Cover Cavalcade

 

May is DRAMATIC WILD WEST ENTRANCES month!

This 1978 cover is by Rich Buckler

Cover Cavalcade

 

Another great Luis Dominguez cover for Jonah Hex. This one is from 1980.

Kicking an Old Woman Off a Cliff

Jonah Hex is, without question, a brutal guy. But he is one of the good guys. Despite his casual attitude towards gunning down outlaws, he does usually shoot in self-defense after giving his opponents a chance to surrender. And, though he would probably never admit this to himself, he is a protector of the weak and innocent, especially women and children.

So, as violent as Jonah often is, we can trust that he would never do something especially cruel. Such as... oh, I don't know... kick a crippled old woman off a cliff.

Wait a minute. He actually did that once, didn't he?

Weird Western Tales #17 (April-May 1973) begins with a gang of outlaws robbing a bank, then blowing up that bank with dynamite, then killing the sheriff while making their getaway. Jonah is in town, but does not at first pursue the outlaws. When called to task for not interfering, he rudely but fairly wonders why the townspeople didn't take action themselves. After all, its their town.

A possibly violent confrontation is defused by the arrival of Judge Hatchet, a cigar smoking, wheelchair-bound old woman who runs the territory with an iron hand. She owned the bank and hires Jonah to pursue the outlaws.

With his usual combination of fast draw and clever tactics, he soon has the gang leader prisoner while killing remaining two outlaws. He takes his prisoner to Judge Hatchet, who has the villain strung up on a nearby tree within moments.

 Well, the Wild West was a brutal place and the outlaw leader was indeed a mass murderer. So far, so good. But Jonah soon learns that Judge Hatchet runs her territory in a rather dictatorial fashion. This includes having her three sons burn out and kill anyone who refuses to sell their crops or cattle to her at a very low price.

Jonah happens by a burning home and rescues a little girl from the flames. But he's too late to help the girl's father.

 When he learns the dead man's son has gone after Judge Hatchet, he immediately sets out to save the boy.

Take note that Jonah is a bounty hunter and didn't chase down the bank robbers until he was paid to do so. But now, despite his reputation as a cold-blooded and mercenary-minded killer, he is now acting on his own. He risked his life to save the little girl. He tried--however awkwardly--to give her some comfort when she asked about her dead pa. And now, he's rushing to save a boy he had met for only a few minutes.

Jonah Hex is one of the good guys. It would annoy him to no end if you told him this, but he clearly is.

He finds Judge Hatcher about to hang the boy, who had managed to shoot one of her three sons. Jonah objects to this by killing the remaining two sons. And when Judge Hatchet attempts to shoot him, he gives her wheelchair a nice, firm kick.

It's clear from Jonah's reaction that he didn't expect what happens next. When the the wheelchair starts to role back towards the edge of a cliff, he runs after it, trying to save the Judge. She is a totally evil woman and clearly deserves what is about to happen to her.

Heck, if the Judge had been a healthy man, Jonah would have let him fall without a qualm. He does not always object to vigilante justice.

But however evil Judge Hatchet may be, she's an old lady in a wheelchair. Jonah tries to save her, but can't quite get to her in time. Her clothing catches on a branch, snapping her neck.

Written by John Albano and beautifully drawn by Tony DeZuniga, "The Hangin' Woman" is an excellent Jonah Hex tale, full of both the violence and the reluctant compassion that defines that character.

Next week, it's back to Africa as Tarzan teams up with an African Little John and a barely tame lion to rescue his wife and son.

The Last Bounty Hunter

A downer ending for a character can often be an unsatisfying and cop-out way to bring that character's story to a conclusion. But there are times when a tragic or sad ending is appropriate.

Jonah Hex was always a cynical and violent guy, so when DC Comics used DC Special #16 (Fall 1978) to bring his story to a conclusion, a cynical and violent ending was indeed appropriate. It is one of my favorite Jonah Hex stories.

Written by Mike Fleisher and drawn by Russ Heath, "The Last Bounty Hunter" is set in 1904. Jonah is now 66 years old. The world is changing--automobiles are replacing horses and there's a story that someone back East built a working airplane (though Jonah is convinced nothing will come of that). But Jonah is still working as a bounty hunter. He might be a tad slower with a gun than he used to be and he needs eye glasses, but he's still bringing in bad guys---usually dead rather than alive.

As the last active bounty hunter, Jonah is pretty well-known. In fact, a former teacher named Michael Wheeler has come west to find Jonah and write his biography. Jonah is amused by Wheeler's enthusiasm and brings him to his cabin, where Tall Bird--Jonah's common-law Indian wife--is keeping house.

I like the character of Wheeler. There might have been a temptation to make him a little bit of a jerk who wants to write sensationalized dime novel versions of Hex's adventures. But, since Jonah lives in a Comic Book Universe, his adventures are already a bit sensational.


Wheeler is a likable guy and is trying to write an accurate biography. This story appeared a few years before a later series that had Jonah Hex transported into a post-apocalyptic future. I wonder how Wheeler would have reacted to those stories. "Oh, come on, Jonah! I want to write the truth! Stop pulling my leg!"

Wheeler is also dependable and has guts. When vengeful outlaws kidnap Tall Bird, Wheeler takes part in the rescue.

But Jonah's failing eye sight allows one of the outlaws to escape. Later, this guy ambushes Jonah in a saloon and kills him.

It's an abrupt death for Jonah. You would expect him to go down with guns blazing, surrounded by a heap of corpses. But the script and art are excellent and, though tragic, the ending feels right for both this specific story and for Jonah Hex in his entirety.

And things continue to get even more tragic. A circus owner who earlier tried to hire Hex as a sharp shooter arrives to steal the body. Wheeler ends up getting murdered. Tall Bird also apparently dies, though she turns up alive as a old lady in a 1987 issue of Secret Origins. (Though that was set after the '86 reboot of the DC universe, so might be a retcon.)

But we're still not done with tragic irony. The circus guy is killed in a robbery and the thieves take Jonah's corpse (now dressed in his sharpshooter outfit) to a fence. After being stashed away for years, Jonah ends up being used at as a display in a Wild West-themed amusement park.

Mike Fleisher had a tendency to slant his writing towards the dark side. Here, it fits. As sad as it all is, it has the right vibe for the world Jonah Hex carved out for himself during life. Sometimes, tragic irony is just what a particular story needs.

In the mid-1980s, Jonah got a series in which he was thrown forward in time to a post-apocalyptic future. The last book in that series, from 1987, had him seeing his own stuffed corpse and taking comfort that one day he would find his way home. I'm in the camp that thinks that series was a misstep--Jonah belongs in the Old West and doesn't really work as a character outside of it. Though the few stories I've read from that series were all good, they never felt completely right. (And its only fair to concede that I haven't read more than a couple of issues from the futuristic series, so my opinion should be taken with a grain of salt.)

But, if you look back at "The Last Bounty Hunter" with the knowledge that Jonah had been in the future, it adds an interesting slant to it. It means when the circus owner tried to hire Jonah and showed him the sharpshooter outfit, Jonah would have recognized it as the suit his stuffed corpse was dressed in. Makes you wonder exactly what was going through his mind at that moment and adds poignancy  to the moment.

Next week, we'll return to the Hulk and find out what he finally does about having a girlfriend who has been turned into glass.

Cover Cavalcade

Jonah Hex got knocked out a lot. Maybe that's why he was always so grouchy.

A Bounty Hunter's Best Friend

Jonah Hex, the hideously scarred bounty hunter, first appeared in All-Star Weird Western #11 (March 1972). Writer John Albano and artist Tony DeZuniga obviously had Spaghetti Westerns in mind when they created the character. In fact, as I said in another post, if a Jonah Hex movie had been made in the 1970s, Clint Eastwood is the only actor who would have been right for the part.

Jonah introduced a more raw and brutal Western hero into the comic book genre. Hex was still kind-of, sort-of a good guy--he hunted legitimate crooks and he would help the innocent (though he'd often be ill-tempered about the necessity of doing so). But he did have a brutal streak--perhaps most noted in his tendency to bring his own personal brand of justice down on the heads of evil-doers.

All-Star Weird Western become Weird Western Tales beginning with the 12th issue. Jonah acquired a pet in that issue--a timber wolf named Iron Jaws. This is fortunate, because in Weird Western Tales #14, Iron Jaws saves his life twice in the course of a 12 page story.

The tale begins with Iron Jaws killing a rattler, but getting bit in the process. Hex takes the wolf to the nearest town and insists the local doctor treat him.

But he's recognized by the two outlaw brothers of a guy Hex once killed. They slug him and take him into the desert, leaving him strung out under the hot sun to die. Only another appearance by Iron Jaws, who uses the last of his waning strength to follow, saves Jonah's life. The wolf dies just as he finishes chewing through the ropes.



Hex holds the two outlaws responsible. When he tracks them down, he kills one and leaves the other to die an appropriately horrible death.

The original Jonah Hex stories were short, sharp tales with a lot of emotional bite mixed in with the overt violence. Jonah is one of those characters that is interesting to think about. As portrayed by writers such as Albano and Michael Fleisher, he's without question Made of Awesome--he's the death penalty personified and those who fall before him clearly deserve it.

On the other hand, his personal sense of justice leads him to do some pretty brutal things--such as allowing a rabies-infected man to die alone in the wilderness as vengeance for the death of an animal. The heck with all that due process and fair trail nonsense.

If Jonah existed in real life, he wouldn't be all that admirable. But perhaps that's one of the functions that fiction serves--we can get a more immediate and visceral sense that criminals are being properly punished than we do in real life. In reality, vigilante justice does not work out that well, but in a fictional universe, where the writer can make sure the bad guy really has it coming, we tend to be more accepting of it. And, since most of us are sane enough to know the difference between real and pretend, this might not such a bad thing.

I certainly know the difference between real and pretend. Jonah Hex, sadly, is pretend. Not at all like Two-Gun Kid and Phantom Rider. Those guys were real, of course.