DC's relatively long-running Western comic starring Jonah Hex by the writing team of Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray was changed somewhat slightly by the publisher's "New 52" refurbishing, its name being changed from Jonah Hex to All-Star Western (it was also expanded by about ten pages, with Palmiotti and Gray written back-up features starring various other super-cowboy types).
Although "All-Star Western" is the name of an old DC comic book, the title was less precise than Jonah Hex was and, given the change of setting from the Old West to late 19th Century Gotham City, not entirely accurate—the lead stories were only "Westerns" in the sense that they had a cowboy in them, otherwise they were technically Easterns. Given the general quality and perception of the 2010 film Jonah Hex, perhaps its understandable that DC would want to distance themselves as far from that particular title as possible.
So despite the new title, the tweaking of format and price tag and the new setting, Palmiotti and Gray were joined by a new artist in the form of Moritat, and Hex was joined by an unlikely partner, buddy cop style, in the form of Amadeus Arkham (who would eventually found the asylum that Batman's enemies are kept in when his writers and artists aren't using them).
It is sometime in the 1880s, and Hex has come to Gotham City in pursuit of a vicious, Jack The Ripper-like serial killer who is also of interest to young alienist Arkham, and the two form an unlikely and uneasy alliance to get to the bottom of a great deal of bizarre criminality in young Gotham: In addition to the ritualistic killings, there's a secret society, mass kidnappings and forced labor.
Like the inferior Demon Knights, this is an example of the historical superhero comic, and while the mode is that of the Western (again, defined as "containing at least one cowboy"), Palmiotti and Gray make great use of DC continuity and shared setting in order to form unexpected and unlikely connections to other DC Comics.
In addition to Arkham, a character Grant Morrison more or less created in 1989's Arkham Asylum graphic novel, other references to Morrison's work include the Crime Bible and the religion devoted to it, as written about in 52 and elsewhere by 52 writers Morrison and Greg Rucka, and the inclusion of The Miagani, an indigenous tribe of bat-worshiping Native Americans that live in caves beneath Gotham City, and a monstrous giant bat, which played small roles in Morrison's Batman run (Particularly in Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne). Nods are also made in the direction of Scott Snyder and company's Batman: Gates of Gotham series, and the prominent families of early Gotham, which Snyder would devote more time to in his Batman run (and Palmiotti and Gray would base more stories around in the future).
This book contains the first six issues of the series, accounting for about two adventures of Hex and Akrham in Gotham. Moritat's art helps place this among the strongest of the 2011 relaunched line. His storytelling is impeccable, and he fills establishing shots and long shots with rich detail.
The writing is, as it was in the 70-issue Jonah Hex series, decent genre fare; rarely if ever transcending the expectations of a dark, scarred killer cowboy hunting and fighting human monsters for money and/or justice, but the change of setting and verbal sparring partner/point-of-view character certainly give it a new coat of paint, which has a relatively restorative effect on Palmiotti and Gray's Hex.
Like all comics though, this one lives or dies by the art, and, thanks to Moritat, it's quite vital. As with Action Comics Vol. 1, the back-ups are collected and included at the back of the book. The serial format of these seems to be about eight pages of story per issue, starting with All-Star #2.
There's two full stories here. The first stars the original El Diablo, the character Lazarus Lane created in 1970 by Robert Kanigher and Gray Morrow (Modern versions of the character were attempted by Gerard Jones and Mike Parobeck in 1989 and by Jai Nitz, Phil Hester and Ande Parks in 2008). This one features Lane as the whip-wielding spirit of vengeance, pitted against a zombie horde raised by native magic. It's drawn (impeccably) by Jonah Hex vet Jordi Bernet.
The second stars The Barabary Ghost, an apparently new creation by Palmiotti, Gray and artist Phil Wil Winslade (oddly, she's the only character to get "created by" credits; not even star Jonah Hex gets a "Created by Tony DeZuniga and John Albano" credit). She's a Chinese immigrant whose large family was whittled down in a violent war of attrition with a crime boss from the old country; to avenge them she dresses like the 19th, Chinese-American version of Dark Horse's Ghost and pretends and uses fireworks as weapons. More-or-less straight genre fare, although I suppose there's always something to be said for striving for diversity in big publisher genre characters, and Winslade's art is pretty great, but his style is not as much to my liking as that of Moritat or Bernet (Make no mistake, Winslade is an excellent artist, but I have greater personal affection for the styles of the other two artists involved in this book).
Of the handful of "New 52" relaunches I've sampled in trade paperback form, this is one that made me happy I read it. It's head and shoulders above most of the others I've read, and if the writing isn't as inspired, ambitious or fun as that in Action Comics, it makes up for that deficiency by boasting better and more consistent artwork.
I've been a terrible comics fan this summer. Despite being mildly interested to rather excited about each of them, I have yet to see Kick-Ass, The Losers or Iron Man 2...and now we can add Jonah Hex to the list of Comics Movies You'd Think Someone Big Into Comics Would Maybe See On Opening Weekend.
I don't have any reason for having not seen any of those movies yet, I guess I just don't get the movies as much as I used to now that no one pays me to watch movies and then write a few hundred words about whether I thought they were any good or not. I hope to at least see Iron Man 2 on the big screen, and hopefully Jonah Hex, which I am honestly quite curious about.
There have been tell-tale signs that things weren't going so hot with Jonah Hex throughout the production, and I got a sinking feeling when I saw that first trailer, in which they revealed that Jonah Hex apparently had a super-power of some sort other than simply being Jonah Hex.
The reviews I've seen so far haven't been pretty. In fact, they've been so not pretty that Jonah's profile might actually be prettier than the reviews.
Keith Phipps' review for The Onion's AV Club, summed up the movie rather pithily: "Jonah Hex is what happens when someone promises to deliver a releasable movie by a certain date, and then doesn’t." Phipps notes the stitched-together, at-conflict-with-itself nature of the movie ("[E]very once in a while, a film limps into theaters so stitched together, it’s a wonder it doesn’t rip apart in the projector.") The AV Club, by the way, gives the movie the letter grade of "F." Marmaduke earned a D.
I'm still curious. In fact, maybe now I'm a little more curious than I was before I started seeing reviews. (Phipps' review also says the movie's only 81 minutes long. How the hell do you make an 81-minute feature film in 2010? The average comic book superhero movie is like five hours now, isn't it?)
Part of the reason for that curiosity is simply I don't understand how exactly one can screw up making a Jonah Hex movie. He's not all that complicated a character. He's a Clint Eastwood-style cowboy hero, a bounty hunter with a heart of gold (or at least a heart much less black than one might expect him to have) and a hell of a visual hook. Jonah Hex is pretty much tailor-made for a 21st century Western, since he wears the ugliness of the era right there on his face. He's a poke-in-the-eye-obvious metaphor for an exciting, adventure-filled but ultimately quite ugly period of American history. He could have quite literally been the face of the modern, post-deconstructionist western.
And I'm not talking about the character's potential or anything. That's just who and what he is, in terms of visual design. His back-story and the details of his life are awfully unimportant—and, in fact, factor in to very few of the Hex stories I've read over the years—so he's not like Batman or Spider-Man where a filmmaker needs to make a lot of decisions about how much of a specific story to tell, which of the hundreds of characters to include and how to deal with the audience's preexisting understanding of the character from all the other media examples they've seen of him. (By the way, how many cartoon appearances does Hex have? I know he was in Batman: The Animated Series and Batman: The Brave and The Bold. Wasn't there a time-traveling episode of one of the Justice League cartoons, too? Is that it? Anyway, the point is, he's not like Superman or Batman or Spider-Man or even The Hulk).
A studio could take just about any Western script they have in their script slush pile, change the protagonist to a horribly-scarred bounty hunter, and hey, what do you know, it's suddenly a Jonah Hex movie.
I realize my words have very little weight here, given that I'm going off of a couple of reviews rather than the movie itself, but it sounds to me like Jonah Hex may have gone wrong by trying to turn a character who was little more than a generic cowboy with an interesting look into superhero character, complete with super-powers and a plot involving saving the day. Hex comics were and are almost all straight Westerns, not superhero comics, so bending his home genre toward another simply because of a faulty perception that the medium of comics automatically equals superhero seems like a pretty huge, fundamental problem that it would probably be pretty difficult to recover from.
Or hell, I don't know, maybe the folks who made the movie were just incompetent. I guess I'll go see it at some point and find out for myself.
Okay, they can't all be like this. Let's just head to Rottentomatoes.com. Yeesh, as of this writing it's got a 14% positive rating. "There isn't a single reason to see this movie...Director Jimmy Hayward fails to establish a viable reason for this movie to exist..." ah, wait, here are a couple of positive reviews.
Kevin Carr says "Jonah Hex is not a good movie. Not by a long shot...But that didn't stop me from having a hell of a lot of fun watching it." And Amy Biancolli says: "I think Jonah Hex could have exceeded 80 minutes to make room for some real visual invention. And three-dimensional characters. And a plot. A plot would have been nice."
Those are the positive reviews? Because those are not very positive things to say about a film.
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The bad news, of course, is that if opening weekend box office reflects the buzz and reviews the film is getting then that means a Jonah Hex 2 isn't terribly likely, and even a "reboot" would be a long shot (It didn't take long for Punisher and Hulk reboots, of course, but I think both of those characters/franchises were perceived as a lot more exploitable than Jonah Hex).
I'm curious what, if any, impact the (presumed) failure of the film might have on DC Comics' publishing plans for the character. It's no secret that the book sells pretty abominably in the direct market. According to the monthly Beat analysis, the Jonah Hex monthly comic moved a little over 11,000 units, and that's about the neighborhood it's been hanging around in for most of the past year, with occasional fluctuations in response to particular artists (#50 was charted at just over 15K for example).
That's generally around cancellation levels for DC, but Hex has continued to hang on. There are several possible reasons for this, of course, including the fact that those numbers are pretty rock solid (it may only sell around 11K a month, but it always sells around 11K a month, instead of dropping drastically each month) and that the collected trade editions may do just fine in bookstores, regardless of how many serialized issues direct market retailers buy to sell their customers.
I suppose it's also possible that writers Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray have compromising photos of Dan DiDio (that would explain why DC's launching a Freedom Fighters ongoing monthly from the pair all of a sudden!).
Or perhaps DC's kept publishing the monthly so long in order to have plenty of Hex material to sell civilians when the movie came out. If that is the case, and the movie has now come and gone (and if it does end up being a flop and thus not birthing a healthy film franchise), then perhaps DC will pull the plug on the monthly?
That's a lot of if's, I know.
Personally, I don't read Jonah Hex, save for a random issue here and there when I like the artist involved, or in the form of a trade paperback I randomly find at a library, but I do kind of hope it sticks around. Regardless of the state of my personal pull-list, I like knowing that DC is publishing the sort of book that anyone can pick up at almost any time and get a complete, done-in-one story, and I love the idea that they're publishing a book in which a Jordi Bernet-drawn issue will be immediately followed by a Darwyn Cook-drawn issue, and that in any given month you might see J.H. Williams III, Val Semeiks, Paul Gulacy or Phil Noto under its cover (And the covers themselves have all been from a who's who of great comics talents). Whatever else it may be, Jonah Hex is a pretty great showcase of comics artists.
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As lax as I've been about getting to the movie theater this summer to see the latest crop of based-on-a-comic movies, one film I can guarantee I'll be at on opening day (barring some unforeseen tragedy) is Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World.
I was kind of worried when star Michael Cera was first announced, as I have a hard time matching him to Bryan Lee O'Malley's comics character, and the first trailer left me kind of nervous. But the second trailer, and now the new "international trailer," have dispelled all my worries and I find myself super-excited about the prospect of a live-action Scott Pilgrim movie.
Seriously, this looks so good:
If you're reading this blog at all, chances are you've already seen that trailer somewhere, as I think just about everyone who writes about comics on the Internet has either posted it or posted a link to it (You're welcome for the free marketing, people who made Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World!)
Director Edgar Wright posted it on his blog the other day, and I can't tell you how happy I was that he also listed the songs featured in the trailer, solving a problem that's been plaguing me since the second trailer was released: What is that goddam song that starts at around the 1:50 mark with Kim Pine pretending to shoot her self in the head and plays throughout the rest of the trailer?
I can't tell you how many times I've watched that second trailer, because even if I was counting, I would have lost count pretty quickly, as it was a very high number. At least part of that was due to the fact that the song played throughout the back half of the trailer got stuck in my head, which meant I had the trailer stuck in my head, and ended up compulsively re-watching it over and over, in a half-conscious attempt to get the song out of my head by getting over it.
Since I didn't know what the song was, I had no choice but to watch the trailer a billion times or so. (So great job whoever put that trailer together! You pretty much hypnotized me at one point!)
Well now I know that the song is "Invaders Must Die" by The Prodigy, from the 2009 album of the same name. Like the song that plays over the opening of the second trailer, "Great DJ" by the Ting Tings But whatever, I finally knew the name of the song, and could listen to it over and over to break its hold on me! I was somewhat shocked to learn I actually kind of liked a Prodigy song, given how much they used to irritate me in the mid-to-late-'90s. I think I like "Invaders Must Die" slightly more with explosions, cymbals and the clanging of metal weapons mixed in over top of it though.
Oh, and the song that plays just before the "If we're going to date, you may have to defeat my Seven Evil Exes" bit is from "It's Getting Boring By The Sea" by Blood Red Shoes, which is a pretty damn awesome song. (Actually, I've liked all of the Blood Red Shoes songs that I've heard so far).
So hooray for the Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World trailers, I love everything about them, and particularly like the way they seemingly improve on some gags from the original comic (like Scott's terrible drawing of Ramona's hair when he asks Comeau if he knows a girl with hair "like this," and the fact that Comeau immediately recognizes her; in the comic Scott just dangles his fingers to evoke Ramona's hair). I'm still kind of nervous about this, as I think some of the idiosyncratic humor of the comic's characters' dialogue delivery gets lost when it's polished up and spoken by professional actors, but so far it looks so great.
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I was surprised to learn that Sony's adaptation of the Smurfs comics—or, more likely their adaptation of the cartoon adaptation of the comics—is going to be a horror movie.
At least, I assume it's going to be a horror movie. That would explain why all I feel when I see this
Oh hey, look what based-on-a-comic book movie finally got around to releasing a trailer. I take back everything I said concerning reservations about the make-up (as recently as yesterday!); he looks pretty damn Jonah Hex-y to me. Well, his left eye could be a bit more bulging for my tastes—it varies from artist to artist, but I like when it's frozen wide-open—but not bad otherwise.
All the crazy gun business seems more Desperado than Jonah Hex, but I'm not going to say no to horse-mounted gattling guns and dynamite-lighting-then-launching crossbows.
The bit about supernatural powers is rather troubling though. Hopefully that was just played up for the sake of the trailer, in the hopes of selling Hex as a superhero of the Old West instead of simply a disfigured Clint Eastwood-like killing machine of the Old West.
Because apparently I can't do anything even vaguely comics-related without writing about it on the Internet, here's what I typed while watching the latest episode of The Brave and The Bold that was posted on cartoonnetwork.com...
—Let’s see, there’s a vulture, perched on a sign that says Sergio Station…Holy shit, this is gonna be a Jonah Hex team-up, isn’t it?
—Sweet; it is.
—And The Royal Flush Gang is preparing to have Hex drawn and quartered, over a train track, where a train is due…? So they’re going to cut him in half while he’s being quartered…? Harsh. Oh no, they’re just quartering him; they’re just using the train whistle to get the horse to run.
—Batman wears a sombrero and poncho over his costume. He is truly a master of disguise.
—Fuck yeah, they said “Bat-Hombre.” It wouldn’t be the Brave and the Bold without someone referring to Batman as “Bat-Hombre” at some point….
—Hex and Batman clothesline a dude riding a horse with an actual rope. Man, they fucked that guy up.
—I would really like to see Batman get himself a proper cowboy hat, as Hex suggests.
—This one’s called “The Return of the Fearsome Fangs.” I don’t know what that means.
—What’s that white eyebrow master eating on? Is that a rice ball? Damn, now I want onigiri….
—That cloud of falling arrows thing is so goddamned played out, I never want to see it again. I’ll forgive it here, since this is a kids cartoon, and they may have only seen it, like, twice already.
—How come this Wong Fei fellow doesn’t wear a mask/helmet, and yet he’s their master, training them to get in touch with their animal totems and what not? What’s his animal…?
—Animated Bronze Tiger. Jeez. To think that I would live to see the day where Bronze freaking Tiger is in a cartoon show.
—Oh shit, Batman took his cape off. Things are about to get serious.
—I like the edge to Bronze Tiger’s voice. I’m glad he doesn’t just have the same generic Black Male Hero voice common in cartoons like this.
—I guess the tiger mask sort of echoes the one he used to wear in the comics too (Although lately they’ve been drawing it as a sort of actual tiger’s head.
—What is that move Wong Fei just busted out, a No Shadow Kick? It’s fucking sweet.
—Hmm, Fox looks more like a hyena with that big-ass hump….
—You know, I’m not sure “When outmatched, cheat” is the best moral for a kids cartoon show.
—In the first one of these I saw, Batman got turned into a gorilla. In this one, he turns into a bat-mutant. They’re really not afraid to transform Batman in this show, which seems noteworthy to me. Batman rarely turns into a gorilla or bat-monster in the comics any more (Although he did turn into a bat-monster similar to this one in an issue of The Brave and The Bold that was collected in the last Showcase Presents book. (This makes sense though, as transforming Batman increases the number of possible action figures based on the show, doesn’t it?)
J. Caleb Mozzocco is a freelance writer who lives and works in Ohio.
Creators and publishers who would like their books considered for review here (and/or anywhere else he contributes) may feel free to contact him at jcalebmozzocco@gmail.com.
Editors at respectable publications who would like Caleb to write for them are also welcome to contact him and offer him work. He loves money.
