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.
(More on Techland: A Brief, Selective Timeline of 3 1/2 Or So Legions of Super-Heroes)
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.”
(More on Techland: So You Want to Read an Iron Man Comic)
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.
Fall 1978: Fleisher and Russ Heath’s unbelievably insane story in the Jonah Hex Spectacular (technically DC Special Series #16) reveals Hex’s final fate: he’s killed with a shotgun while playing cards in 1904 (at the age of 65), and his body is stuffed, mounted and displayed in a traveling Wild West show.
(More on Techland: The Secret Comics History of “The Losers”)
April 1984: There’s nothing particularly special about Jonah Hex #83 (by Fleisher and DeZuniga). I just love this cover.
September 1985: Following Jonah Hex #92, the series is relaunched as Hex, by Fleisher and (initially) artist Mark Texeira, in which Jonah is transported to the year 2050 and becomes a post-apocalyptic warrior. Why, yes, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome was very popular that year, why do you ask? The series lasts 18 issues, ending in early 1987; in the final issue, the middle-aged future Jonah encounters his own older body’s stuffed corpse. There’s a sort of postscript in Secret Origins #21 later that year, indicating that Hex eventually returned to his own time, and that’s the last anyone hears of Jonah for a few years.
August 1993: Horror writer Joe R. Lansdale and artist Timothy Truman revive Jonah Hex for a five-issue Vertigo miniseries, Two-Gun Mojo–set once again in the Old West, but with supernatural overtones that had never really been a part of Fleisher’s series. The same team follows it with 1995’s five-issue Riders of the Worm and Such and 1999’s three-issue Shadows West. In 1996, musicians Johnny and Edgar Winter sue DC over the appearance of the parodic “Autumn Brothers” in Riders of the Worm and Such; the case is eventually decided in DC’s favor.
(More on Techland: Exclusive Preview: Jim Lee’s Art Book “Icons”)
January 2006: The current Jonah Hex series begins, written by Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti, and drawn by a Murderers’ Row of cartoonists. Artistic highlights include the return of Tony DeZuniga, for #5 and #9; Torpedo artist Jordi Bernet’s sequences (including #13-15, a different “origin” for Jonah than had been seen before); Darwyn Cooke’s stylistic experiments in #33 and #50; and J.H. Williams III’s gorgeous #35. Pretty much the entire series is available as a series of trade paperbacks.
June 2010: To commemorate the opening of the Jonah Hex movie, Hex gets his first-ever original graphic novel, No Way Back, written by Gray and Palmiotti and drawn by none other than his co-creator Tony DeZuniga.
More on Techland:
Up, Up and Away: 10 Non-Superman Supermen