Jonah Hex
1838 - Jonah Hex is born in .Louisiana.
1848 - 10-year-old Jonah's mother runs away from his abusive, alcoholic father with a traveling salesman.
1851 - 13-year-old Jonah is sold by his father into slavery to an Apache tribe for a pile of pelts & passage through their territory.
1853 - 15-year-old Jonah saves the Apache Chief Gian-nah-tah from a puma & is adopted as his second son.
1854 - 16-year-old Jonah performs his manhood trials with his adoptive brother (& rival for the love of Liluye) Noh-Tante. He is left for dead by a rival tribe, the Kiowas, and is then shot in the stomach by renegade scalp hunters slaughtering the Kiowas. He is nursed back to health by a trapper.
1856 - 18-year-old Jonah becomes an army scout.
1859 - 21-year-old Jonah is engaged to marry Cassie Wainwright, but she is killed by scalp hunters a day before the wedding.
1861 - 23-year-old Jonah joins the confederate army, 4th calvary.
1862 - 24-year-old Jonah surrenders to Fort Charlotte with the announcement of the emancipation proclamation. He refuses to give up the location of his unit, but the captain learns from his scouts and makes sure he is blamed. He is branded a turncoat and blamed for the Fort Charlotte Massacre, his face branded, leaving him scarred.
1866 - 28-year-old Jonah confronts Noh-Tante, and is forced to pull a knife during ritual combat, forever labeled an outcast. He becomes a bounty hunter & takes his first bounty.
1871 - 32-year-old Jonah Hex and Standing-Bear confront each other when Hex takes a bounty on him. After an extended game of cat and mouse, they come to an understanding, and Hex helps him finish a raid on a group of kidnappers.
1874 - 36-year-old Jonah kills his adoptive father, Gian-nah-tah, when he kills Liluye. He meets Tallulah Black, who convinces him to teach her how to fight.
1875 - 37-year-old Jonah and Tallulah Black part ways after she guns down the men who murdered her family in Dodge City.
1878 - 40-year-old Jonah and the Justice Riders stop Vandal Savage from ruling vast stretches of Colorado like a king and track him back to his gold mine in Mexico, where he is gunned down by Hex. He sleeps with Tallulah Black for the first time.
1880 - 42-year-old Jonah's mother dies. He meets his half-brother Joshua Dazzleby, sherif & preacher of Heaven's Gate, Colorado.
1894 - 56-year-old Jonah marries Tall Bird & retires.
1904 - 66-year-old Jonah is gunned down in a saloon by the coward George Barrow with a shotgun while cleaning his glasses.
There is only one place to start in the world of DC's Wild West, and that's Jonah Hex. He's become the figurehead of that entire genre, which I think is fascinating, because given the broad spectrum of characters DC has introduced into it's pantheon of Western heroes, why is this one the one we've gravitated toward?
He embodies a lot of the later, more modern Westerns, the sort of movies being made by Non-American directors from Italy or Spain or Japan, built out of tropes of other film disciplines. Through it all, however, he remains firmly and directly tied to a very specific genre of comic story, and if you're building a timeline that includes that whole era, then Hex might be the single most important character in it.
He embodies a lot of the later, more modern Westerns, the sort of movies being made by Non-American directors from Italy or Spain or Japan, built out of tropes of other film disciplines. Through it all, however, he remains firmly and directly tied to a very specific genre of comic story, and if you're building a timeline that includes that whole era, then Hex might be the single most important character in it.
Jonah Hex's Comic HistoryJonah Hex appeared for the first time in 1972 in the revival of the series All-Star Western. The comic was a fantastically modern reimagining of the concept of the Western with new more complicated stories and morally grey heroes, very much in the vein of the new Westerns of the day, the Fistful of Dollar or Django series, A Man Called Horse, El Topo, Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, the Wild Bunch... I mean we could name Westerns all day. This was the environment in which we were first introduced to John Albano & Tony DeZuniga scarred gunslinger in their story "Welcome to Paradise".
Hex isn't a character that needed a backstory, or a complex explanation. He wore a worn old Confederate uniform, he was horribly scarred, and he was the single most dangerous man in the West. Built to be DCs answer to Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name, he quickly became a monolith astride the stories told in the pages of All-Star Western. two issues later the series gave up its Golden Age throwback name and became Weird Western Tales. Hex would share the cover occasionally with El Diablo, but within the year the book used his name as the title. |
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By 1977, Hex was such a popular character that he left the cover of Weird Western Tales for Scalphunter, and was given his own series. While the stories told within were broadly morally grey and Hex was feared by everyone he met, he also clearly operated with his own code of morality. He was the figurehead of DC's Weird west. The series ran right to the Crisis of Infinite Earths in 1985, when it ended but was replaced by the series Hex, which transported him to post-apocalyptic 2050. I PERSONALLY love this series as a slice of pure frosting genre fun, and I understand it faired better in the international market, but it was definitely a far cry from maintaining the particular gritty balance of the Weird West that Hex has traditionally thrived in.
Even after Hex ended in '87, Jonah wasn't gone for long. He appeared in three Vertigo miniseries; Two-Gun Mojo, Shadows West, & Riders of the Worm and Such before a brand new ongoing series began in 2006 by writers Justin Grey & Jimmy Palmiotti, who crafted a whole new era of violent, dark gritty Western tales. While Hex had had the occasional romance in the past, Ine big innovation by Grey & Palmiotti was the introduction of Tallulah Black, a character who functioned just as well as her own character as she did as Hex's... well, romantic partner is probably the wrong phrase. Partner. This ongoing series was so successful that Hex was a launch character in the New 52, leading a whole new All-Star Western, bringing the character full circle. |
Our Jonah Hex StoryHex is always the very first character you see whenever any story in DC starts to bring characters through time in any way. First things first, EVERYONE meets Jonah Hex. He's appeared in the DCAU, had his own animated movies, appeared in live-action in Legends of Tomorrow, and even holds the ultimate badge of honor for a comic character; he had a terrible movie based on him.
Part of the fun of Jonah Hex when you're building a timeline is that the events of his story have actual real-life dates attached to them. There is, way more than most characters, an actual honest to god timeline we get to adapt. To that end, most of the events we used to build his timeline are actually from the comic, although generally speaking the actual stories depicted there are more episodic, and his actual life story tends to be told more in flashbacks. We of course made Hex the main character in our big gathering of our Western heroes, making him part of our version of the Justice Riders. One small change we made that you might notice? We said he was originally from Louisiana. Traditionally I believe he's meant to be from Missouri, but they didn't actually secede in the Civil War, and being an Ex-Confederate is a big part of Hex's story. You don't want too much magic in the world of Hex, but the idea that he might have come from the same Swamps that will one day spawn Swamp Thing just felt horror-adjacent enough to include. It might affect his infamous Southern accent a little, but I think it's safe to say there are other factors affecting his speech a LITTLE bit more. |
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