"Oh, man, this guy’s going on for a third day about the whole ‘death of Jonah Hex’ thing? This blog sucks."
Well, yeah, I do have a few more things to say about Hex, but only briefly. Don’t panic.
I was going to bring up some of Jonah Hex’s other time-travel/non-traditional western encounters, specifically in light of his appearance in the recent Justice League animated series, where Hex clearly is aware of the concept of time travel and is able to I.D. the Leaguers as being from the future. Well, you folks beat me to it in yesterday’s comments section, with this anonymous commentator whipping out specific cites to Jonah’s wandering about the DC Universe. ‘Course, he gives out the titles in shortened form, and if you’re able to identify them all in row without stumbling, you get a cookie. (NOTE: Get your own cookie, I’m not gonna mail you one.)
What’s interesting, I think, about the Justice League cartoon appearance is that the idea of Jonah being the Old West character that Weird Sci-Fi/Horror Shit Happens To is apparently been mainstreamed into the character’s concept. Even in the current Jonah Hex series, which while generally playing the comic as a straight western, featured supernatural elements in its Halloween issue. I think I remember reading somewhere, too, that one of the proposed concepts for the theoretical film adaptation would have incorporated the Vertigo Comics’ horror-themed Hex stories. (I didn’t Google that up, so if someone has more recent, reliable, movie information, feel free to drop it in the comments.)
So, in short, I like the well-traveled-in-time-and-space Jonah Hex. Here’s to more of that sort of thing.
An addendum to the fate of Hex’s stuffed body following the Secret Origin‘s tale related yesterday. I was looking at the Wikipedia entry, and it states that the body eventually made it into the hands of Booster Gold, who placed it into his “Planet Krypton” restaurant (and visible in the Kingdom Come collection-only epilogue, if I recall correctly). I’m now going to imagine Booster Gold wrestling Hex’s body from the hands of the elderly Tall Bird, because it’s both cruel and amusing and I’m a bad person.
By the way, this blurb was on the cover of Hex #18, the last issue of that series which I was also discussing yesterday, and while I was all ready to make fun of it:
…I am, after all, still talking about this series, 20+ years after its conclusion. It’s a classic to me.
