The Jonah Hex movie, starring Josh Brolin and Megan Fox, opens this Friday. Here’s a quick primer on Hex’s long, twisted history in comic books.
February 1972: Jonah Hex makes his first appearance in All-Star Western #10, in a story by writer John Albano and artist Tony DeZuniga. All that’s revealed about him is that he’s a badass bounty hunter in the post-Civil War Old West who’s got a Confederate soldier’s gray jacket and a hideously scarred face. Even though the latter is revealed seven pages into that first story, the early stories usually take pains not to show the right side of Hex’s face very much.
In a reversal of the way this stuff usually works, Albano writes most of the first dozen or so Hex stories, then never returns to the character; DeZuniga has continued to work intermittently on Jonah Hex projects ever since. With #12, All-Star Western changes its title to Weird Western Tales.
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May 1974: Michael Fleisher, the writer who will come to define Hex, takes over Weird Western Tales and starts hinting at Jonah’s complicated, tragic backstory. (His early Hex stories, as well as Albano’s, are collected in the very readable black-and-white Showcase Presents Jonah Hex Volume 1. A second volume was scheduled a few years ago, then cancelled, reportedly due to contractual problems.) It’s in this period that the series gains its classic tagline: “He was a hero to some, a villain to others, and wherever he rode people spoke his name in whispers. He had no friends, this Jonah Hex, but he did have two companions: one was death itself… the other, the acrid smell of gunsmoke.”
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March 1977: Following Weird Western Tales #38, Jonah Hex gets his own series, written by Fleisher and drawn, for its first five issues, by the remarkable Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez. It goes monthly with its fourth issue. In Jonah Hex #8, Fleisher and artist Ernie Chan finally reveal the story of how Hex’s face got scarred. (The recent collection Welcome to Paradise includes two early Garcia-Lopez-drawn issues, as well as color versions of some of the same material that’s in Showcase.) The series is popular enough that there are also editions of it in Sweden and Brazil, among others.