest, and Jonah gives her a slap to calm her down, causing her to faint, so Jonah takes her to the hotel he’s staying at (to let her rest, mind you, not for shenanigans).  When the clerk objects to having Asians on his property, Hex threatens to throw the him off the roof, which persuades him to give Mei Ling have a room down the hall from the bounty hunter’s.  After returning to his own room, his frustration over the chain of events explodes out of him as he shatters a mirror with his fist.

What follows is a prime example of Fleisher’s “character moments trump action” rule, as the next couple of pages feature Jonah doing nothing more than talking with Mei Ling.  He not only expresses remorse over the death of her father, but Mei Ling manages to get him to open up a little about both his personal beliefs (of which he claims to have none) and the reason why he leads the violent life he does (he says “it just sorta come up on me!”).  Getting Jonah to talk about anything having to do with himself is like pulling teeth, so there must be something quite remarkable about Mei Ling for him to do so.  All this time they spend “makin’ cow eyes” at each other doesn’t go unnoticed, and the remaining rail bosses soon kidnap Mei Ling in order to get revenge on Hex.  Our hero makes short work of them, and then we get a scene that’ll bring a tear to your eye, as Jonah does his best to sputter out that he loves Mei Ling, but she believes what he truly loves is the “gentleness” that he long ago buried deep within himself and now sees reflected in Mei Ling, and that he can never truly love anyone until he can find the strength to love himself.  So she instead sends him away weeping, an act that probably adds yet another layer of scars to Jonah’s lonely heart.

After such an emotional issue, the one in JH#24 -- with both cover and interior illustrations by Luis Dominguez -- is liable to give some folks whiplash due to somewhat-comical premise.  Y’see, ol’ Jonah disguises himself as a preacher to get the drop on some owlhoots, but then he gets buried in a rockslide, which leads to a classic amnesia plot, as he comes under the mistaken belief that he really is a preacher!  His brain does unscramble by the end, of course, but allow me to take a moment and insert a bit of real-world medical knowledge into this.  There are several different forms and causes of amnesia, and though none truly resemble what we see in this here comic (i.e. you get bonked on the head and you totally forget who you are), I can point to a possible form that Jonah is suffering from here, namely dissociative amnesia.  This is not normally caused by physical injury, but instead by mental trauma and/or stress.  Therefore, it’s possible that Hex’s willingness to believe himself to be a genteel man of faith is an extreme reaction to Mei Ling’s rejection of him.  In other words, his subconscious is giving him an excuse to embrace that “gentleness” inside him that Mei Ling pointed out.  Too bad it all got undone the moment those same owlhoots he’d been chasing force “Reverend Julian” to strap on a gunbelt and face off against the three of ‘em.

Things turn serious again in Jonah Hex #25 (June 1979), with Ayers & Tanghal back to illustrate Jonah’s reunion with Nate Ashin, an ex-Confederate who’d lost an arm at Vicksburg while saving the life of a young Lieutenant Hex (see Appendix A for more details).  Seems Nate has called on Jonah to help out against the Black Hat Gang, who’ve been terrorizing the area, up to and including burning down Nate’s newspaper business in retaliation for all the negative press he’s been tossing their way.  What follows is a typical Hex story filled with gunplay, harrowing escapes, innocents dying, and the bad guy meeting a gruesome end, but it’s the final page that I want to highlight.  As her husband lays dead in their yard, Nate’s wife, Sally, confronts Jonah over his deeds.  “You’re the cause of all this!  Well, tell me, are you satisfied with what you’ve done?”  Tears streaming down her face, she jabs a finger at him and says, “The bad guys are all dead now and you can collect your reward money and get on your horse and ride off into the sunset!  But what about me?  What about my children who’ve lost their father?  What about us -- widow maker!!”

And that’s the real obstacle which Jonah Hex can never overcome: Any love he could possibly have for himself like Mei Ling wants him to cannot survive the fact that, wherever he goes, lives are destroyed, and he’s usually the one responsible.

Though Jonah’s tales (for the most part) remained firmly ensconced in the 1870s, time would keep marching on for the rest of the world.  The decade the birthed Jonah Hex was rapidly coming to an end, as was the trend that inspired him.  By this time next year, one Western title will begin to breathe its last, and another will have to make room for some new friends.

<< Part 3 | Index | Part 5 >>
Appendix A  |  Appendix B