Jonah Hex

When I was a full-on comic nerd in the early-to-mid-'90s (and I define that by the fact that I had a "weekly pull"), I only read a couple of issues of Jonah Hex. I dug the Western-meets-Lovecraft idea, but I dunno... I just wasn't that into Westerns at the time, so I pretty much ignored the character.

I thought it was cool when Thomas Jane did himself up as Jonah Hex on spec (!), and those pictures managed to find their way to the internet. I'm a fan of Jane for a variety of reasons - I've defended his Punisher on more than one occasion - so the idea that he would just throw himself into the character like that added some points to Jonah's pro column, a coolness-by-osmosis.

Then it was in the trades last week that the Jonah Hex movie wasn't moving forward, at least for the moment.

Add all of that together, and you get the reason why I picked up the Jonah Hex omnibus at Borders the other day. Both DC and Marvel are putting out these massive collections of their older comics, and I fuckin' love that. I'm not an issue guy anymore, but I like catching up on titles in graphic novel format. There's no way in hell I'd go to a comic store and paw through their old-issue boxes, while at the same time I was more than happy to score a 500-page collection of back Jonah Hex stories crammed between two covers and stuck on a shelf for sixteen bucks, plus tax.

These stories are two-fisted Western pulp tales, a form of storytelling I love because it's clean and strong, there's no fucking around. You get a hero, a villain, a love interest, an A-story problem, fist fights, gunfights, tough guy lines, a twist at the end, and you're done. It is a zone of zero wankery, like a story put into liquid form and injected directly into your brain.

That's the long version of me saying: "I love this shit."

The stories reminded me of Robert E. Howard's Westerns.

Jonah Hex is a bounty hunter who's often mistaken for a villain. Everyone's scared of him. He says he's only interested in money, but his harsh personality belies a heart of gold (of course). Jonah tends to weigh in on the side of old friends and underdogs, and sometimes performs an act of charity when no one is looking.

He also expresses a desire for steak at least once per story.

Jonah's face is horribly scarred by an incident in his backstory. The left side of his face is fine, the right side -- monstrous. That, plus the fact that people end up dead wherever he goes, makes him an almost-supernatural personification of evil for bandits and innocent townsfolk alike.

The set-up reminded me of Zatoichi. Both men are afflicted in some way (Zatoichi is blind), but make up for it by becoming deadly killers, the fastest draw around. They wander around and get into adventures, and are as often mistaken for villains as heroes. It seems to be just one more thread connecting Westerns with samurai movies.

Two of my biggest creative influences are Robert Howard and H.P. Lovecraft. It's interesting that a single character has gone through a span in which his early adventures are very Howardian, and his later adventures are Lovecraftian. How was I not paying closer attention?

This past weekend was a woodshed for me. I broke up the writing with episodes of Mad Men and reading this huge wad of Jonah Hex. The ink stained my fingers, and that brought me joy - I think in some ways that's kinda what reading comics is all about.