Day 26
Today we visit with Susan Hillwig as she presents us with an epic of an article, The Illustrated History of Jonah Hex. Buckle up folks, this is a fascinating look at one of the weirdest western to ever hit the newsstands.
(Don't forget you can click on the images to make them larger. And trust us, you are gonna wanna see these pics.)
Introduction
In the world of comics, Jonah Hex has always been an
oddity. The Western genre he usually
inhabits is constantly declared to be “dead”, yet he’s had his own title in
every decade since his creation. His
sales figures have always been notoriously low, seemingly an indicator that no
one cares for the character, yet whenever there’s a mention of the Old West
within a DC comic book, he’s there more often than not, sometimes as the sole
representative of the entire era. And at
a time when the trend is leaning towards updating or streamlining classic
characters to make them more appealing to a modern audience, Jonah Hex
unabashedly remains rooted in the 19th Century, and worse yet, he wears a
uniform that is viewed by many as racist.
He’s a surly, murderous drunkard with a nightmarish visage, attributes
that seem to go against every notion of mass-market appeal and longevity, yet
here he is, four decades later, still sitting pretty in a world full of capes. In fact, with the release of All-Star Western #28 on February 26,
2014, Jimmy Palmiotti & Justin Gray have managed to add another 100 tales (and
counting) over the past eight-and-a-half years to the bounty hunter’s legacy. And they’re not even the first Jonah Hex
writers to reach that milestone: Michael Fleisher penned 126 Hex tales over a
thirteen-year period, one of the longest runs for a writer on a
non-creator-owned comic. What is it
about the character that has enabled him to achieve the 100-issue mark twice with two different sets of
writers? It states plainly in his
tagline, “He had no friends, this Jonah Hex...”, but somehow, someway, he
manages to inspire a fierce loyalty in both his fans and creative teams.
What follows here are the first two installments of a kind
of unauthorized biography for Jonah Hex, focusing on the stand-out moments in
his life, both on the page and behind the scenes. This portion covers the entirety of his
five-year run in All-Star/Weird Western
Tales, and gives you a glimpse of many notable firsts, as well as some
lasts and what-might-have-beens. You’ll
learn the names of those who had a hand in his creation, as well as those who
helped him live as long as he has without forgetting where he came from. You’ll also see things that are probably best
forgotten, but I’m going to drag them out into the light one last time, because
sometimes it’s good to remember the mistakes we’ve made. It’s what makes us human, and as you’ll find
out, Jonah Hex is one of the most human fictional characters out there.
1972-1974: Birth of a Bounty Hunter
“Cold-blooded killer,
vicious, an unmerciful hellion without feeling, without conscience -- a man
consumed by hate, a man who boded evil...that was Cody Corbert -- better known as...THE COBRA -- and twice as deadly!”
This was almost the introduction to the lead feature in All-Star Western (vol. 3) #10, dated
Feb./March 1972. Luckily for Western
fans and the world in general, writer John Albano crossed out all that “Cobra”
nonsense (the first name of “Cody” is pure guess on my part, going by what
little I can see of the original word) and wrote “Jonah Hex” in its place. It’s just the first in a series of decisions
that would shape the scar-faced bounty hunter into a character that would hang
around the DC Universe for years to come.
Jonah’s life started with a conversation between Albano and
artist Tony DeZuniga regarding the way Westerns were represented in comics
(which, at the time, were dominated by clean-cut Roy Rogers/Lone Ranger types)
versus the Clint Eastwood spaghetti Westerns that had become popular in the
mid-1960s and were now reshaping the genre on the movie screen. They both wanted to bring that same level of
gritty realism to comics. As DeZuniga
told Michael Browning in Back Issue
#12 (Oct. 2005), “John Albano, when we talked together, he was telling me,
‘Hey, Tony, let’s get away from like the Rawhide Kid and all those Western
super-heroes because, you know, they’re shooting the guns out of the hands of
the bad guys and all that.’ And I said,
‘I agree.’... Jonah Hex is an anti-hero, like John was telling me. Even the towns in those days, they weren’t
all asphalt roads. They were dirt
roads. The cowboys really dressed
really, really rugged -- I would say filthy and dirty -- and I liked doing it
that way.”
With the direction of their project quickly decided upon, a
character had to be made that best fit with their newfangled ideas. As Albano worked on the script, DeZuniga
submitted a few sketches of what this “Jonah Hex” fella should look like, with
the one of a man with a hideous scar dominating the right side of his face
being the most favored, though Albano questioned why the character was wearing
a Confederate coat and hat. As DeZuniga
explains, “I said he was a Johnny Reb who was blown up by a cannonball. I said, ‘He’s a comic book character and
nothing’s impossible.’ But they said
okay and they really liked the concept of that face.” He has remarked elsewhere that the idea for
the single flap of skin connecting Jonah’s upper and lower jaw came from
anatomy illustrations showing the underlying musculature of the face. There was one other element added at the
request of Carmine Infantino, who was head publisher for DC at the time: he
wanted Hex to be bulky, “like the Incredible Hulk.” Though this idea was slowly phased out of
Hex’s design over his first few stories, it’s most obvious in the promo ad that
ran in some DC titles a month before his debut:
An interesting side note: in addition to writing, Albano
worked as a cartoonist, and the very first Jonah Hex script was actually a
hand-drawn affair, complete with panel layouts and dialogue balloons. It currently resides in the collection of
aforementioned Michael Browning, and I took the liberty of reproducing the
first page of it here, next to the published version by DeZuniga (who followed
Albano’s layouts almost to the letter):
It’s thanks to these surviving pages that we know of Jonah’s
short-lived “Cobra” alias, as well as a bit of narration that didn’t make it
into the first story:
“That was Jonah the
gunfighter, but what about Jonah the man?
Was he really a wild, immoral, and incorrigible savage who had best be
kept forever isolated from civilized human beings...?”
Though it never made it to print, that question pretty much
forms the basis of every Jonah Hex story to come. Albano and DeZuniga (and all the creators who
will follow them) constantly put Jonah in situations where he can be an
“incorrigible savage” one minute and a rather tender-hearted sort the
next. His debut story gives us a mix of
both: as seen above, the first shot is of him dragging two dead bodies behind
his horse as if out for a Sunday stroll, and all throughout, we witness him
cutting down owlhoots left and right like a grey-clad angel of death. Yet in the middle of the tale, Albano and DeZuniga
use up half a page to show Jonah knocking a man out cold for whipping a horse
-- a pure character moment, with no relation to the overall story -- and at the
end, Jonah uses nearly all the reward money he earned to pay off the back taxes
owed on a widowed mother’s farm. Unaware
of this, the widow later tries to blow Jonah’s head off with a rifle because
her boy has taken a shine to him, but instead of trying to smooth it over by
pointing out his altruism, he simply acts like the mean-spirited bastard
everyone assumes he is the moment they lay eyes on him. As we’ll learn in the years to come, this is
almost a knee-jerk defense he’s developed when dealing with most of humanity,
as more often than not, whenever the bounty hunter makes a new friend or we’re
introduced to an old one, that person will be dead by the end of the
issue. With a track record like that, it
must be easier to let everyone hate you than to show them otherwise and risk
watching them die.
Another aspect of Jonah Hex that will wax and wane over the
decades is also featured in his first outing, namely his implied “supernatural”
nature. With a name like Hex and a face
like a hell-spawn, it seems an unavoidable notion -- to be sure, one of the men
he hunts down in the story seems convinced that Jonah is a demon, and another
gets spooked so bad he starts shooting at tree stumps -- but other than
unerring tracking skills, Jonah never displays any unearthly powers, so you
could write the outlaws’ behavior off as a lack of nerve. Viable excuses like that constantly crop up
in Albano’s Hex stories, therefore leaving up to the reader’s imagination to
decide if Jonah is indeed “an immortal apparition” (as the intro to his tale in
WWT#19 suggests) or just a very skilled hunter of men. The closemouthed position that his creators
continually take regarding both Jonah’s past and his scars only serve to add to
the mystery.
Jonah’s preference towards animals over people comes back
into the picture when he picks up a sidekick of sorts in Weird Western Tales #12 (All-Star
Western’s new name starting with this issue). Ironjaws was a pet wolf belonging to a little
Indian princess who died at the hands of white settlers, a tragedy that riled
Jonah up to a point we had yet to witness -- years later, we would learn that
he has very personal reasons for his animosity towards anyone who hurts an
innocent child.
Swearing that he’d look after the animal, Ironjaws tagged
along with the bounty hunter until WWT#14, which also marks a slight change in
Jonah’s appearance. The story begins
with Ironjaws suffering from a rattlesnake bite, and after Jonah leaves the
ailing wolf in a doctor’s care, he’s ambushed by a few outlaws out for
revenge. They haul him out to the
desert, strip him down to his blue jeans, then tie him up to die under the
blazing sun. Ironjaws somehow makes its
way out to the desert to chew away the ropes binding Jonah before dying from a
combination of snakebite and exhaustion.
Outraged, Jonah stalks back to town and demands the doctor give him some
clothes and a gun so he can go and kill the skunks responsible. When he leaves the office, Jonah has
inexplicably acquired a new Confederate coat (maybe the doc just happened to
have one laying around?) but the rest of his outfit is brand new: the gun
holster rig, which has been left-handed since his debut, now rests on his right
hip with a second gun tucked beneath his belt, and he now wears brown cuffed
boots with rawhide stitching. These
features will be part of his standard look for years to come. Luckily, he won’t grow so attached to the other
item he wears for the first time here: a blue-black hat with a tiger-striped
band, like he’s some sort of crazy cowboy pimp.
DeZuniga must’ve wised up to the fact that this looks rather silly on
him, and by WWT#20, he’s back to his old officer’s hat. This ain’t the last we’ve seen of Jonah’s
pimp hat, though, so stay tuned.
Just before his change in attire, Jonah took part in an odd
little adventure which wouldn’t see the light of day for another four years,
when it was finally printed in The
Amazing World of DC Comics #13 (dated Oct. 1976). In the early ‘70s, as editor Paul Levitz
explained in his preface to the piece, the company was in the process of
cooking up some kind of humor/horror mag for their line of “Weird” comics (in
addition to the newly-dubbed Weird
Western, DC was already cranking out Weird
Adventure Comics, Weird War Tales,
and Weird Worlds). By 1972, they were calling this
still-unpublished title Zany, and one
of its features was to be parodies of their own DC characters. Sadly (or is that happily?), by the time the
magazine (now and forever known as Plop!)
hit the stands in September/October 1973, that particular idea had been
scrapped, but not before Albano and DeZuniga finished a four-page Jonah Hex
story. The result is something you have
to see to believe, and I chalk it up to Albano’s cartoonist background that he
so effectively knocks the piss out of his own character without being mean:
Though absent from WWT #15 (El Diablo takes the lead for
this issue), Jonah gets back in the saddle with WWT#16, and by WWT#18, not only
has Jonah taken over the front cover art, his name is also printed bigger than
the name of the magazine (rather like how Batman’s name usually overshadows
Detective Comics). There’s no doubt now
that Hex’s departure from the norm when it comes to Western comics heroes has
won out. More landmarks will follow,
like the first dated story in WWT#19 (which takes place in August 1867), and WWT#20
features a story by Arnold Drake, the first person besides John Albano to write
a Hex tale. Drake also gives us a novel
concept by introducing an old flame of Jonah’s by the name of “Widow” Lacey
(she ain’t no widow, folks, she just calls herself that to sound respectable)
and she actually lives until the end of the issue! Unfortunately, Drake only does the one tale,
and we never get to see this particular soiled dove again. Albano comes back to the writer’s desk for
WWT#21, but this will be the very last time he does so: after penning only ten
stories, he decides to leave Jonah behind.
Before he moves on, though, he bestows upon us a glimpse of Hex before
he got his scars, courtesy of a hallucination brought on by a bad head wound:
As I noted earlier, both Albano and DeZuniga preferred to
leave the origin of Jonah’s scars a mystery (the “blown up by a cannonball”
notion never making it into any story), so this is first time they even
acknowledge that Jonah wasn’t just born ugly.
Overall, it’s a fine story for creator and creation to part ways on, and
for a brief while, it was nearly the last one: despite solicits on the last
page saying otherwise, Weird Western
Tales was cancelled after #21 (dated Jan./Feb. 1974), due to a nationwide
paper shortage -- considering its bimonthly status and the old adage of “nobody
reads Westerns,” DC must have thought it a small enough book to sacrifice. This marks the first time Jonah got the axe,
and the book’s return four months later would mark his first resurrection. Coincidentally, this also heralds the entry
of a new writer, one who would make more than a few marks of his own upon the
character: Michael Fleisher.
1974-1977: Losses and Gains
“I begged Joe Orlando to let me write the series,” Michael
Fleisher told reporter Mike Browning in Back
Issue #42 (Aug. 2010). Orlando, who
edited Jonah’s stories in Weird Western
Tales, had worked quite a bit with Fleisher already, so this wasn’t exactly
a call out of the blue. Nor was Fleisher
one who needed to beg for work: he’d already done a series of Spectre tales for
DC’s Adventure Comics, as well as
three volumes of The Encyclopedia of
Comic Book Heroes (which, for their time, were so exhaustively researched
that they’re still being published today).
But when he found out that creator John Albano was leaving Hex behind,
Fleisher was “very eager” to fill his dusty cowboy boots. “I read the Albano issues and the idea of the
character was somehow exciting for me, and when Albano dropped out of it I was
overjoyed. There was something about it
that struck home for me, and I wanted to do it very much.” Having grown up on a steady diet of Saturday
matinee Westerns, Fleisher more than familiar with the genre, and was just as
adamant as Albano and DeZuniga that Jonah Hex wouldn’t be a squeaky-clean
gunslinger, because “the idea that you’re facing someone with a gun and you
sort of have a moral code that prohibits you from actually hitting them with
bullets is just so stupid. Nobody would
do that. I liked it that Jonah Hex was
serious.” That seriousness showed in
Fleisher’s first issue, Weird Western
Tales #22 (dated May/June 1974), as the bodies are falling left and right
throughout (and not always due to Jonah’s gunplay).
Before we go any further, we should note the contributions
of Fleisher’s friend, artist Russell Carley, who is listed in WWT#22 as “art
continuity” (though DeZuniga is doing the actual art), then as “script
continuity” all the way up to WWT#26, after which his name disappears from Hex
lore. Fleisher explained in an interview
with The Comics Journal that “when I first began to write
comics regularly, I really had no experience in coming up with the plots for
example, or in breaking down the stories.
Those were both intimidating things for me to do. So Russell and I would get together and we
would work out a plot together. We'd sit
together on a Saturday afternoon and we would throw ideas back and forth and we
would produce a plot. And when I'd
gotten the plot okayed, Russell would take the plot and he would make a
breakdown of it -- that is, he would take sheets of paper and divide them into
panels, and he would describe in each panel, very briefly, what was to take
place, and then he would give me these pieces of paper and I would write the
script. When we started out we wanted to
say, ‘Story by Michael Fleisher and Russell Carley,’ but Joe Orlando felt that
we should distinguish between what he did and what I did...there was no
standard title in comics for what Russell was doing, so we made up a term.”
The process Fleisher described sounds like a variation on
“the Marvel method”, as well as bearing a strong resemblance to what John
Albano himself did with the first Jonah Hex script. No matter how they arrived at the finished
product, the transition from Albano to Fleisher is nearly seamless: Jonah’s
just as coarse as ever when dealing with “civilized” folk, and the touches of
deadpan humor that peeked through in previous Jonah Hex stories are evident
here as well, such as when an illiterate bumpkin asks Hex for his autograph,
and he signs the paper “Buffalo Bill”.
The only sour note is an unfortunate bit of stereotyping on the part of
the main bad guy, a huge African-American named Blackjack Jorgis, who
repeatedly talks about how much he likes “watermelly”. But what’s most notable about Fleisher’s
debut is what he introduces to Jonah’s world in general: continuity. Aside from the “Ironjaws Trilogy” of
WWT#12-14, all Hex stories up to this point have been interchangeable, with no
need to read them in a specific order, nor has there been much reference to his
life before he became a bounty hunter, aside from the occasional acquaintance
who’d turn up only to die by the end of the story (which also occurs here, the
victim in question being a sheriff named Hank Brewster). From this issue onward, however, we’ll begin
to see ever larger swatches of Jonah’s past, and the seeds that are sown
throughout these 20 pages will bear fruit for decades to come.
The glimpses into Jonah’s past begin when he hitches a ride
on a passing stagecoach, and one of the other passengers (who bears striking
resemblance to Lee Van Cleef) recognizes him from an old photograph he’s
carrying, which shows a much younger an unscarred Jonah standing in front of a
Confederate flag. Later on, the man meets
up with a group of former Rebs and tells them about his encounter, who declare
that they would’ve won the Civil War “if’n it hadn’t’a been fer vicious men the
likes’a Jonah Hex!” These men ride out
and end up saving Hex from Blackjack’s gang...only to declare that they’re
going to hang him themselves! Jonah
manages to give them the slip for a while, but by the end of the issue, there’s
a nasty four-on-one shootout, and Jonah is nearly killed by an ex-Reb who decides
to speechify a bit before finishing him off:
Jonah’s a traitor?
What the heck did he do? We won’t
get any answers here, as Hex promptly shoots the Reb and shuts him up. On the very last page, however, we witness a
scene between a colored servant and a man holding an eagle-headed cane -- we
never see the man, but it appears that he wants Hex to be dead just as badly as
those Confederates did. In addition to
the “traitor” subplot, we get reference to both Jonah’s disfigurement and his
father, courtesy of an offhand exchange between Hex and Brewster. We get no real details about either (Jonah
gruffly cuts off Brewster’s inquiries the moment he makes them), but still,
after 12 issues, this is the most we’ve ever learned about Jonah Hex, and we
get it all in one gulp. Overall, I daresay
what Fleisher does here is the antithesis of what Albano ever had planned for
the character, as he and DeZuniga almost seemed to pride themselves on
revealing nothing about Jonah’s past.
That may have been one of the factors behind DeZuniga’s departure after
WWT#23, the plot of which revolves around an assassination attempt of President
Grant. We also get more clues as to the
identity of the mysterious man with the eagle-headed cane: apparently, he’s an
important man in Washington, one of “the nation’s leading captains of industry
and commerce” (no run-of-the-mill baddies for Jonah Hex, no sir!), and whatever
it is that Jonah’s guilty of, it involved this man’s son. Suffice it to say, Jonah manages to escape
another attempt upon his life, but he later gets caught in an explosion while
foiling Grant’s assassins, and on the last page, Jonah’s essentially declared
dead! He’s not, of course (the blurb at
the bottom of the page even advertises Hex’s next adventure), but it’s an odd
note for Tony DeZuniga to go out on: “killing” your creation as you part ways
with him.
Noly Panaligan takes up the artist’s reins with WWT#24,
making him only the second interior artist to draw Jonah Hex (a few other
artists besides DeZuniga -- such as Luis Dominguez -- had already done various
covers featuring him). This story picks
up not long after the previous issue, and we learn that, while Hex may have
survived the explosion, it has rendered him temporarily blind. Don’t worry, folks, he’ll be fine by the end
of the tale. We don’t hear another peep
about the man with the eagle-headed cane or Jonah’s supposed treachery, though,
and over the next few issues, it seems like Fleisher’s forgotten all about that
subplot. Not to say that the stories aren’t
noteworthy: WWT#26 gives us a third Hex interior artist by the name of Doug
Wildey (his only time on the character), and more importantly, it’s the very
first rendition of Jonah’s now-infamous tagline, seen here in the
upper-lefthand corner:
In later years, some people will mistakenly attribute this
tagline to John Albano, but Michael Fleisher alone is responsible for
it...though he does admit to cribbing the “acrid smell of gunsmoke” portion
from (naturally) the TV show Gunsmoke. Whatever the source, the entire paragraph
sums up Jonah quite well, and it’s stayed with him ever since, his own warped
version of Superman’s “Truth, justice, and the American way,” or Spider-Man’s
“With great power comes great responsibility.”
WWT#27 focuses upon early attempts at getting women the right to vote
(which Jonah isn’t in favor of at all, but the suffragettes pay him good), and
WWT#28 is a tale based upon the true story of the Jake Hauschel gang, plus it’s
the first time we get George Moliterni on the book -- he and Noly Panaligan
will share art duties for the next few issues, each of them taking a turn on a
two-parter running through WWT#29 and 30, wherein the subplot started in #22
over a year ago finally comes to a head.
It begins with a teenager confronting Hex out in the street,
calling him a traitor and swearing that he’s going to kill Hex for letting his
father die at Fort Charlotte. The bounty
hunter blows him off, and the boy tries to shoot him, but only succeeds in
spooking Hex’s horse, which promptly whacks Jonah in the head with one of its
hooves and knocks him unconscious. We
are then witness to a device that Fleisher will use many times over the next
ten years: the flashback to Jonah’s past.
We learn how Jonah was friends back in1861 with a fellow Confederate
named Jeb Turnbull, whose father, a wealthy Virginia plantation owner, is the
man with the eagle-headed cane that’s been trying to kill Jonah over a decade
later! We also learn that Jonah is more
of a “state’s rights” kind of Reb, and after the Emancipation Proclamation is
passed, he makes a decision:
Jonah travels alone to Fort Charlotte and, since he feels it’s “a point of honor
tuh surrender tuh th’ top man”, sneaks into the C.O.’s quarters to do so! We then find out that Hex is a lieutenant
with the 4th Cavalry, and while he’s willing to turn himself in, he won’t
betray the rest of his unit and give their location. Unfortunately for him, the Yankees figure out
for themselves where the Rebs are, and after they’re all captured, the C.O.
“thanks” Hex for his help in front of all his friends. This and the massacre that soon follows as
the Confederates try to escape the fort is the reason why the elder Turnbull
and so many others want Jonah Hex dead: his desire to no longer be a part of
the War inadvertently led to the deaths of nearly three dozen people, including
Jeb Turnbull. After he wakes up from
this issue-long flashback, Jonah finds the vengeful teenager again and lets him
have his “showdown”, even going so far as to fall over in the street and feign
death so the boy can have some closure.
But what of Jonah himself? An
incident such as the Fort Charlotte Massacre is sure to weigh upon a man’s
conscience, and as the issue closes, the reader can be sure of one thing: under
Fleisher’s tenure, there will be little allusion to Jonah Hex as some
supernatural creature. He’s a human
being, with a soul scarred worse than his face.
The next issue has Jonah traveling to Virginia, ready to set things
right between himself, Turnbull, and the few soldiers who survived the massacre
twelve years earlier. What he gets is
more hate, more death threats, and one of the best splash pages ever:
To top it all off, Jonah is ambushed and forced to sit through
a mock trial, with Turnbull as judge and his former friends as jury, who
quickly find him guilty as sin. Deciding
to execute him by firing squad at dawn, they lock Hex up in a shed for the
night, but he soon escapes, only to be confronted by Turnbull’s colored
servant, Solomon, who’s holding a shotgun on him. Lucky for Hex, Solomon is a kind-hearted
sort, and actually listens to Jonah’s explanation of what really happened at
Fort Charlotte. Jonah manages to sway
Solomon, but when Turnbull shows up, he won’t listen to anyone, and as he
charges Jonah in a fit of rage, the bounty hunter (who refuses to fight
Turnbull) steps out of the way, causing Turnbull to accidentally impale himself
on an upturned pitchfork. The reader
(and possibly Jonah himself) is led to presume that Turnbull is dead, but in a
few years, we’ll learn different.
After this high-point of a storyline, Jonah’s remaining
appearances in Weird Western go back
to basics, with no more massive reveals regarding his past. Instead, we get tales like WWT#31, wherein
he’s tricked by a dying friend into fighting him for the amusement of the
townsfolk, and a two-parter in WWT#32 and 33 has Jonah trying to rescue a
businessman’s daughter, who was kidnapped by an Indian named Joe Bigfoot
looking for vengeance against the businessman for poisoning his tribe. The latter story stands out not for its plot,
but for the artist: Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, who was still getting his feet wet
at DC in 1976, having come to New York barely two years before with the phone
number of Hex cover artist Luis Dominguez in his pocket (the two men had never
met, but with both of them being from Argentina, they had some mutual
friends). Dominguez showed him the ins
and outs of the city, as well as introducing him around the halls at DC Comics
-- on his first day there, Garcia-Lopez met editor Joe Orlando, who would soon
come to call the artist his “secret weapon”.
After numerous inking jobs, he was given a few Jonah Hex scripts to do,
and the result is drastically different from every other Hex story up until
then. Whereas Tony DeZuniga started the
mandate of “filthy and dirty” when it came to Hex, and both Noly Panaligan and
George Moliterni carried on in that same fashion when they took over, Garcia-Lopez’s
rendition is incredibly vibrant, with crisp lines and dynamic poses in nearly
every frame. And instead of the constant
shadows the other three artists use, it seems like he’s gone to great pains to
highlight every detail possible, both in terms to character expressions and
backgrounds. In short, he treats Jonah
Hex in the same manner as he would DC’s spandex-wearing crowd, and the result
is striking:
Moliterni is back on the job for the single-issue stories in
WWT#34 and 35, and for a
blink-and-you-miss-it moment, Weird
Western Tales is cancelled once again!
My notation of it here is mere formality, though, as the book was
revived so quickly there was no interruption in its bi-monthly schedule. When it returns with WWT#36, Jonah faces Joe
Bigfoot once more, a yarn handled by the triple-threat art team of Bill Draut,
Oscar Novelle, and Luis Dominguez (his first time on interiors, but certainly
not his last). Something else returns in
WWT#37: Jonah’s pimp hat, last seen in WWT#19!
It makes little sense for it to suddenly turn up after three years, but
there are two possible explanations for it, the first being that the artists --
Rich Buckler and Frank Springer -- may have used outdated materials when
looking for references to Jonah’s look.
The second possibility is that the story might have been among the first
written by Michael Fleisher when he got the gig (which was rather close to the
pimp hat’s last appearance) and had simply been held in reserve for all those
years in case they needed a fill-in. The
latter seems most likely, especially considering that the artwork is below the
quality we’re used to on the title, and a real shock if you’ve ever seen how
good the art from either Buckler or Springer usually looks:
The story itself is
an interesting take on Jonah’s normally-gruff attitude, as he takes a young man
under his wing and trains him in the ways of the gun in order for the young man
to avenge the death of his parents. It
turns out to be set-up of sorts in the end, but keep that plotline in mind, as
a variation of it will resurface in Jonah’s life a few decades later with much
different results.
As 1976 comes to a close, the news breaks that Weird Western Tales #38 (dated Jan./Feb.
1977) will be Jonah Hex’s last issue, and its headlining slot taken over by a
new character called “The Savage” (soon to be known as Scalphunter). But fear not, fans, for in two short months,
Jonah will be back on the stands in his very own self-titled magazine, courtesy
of the “DC Explosion” (which would turn into the infamous “DC Implosion” by the
beginning of ‘78). Yes indeed, Jonah Hex
has finally hit the big time, with even bigger adventures on the horizon.
To read more
installments of “An Illustrated History of Jonah Hex”, please go to http://susanhillwig.blogspot.com/p/an-illustrated-history-of-jonah-hex.html for a complete index.
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Susan Hillwig is
a Michigan-based writer with a predilection for 19th-Century adventure. Her debut novel, Swords & Sixguns: An Outlaw’s Tale, will released soon by
Permuted Press, but in the meantime, you can keep up with her on “One Fangirl’s
Opinion”, her semi-regular blog.
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