The cowboy comic book was fading away. Superheroes were once again ascendant in the early 70's, despite a bout of horror which goosed the marketplace for a few years. The future of comics was generally dim as the newsstand distribution system was creaking and wheezing, but if editors knew anything, it was that superheroes sold.
So it was most remarkable that in
All-Star Western #11 that a new western star debuted. Jonah Hex owed much to the "Spaghetti Western", the weird alternate-universe variation on westerns streaming in from the European continent. TV stars were kick-starting careers in gritty downbeat misadventures purporting to tell tales of the old west.
Among these was one Clint Eastwood who became literally iconic in the role of
"The Man with No Name" in movies like
A Fistful of Dollars,
For A Few Dollars More and
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. (I've always been fascinated by these Italian movies which adapt the Japanese
Yojimbo by Kurosawa which itself adapted the American
Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett -- it's a small world)So the folks at DC took the visual zest of Eastwood and messed up the face to avoid outright theft and came up with a compelling and dangerous character named "Jonah Hex".
Hex was a bounty hunter, and he was one like few in western comics before. Not unlike the western heroes of the small screen and the big screen before them, the cowboy hero was often reluctant to deal death. Instead there was a lot of shooting guns from stinging fingers and wounding in legs and whatnot. None of that rot for Hex, he shot to kill. And he wasn't any too nice about it either. Hex was positively unlikable, even craven in his earliest appearances. He was the title character, but he wasn't always the hero by any means.
In the earliest days of
Weird Western Tales (the beautifully re-titled
All-Star Western) Hex was not always the cover feature, having to share that role with Gray Morrow's El Diablo. And in those issues which cost a quarter we get some reprints of past DC westerns like Bat Lash and Pow-Wow Smith.
But he came to cominate the comic and even more so when the comic shifted to a twenty cent price and a smaller size.
Tony DeZuniga was the artist slated to bring the story of Hex to the comics page and his exquisite blend of imagination and reality was frankly ideal for Hex's harsh world.
Writer John Albano was the man who created Hex, and who along with DeZuniga guided his earlies forays into the west, looking for desperados and finding both villainy and betrayal in a harsh landscape with meted out death with grisly regularity. Albano reveals very little about his rugged protagonist, and aside from the visual evidence of his having taken a role in the Civil War, there's not much back story for readers to digest. We just get potent stories from Albano, alluring and attractive art from DeZuniga and some compelling covers from Luis Dominguez.
Then with the twenty-second issue writer Michael Fleischer steps in as writer and immediately a new sense of continuity develops. Hex had before been an enigma, a man of mystery and a past, but the focus was on the present. New the stories begin to explore that past. There's a mysterious powerful man who has a grudge against Hex and sends men to find and kill him. This mysterious man, identified by the cane he always carries is clearly a man of influence and means.
The stories wind along until we learn the secret of the mysterious man and we get an origin of sorts for Jonah Hex. His early days frankly reveal very little to set him apart, but he is a man set at odds with the world and so his skills, learned to no small extent during the war, are put to good use finding and stopping outlaws.
The artwork on the series becomes less regular with a number of talents stepping to fill the shoes left when DeZuniga moved on. Noly Panaligan and George Moliterni, did several issues between them. Doug Wildey even did one stellar story, wished there'd been more by him.
But eventually the awesome Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez comes aboard and the Jonah Hex I'm most familiar with is showcased at long last.
The stories of Hex are grim and gritty at a time when those descriptors were not necessarily a dismissive critique. Jonah Hex, set in a violent west reflected the times, which cried out for a tad more realism in the storytelling. The gallant heroes of yesteryear had to give way to heroes with feet of definite clay. Jonah Hex found his niche and despite the avalanche of superheroes found an audience which buoyed him for years to come.
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