Tallulah Black
1855 - Tallulah Black is born in a Tennessee homestead.
1871 - 16-year-old Tallulah's family homestead is visited by seven men claiming to be government agents trying to acquire their land. Her parents and brothers are murdered, and she is shot in the head, losing her eye. She buries her family and makes her way to Little City, where she becomes a prostitute.
1874 - 19-year-old Tallulah is found by one of the men who killed her family, who mutilates her and leaves her for dead. Surviving the ordeal, she hunts for a way to get her revenge, and meets Jonah Hex, convincing him to teach her how to fight.
1875 - 20-year-old Tallulah tracks down the seven men who murdered her family, and guns them down in the streets of Dodge City, Kansas in a historic gunfight. She and Jonah Hex part ways as she becomes a legendary bounty hunter and gunfighter.
1878 - 23-year-old Tallulah 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 Jonah Hex. She sleeps with Hex for the first time.
1888 - 33-year-old Tallulah saves Jonah Hex's life from Quentin Turnbull. She becomes pregnant with his child, and stays with Bat Lash for a time, until she loses the baby.
1893 - 38-year-old Tallulah is hired by William Grimes to work with the US Marshals in Oklahoma, where she works with Marshal Chris Madsen.
1898 - 43-year-old Tallulah helped defends the Oklahoma territory while Marshal Chris Madsen fights in the Spanish-American War with Teddy Rosevelt's Rough Riders. When he returns, they are married.
1911 - 56-year-old Tallulah's husband Chris Madsen is appointed US Marshall for the entire state of Oklahoma.
1913 - 58-year-old Tallulah dies of Scarlet Fever.
Among the Wild West characters in DC's pantheon, Tallulah might be unique, in that she's not a character introduced in the height of popularity of classic Westerns in the fifties, or the new generation of nouveau Westerns of the seventies. She's an entirely new character created in the 2000s, giving her a pretty unique perspective. She was built with a critical eye on the whole storytelling tradition, giving us a very particular examination of certain classic Western tropes that allowed her to become at once unique, but also immediately familiar to fans of the genre.
Tallulah Black's Comic HistoryTallulah was introduced in one of the early arcs of Justin Grey & Jimmy Palmiotti's 2006 Jonah Hex series, a story called The Ballad of Tallulah Black. We follow Tallulah through her story of abuse and victimhood, but also watch as she slowly rises up to never accept defeat, and to push through to her revenge no matter what. There is a whole tradition of wronged women characters across the history of the genre, usually as a damsel that needs to be saved, but there have always been exceptions, from Barbara Stanwyck in The Furies, to Raquel Welch in Hannie Caulder, to Suzie Amis in the Ballad of Little Jo. The fact that two of those three movies involved women being mutilated by men should tell you that the innovation to make Tallulah a disfigured female gunslinger, far from being a new idea, is a deep cut into the genre, but the particular execution of the concept, and casting her as an equal with famously disfigured Jonah was a brilliant exploration into a side of the Western that was previously absent from DC's depiction.
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Our Tallulah StoryAfter her original story, Tallulah appeared in a few more issues before she joined other classic heroes in the storyline the Six Gun War, cementing her as a must-include part of DC's Old West. She was also heavily featured in the New 52 All-Star Western as part of Jonah's story, but they seemed hell-bent to diminish her disfigurement and play her like eye candy... which is a weird choice.
We've changed as little as possible of Tallulah's story, just trying to get a little more specific with certain events. We also very deliberately didn't include certain words that are often used when describing the trauma she endured. This honestly is enough of a trope of Western fiction that it's implied anyway, so I really don't think you needed to hear it from us. One big change for our timeline is that we actually extended Tallulah's story. We looked to some of the epic tales of the actual historic West. Once we decided that she might someday actually have a decent life, we had her partner (and later marry) legendary US Marshall and Rough Rider Chris Madsen of Oklahoma. A person as fueled by rage and vengeance as Tallulah is probably just as likely to be gunned to death before she's 40, but sometimes it's fun to imagine a character growing and overcoming those parts of themselves. |