All Star Western - Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti

I'm a longtime Jonah Hex fan, so naturally I'd have some interest in the current comic book series featuring him, ALL STAR WESTERN. I picked up a trade paperback reprinting the first six issues of that title, even though I'd heard mostly negative things about it, most of them centering around the fact that the stories are set in Gotham City in the 1880s, rather than out west.

Actually, that doesn't bother me too much. There's a long tradition in fiction of sending Western heroes back east. Longarm and The Trailsman have both gone to big eastern cities to have adventures. In one of the books I ghosted I sent the hero to both Chicago and Boston before having him go back out west to wrap up the story. So as far as I'm concerned, sending Jonah Hex to Gotham City on the trail of some fugitive outlaws is fine. So is teaming him up with Dr. Amadeus Arkham, who sometime in the future will build a certain asylum. It's nice to see some of the ancestors of other famous Gotham citizens, as well.

The stories in this collection were written by Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti, who chronicled Hex's adventures in his previous title for quite a while. They send Hex and Arkham after a serial killer known as the Gotham Butcher and then get them involved in a case in which hundreds of children from the poor part of town have disappeared. Both are decent yarns. Unfortunately, the art by a single-named artist billed as Moritat doesn't appeal to me at all. Hex looks good here and there and there are some impressive full-page action scenes, but overall it's just not to my taste.

This collection also includes a couple of back-up stories featuring El Diablo (who originally appeared with Hex in the old WEIRD WESTERN TALES comic book many, many years ago) and a new character known as The Barbary Ghost. These stories do take place in the West, and they're pretty good ones, although the Indian curse/zombie plot in the El Diablo yarn strikes me as a little overdone. I like the art in these stories—Jordi Bernet on El Diablo and Phil Winslade on The Barbary Ghost—much better.

Overall, I found enough to like in ALL STAR WESTERN: GUNS AND GOTHAM that I'll probably read the next volume. I still prefer the original Jonah Hex stories by John Albano and Tony deZuniga, but those days aren't ever coming back, are they?

Jonah Hex: Only the Good Die Young

Regular readers of this blog know of my fondness for the Western comics featuring disfigured bounty hunter Jonah Hex. ONLY THE GOOD DIE YOUNG is the latest trade paperback reprinting six issues of Hex’s current title, and like all those before it, it’s an excellent collection of gritty, violent Western tales written by Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti. These are mostly stand-alone yarns, although there’s a slight connection between a couple of them, and a couple of others refer to things that happened in earlier issues. There are even guest appearances by Bat Lash and El Diablo, who shared the billing with Hex in the late, great comic WEIRD WESTERN TALES.

Those first appearances of Jonah Hex appeared more than thirty-five years ago, making him one of the most durable Western characters in the history of comics, although stories featuring him haven’t been published continuously during that time, of course. Still, it’s good to see him still around after all these years. I don’t care for some of the art in this collection as much as I did in others, but I’m always more interested in the stories than I am in the art, anyway, and all the stories worked just fine for me. If you’re a fan of Western comics, you should definitely consider picking up these trade paperbacks or the monthly issues of JONAH HEX.

Jonah Hex: Guns of Vengeance

This is the second trade paperback reprinting issues from DC’s new Jonah Hex series, in this case #7 - #12. These are all stand-alone Western stories featuring the scarred bounty hunter Jonah Hex, written by Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray. The biggest influences on these stories are Spaghetti Westerns and Seventies series like Edge, which were the product of British authors who referred to themselves as the Piccadilly Cowboys. So if you’re looking for traditional Western yarns, you won’t find them here. But if your taste runs more to the bizarre and gritty and violent, these are some of the best examples you could hope for. I actually liked this collection even better than the first one, JONAH HEX: FACE FULL OF VIOLENCE, because each story in this volume has a different artist, giving the reader a variety of styles. The line-up includes Paul Gulacy, who did the art on one of my favorite Seventies comics series, Doug Moench’s MASTER OF KUNG FU, and Tony DeZuniga, the artist on the original Hex series, also from the Seventies. Plenty of good stuff here.

Jonah Hex: Face Full of Violence

Back in the Seventies, one of my favorite comic book characters was Jonah Hex. Hex was an anti-hero, a scar-faced ex-Confederate bounty hunter in the Old West who appeared in ALL-STAR WESTERN, WEIRD WESTERN TALES (the same book with a title change), and his own comic book, JONAH HEX. The stories by John Albano and Michael Fleischer were gritty and violent, influenced by spaghetti Westerns and possibly by the various Western paperback series such as EDGE that were written by a group of English authors who dubbed themselves the Piccadilly Cowboys, and the art, usually by Tony DeZuniga, was outstanding. DC has reprinted a lot of these early Jonah Hex stories in one of their black-and-white SHOWCASE volumes, but that will be the subject of another post later on.

Today I’m concerned with the revival of Jonah Hex in his own title a couple of years ago. DC is reprinting these stories in trade paperback collections, starting with JONAH HEX: FACE FULL OF VIOLENCE. It’s a great comeback for a great character. Written by Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti, these stories are stand-alone Western yarns, and they’re every bit as hard-edged as the originals. Hex takes on outlaws, Indians, the plague, crooked lawmen, and killer nuns. As befitting a character who once appeared in a comic book called WEIRD WESTERN TALES, most of these stories have some bizarre, even grotesque elements (though not supernatural). The artwork in five out of the six stories in this volume is by Luke Ross. It’s a slicker style than in Hex’s previous incarnations, but it works very well. The other story in this book was drawn by Hex’s original artist and co-creator, Tony DeZuniga, and his work is as powerful and effective as ever. If you’re an old fan of Jonah Hex who hasn’t tried this new series yet, or if you just like offbeat Westerns, I can’t recommend FACE FULL OF VIOLENCE strongly enough.