Jonah Hex volume 3: Origins

By Jimmy Palmiotti, Justin Gray, Jordi Bernet, and others (DC Comics) 

ISBN: 978-1-84576-629-0 (TPB/Digital edition) 

The Western is an odd genre that can be sub-divided into two discrete halves: the sparkly, shiny version that dominated kids’ books, comics and television for decades, exemplified by Zane Grey stories and heroes like Roy Rogers and Gene Autry. Then there’s the other half… 

That kind of cowboy – grimy, gritty, excessively dark and nihilistic –was done best for decades by Europeans in such strips as Jean-Michel Charlier’s Lieutenant Blueberry or Bonelli & Galleppini’s Tex Willer and made their way into US culture through the films of Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone.  

Jonah Hex is very best of this latter sort. 

DC opened a stable of clean-cut gun-slingers as the super-hero genre imploded in 1949, with dashing and highly readable luminaries like Johnny Thunder, Nighthawk, The Trigger Twins, Matt Savage and dozens of others in a marketplace that seemed limitless in its voracious hunger for chaps in chaps.  

However, all things end and by the early sixties the sagebrush brigade had dwindled to a few venerable properties. A flurry of superheroes hogged the newsstands during the Silver Age from 1956, but as the 1960s closed, they were waning again and thematic changes in the cinematic Cowboy filtered through to a comics industry suffering its second super-hero retreat in twenty years.  

All-Star Western #1 was released with an August/September 1970 cover date, filled with Pow-Wow Smith reprints, and became an all-new anthology with its second issue. It featured numerous creative all-stars, including Robert Kanigher, Neal Adams, Gray Morrow, Al Williamson, Gil Kane, Angelo Torres, & Dick Giordano, working on Outlaw!, Billy the Kid and cult sleeper-hit El Diablo: combining shoot-em-up shenanigans with supernatural chills, in deference to the real hit genre-type that saved comics in those dark days – horror stories. 

Issue #10 introduced a disfigured, irascible, shockingly lethal bounty hunter created by writer John Albano & Tony DeZuñiga and DC finally found its greatest and most enduring Western Warrior…  

Hex is the very model of a modern anti-hero. Coarse, callous, proudly uneducated, the relentless manhunter is clad in battered Confederate Grey, half his face lost to a hideous past injury. He offers the aspect of a brutal thug little better than the scum he hunts  and is a man to avoid – or so you’d think on first appearances…  

Hex is arguably the most memorable western comic character ever created. He’s certainly the darkest and most grippingly realised, as is the brutal and uncompromising world he inhabits. His 21st century revival portrayed him as a ruthless demon with gun or knife, hunting men for the price on their heads in the years following the American civil war.  

This collection (reprinting issues #13-18 of the 2006 monthly series) revisits his origin and offers fascinating insights not only in gripping lead tale ‘Retribution’ – illustrated by the utterly superb Jordi Bernet – but also in haunting, nihilistically evocative cautionary tale ‘The Ballad of Tallulah Black’ (beguiling painted by Phil Noto), and blackly comedic ‘I Walk Alone’, drawn with unsuspected subtlety by Val Semeiks. 

Jonah Hex was always the “Western for people who didn’t like Westerns” and cliché aside, it’s still true. This is a perfect book for any adult beginning or returning to comics. 
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