Inspirography: Jonah Hex

This time around, our Inspirography series takes a look at Jonah Hex. No, not the god-awful movie that came out last year: the far, far more interesting comic series that has been running on and off since the 1970s, published by DC comics, featuring the scar-faced ex-Confederate bounty hunter, Jonah Hex.

Jonah is a righteous man, an avenger of the innocent, and cares deeply about staying true to his own personal honor. He’s also bitter, cynical, possessed of an acidic sense of a humor, mean as a ‘rattler, and a stone-cold killer.

On his good days.

Jonah is Far West through and through: a barbarian with a gun that protects civilization as best he knows how.

Jonah’s life is a stranger tale than most, full of time-travel, tragedies, victories against fearsome odds, impossible escapes, numberless fights of every stripe, and corpses. Lots and lots of corpses, quite a few of which became such at Jonah’s hands. Jonah’s tales over the years have ranged from straight western revenge stories, survival horror, science fiction, and more.

There are a lot of places to jump into Jonah’s story, but one of the best is a tale by one of the masters of weird horror, Joe R. Lansdale, collected into graphic novel form – Jonah Hex: Two Gun Mojo. The current series, by Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray, depicts fairly straight-genre western tales from throughout Hex’s career, maintaining the darkness and nihilism that has marked Hex since the beginning. The series is currently being collected in graphic novels — the first is Face Full of Violence.

Don’t let that horrible movie sour you, folks, Jonah Hex is a surly son-of-a-bitch, but you’ll grow to love him.

 

Oh, and that scar? His toothpick slipped.