Justice Riders
1878 - Vandal Savage steals vast stretches of land in Colarado, ruling it like a king. He is stopped by the Justice Riders, including 40-year-old Jonah Hex, 23-year-old Tallulah Black, 21-year-old Bat Lash, 33-year-old Lazarus Lane, & 44-year-old Standing Bear, who track him back to his gold mine in Mexico. He is gunned down by Hex.
The Full Posse
DC comics has a fascinating relationship with the entire concept of western heroes. They've literally been here the entire time. The whole idea of the heroes of wild west comes from dime store novels, the direct ancestor of comics. As long as the very idea of comic book heroes have been around, some of them have been from the wild west... and just like America's relationship with the whole genre of wild west stories has changed over time, so to has the way they are depicted in the pages of DC. You can actually chart the evolution of this entire storytelling tradition over DC's publication history.
The Justice Riders Comic HistoryWhile there have basically always been Western comics, going all the way back to the 30s, it wasn't until after World War II that the big publishers started to really lean into them, with DC publishing All-Star Western and Western Comics starting in the late 40s. These were anthology series that told the stories of a variety of heroes, almost all of them following the same traditions of classic dime store and Western movie heroes; tall, forthright, moral, and wearing dashing neckerchiefs. One exception might be the Nighthawk, who existed in the same sort of Western world, but actually followed some more superhero-y tropes, in that he wore a mask, worked in the shadows, and had a secret identity.
As we transitioned into the Silver Age, and superheroes quickly took over the medium, western comics continued to exist, but we saw less and less of the simple man-with-a-hat Roy Rogers / John Wayne characters. Instead they tended to need a gimmick of some kind. The term 'weird west', a combination of Western, sci-fi, and horror tropes, wasn't coined until the seventies (even though there are stories dating back to Robert E Howard's The Horror from the Mound from 1932 that are now considered examples of the genre), but it's very clear that DC's western offerings were starting to lean more and more in that direction. |
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Interestingly, the actual term 'weird west' is literally derived from another DC comic, Weird Western Tales, which started its life as All-Star Western, a revival of the Golden Age series by editor Dick Giordano in 1970. The series quickly became a reflection of the new style of Westerns, the post Clint Eastwood West, stories told by an America that had lost its taste for the wholesome black & white Cowboys vs Indians stories. We got a whole slew of new heroes, most notably El Diablo, Scalphunter, Cinnamon, Bat Lash, and the man who would soon come to define the world of DC's weird west; Jonah Hex.
It's especially noteworthy, I think, that Jonah is a former Confederate soldier. This is a post-Vietnam War America, after all, and Hex's role in the apocalyptic landscape of the post-war American West seemed to gel with certain sentiments America had toward its relationship with its formerly heroic past. Hex seems to almost be more suited to a post-apocalyptic horror story, which is probably how he wound up briefly time traveling into the post-apocalypse of 2050. Interestingly, it's not like all those pre-Silver Age characters went away during this time. Pow Wow Smith stories were actually reprinted in early issues of the revival of All-Star Western, and it was clear that all these darker, edgier heroes occupied the same world as those classic characters, even if they rarely if ever ran into each other. |
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The Crisis of Infinite Earths actually included big team-ups of Western characters being transported to modern day, letting them name drop lots of classic characters. Later, after the Crisis, when DC started to publish its awesome continuity adjacent Elseworlds stories, we got the really fantastic series Justice Riders, which invented a VERY Weird West story in which Western versions of the Justice League came together to stop an evil (foreshadowing!) Max Lord. In addition to just being a cool standalone story, it provided a whole new set of Western visuals for the concept of DC's weird west, most notably the very cool idea of Wonder Woman as a sheriff. Later, when Grant Morrison built their Multiversity story, one of their innovations was Earth 18, a Western world that primarily used reimagined versions of classic Western characters (with the addition of a new version of Super-Chief), they actually reimagined a few characters using the visuals from the Justice Riders elseworlds; Madame 44 now looked like western Diana, and Johnny Thunder looked like the Justice Riders Wally West. It's an interesting compromise, letting this version of the DC West exist using both the classic and elseworlds tropes.
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Our Justice Riders StoryAs we build up our pantheon of Western heroes, it's very hard to start anywhere other than the character that has become the premier DC character of that era, Jonah Hex. He's not exactly a team guy, but his sheer popularity means that he's teamed up with practically every character there is from that era at one time or another. There is a specific storyline from his 2006 ongoing series by Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti in which Hex rode with Tallulah Black, El Diablo, and Bat Lash to stop his longtime villain, Quentin Turnbull in a story arc called the Six Gun War. It made perfect sense for the character we were including to, at least once, all ride together in one epic posse, and this story provided an ideal framework. We changed it up a little, swapping Turnbull for Vandal Savage to make it more epic, and adding in our reimagined version of Super-Chief...
But of course, once we added Standing Bear, the connection to another team of Western heroes was just too obvious. This posse of classic Western heroes could only go by one name. |