JONAH HEX RIDES AGAIN

**MattBrady** · 03-21-2005, 11:03 AM

One of DC Comics’ bigger - and more well received - announcements over this past weekend’s Wizardworld LA convention was an upcoming new Jonah Hex ongoing series by the Hawkman/Monolith/Twilight Experiment writing duo of Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray.

Newsarama caught up with the writers as we all made our way home from Long Beach, California via the Airfone for a few early words about the new series...

Newsarama: Okay, first of guys let’s start with the basics, like when does the series debut; who’s doing the art and covers? Etc?

Justin Gray: Jonah Hex is an ongoing series and updated return to one of the great Western characters in comics. I’m not sure of the exact date but I think issue #1 hits this fall.

Jimmy Palmiotti: Each cover is going to feature one of the top artists in the industry…the line-up is amazing and each and every day we are getting people who we never knew were fans of Hex offering their talents to the series. As you can see, Frank Quietly is our first artist to be featured on the cover and Justin and I are both fans of Frank’s work. When we saw this cover come our way, we both flipped out…this is a classic example of how a picture is worth a thousand words.

NRAMA: Tell readers a little bit about how this series came about? Did you pitch it to DC? Did they come to you with the idea? What made y’all commit to it?

Gray: For me it came as a phone call from Jimmy that started with, “Dude, what do you think about Jonah Hex?” A wise man does not say, “No thank you” to a chance at pitching Jonah Hex.

Palmiotti: Jonah Hex was a comic that I loved to death when I was a kid, and to tell you the truth, the best part of this job is being able to get a chance to work on something that has made an impression on you … to get the opportunity to write Jonah has really been a dream come true for us both. I personally have been after DC. To get a shot at the character and have been bugging the people up there for years about its availability to us. Something like this was all about timing at the end of the day.

When I heard there was a chance that we would be able to pitch our version of the character, I picked up the phone and called Justin. We had a proposal done in one afternoon. Believe me, it wasn’t a hard thing to pitch, we just got really lucky that it was exactly what they were looking for and we consider it an honor that the company has so much faith in our work. We finished up our run on Monolith and it was perfect timing for us all around.

NRAMA: Common wisdom suggests the HBO series Deadwood has opened the door for a lot of Western projects to get greenlit, or at least given a second look. Is that the case here?

Palmiotti: How could it not be in the back of most people’s minds, it’s a brilliant show. Deadwood is opening a lot of minds to the wonderful history of our country, and how any well written show can exist in any time frame as long as the characters are developed correctly.

But I think the main thing to understand about Jonah Hex is that it is one of the few genre titles that has been successful (for over 8 years back in the 70’s) and is still considered one of the best runs of any comic book in the Western genre. This character has a great history in the DCU, and will continue long after we leave the planet.

Gray: I can’t speak for other people in terms of the impact Deadwood may or may not have had on greenlighting a return to monthly Hex comics. The Western was a staple of the industry as was Romance and War comics. If Deadwood helped then I better thank [series creator] David Milch and HBO.

NRAMA: But can that also be a double-edged sword of sorts? After all, won’t things be compared to Deadwood?

Palmiotti: That’s fine by me. I consider it a challenge to tell you the truth. Deadwood is limited in a way because it is about a few characters in a specific town. Jonah Hex is about one man - a bounty hunter - who wanders all over the country making a living doing a dangerous job. The landscape and towns constantly change and there is so much history to interact with in the storytelling that the opportunities are endless for us.

Gray: I can’t concern myself with people making comparisons. To me Hex is not a situation where someone said, “Westerns are ‘hot’ again, so lets rush something into production to capitalize on the success of Deadwood”.

As to how the series is handled and the Westerns that inspired me, Deadwood is just the newest addition to a rich landscape of material.

NRAMA: Okay, moving on before this becomes an interview about Deadwood … educate some of our readers here who may not be familiar with Jonah Hex – Who is he? What sets him apart from being just another cowboy? What can you tell readers about his “origin”?

Gray: Jonah Hex, sometimes bounty hunter sometimes gun-for-hire, is a haunted, scarred, and brutally efficient killer, whose morality is questionable at best. Haunted men don't talk and when a character isn't babbling on and on about something we don't care about, that leaves lots of time for sneers, squints, one liners, and bloody shootouts.

This is not a book about your sensitive 21st century man in touch with his feminine side; this is raw violence, filled with bullets blasting through people of questionable value. Having been handed to the Apaches by his drunken father, his face deformed for a crime he didn’t commit and a tour of duty as a Confederate soldier in the Civil War, Jonah Hex has long since abandoned compassion for his fellow man. The West was dirty and often unpredictable, men are hanged, women raped, and children stolen, and everyone had different ideas on how to look good dying.

This is an unvarnished look at the mythologized American West. Jonah Hex is less a man than a force of nature, a storm that blows across the plains of the west clearing the lands, burning the refuse and moving on. If something good comes out of it, believe me it wasn’t intentional.

NRAMA: Can you give an example of what cowboy mold he’s from – he’s more Leone’s Eastwood, rather than High Noon’s Gary Cooper, right?

Palmiotti: There are different points of his life that he can fit both of these molds, but to tell you the truth, Jonah falls easier into the Leone category more often than not because the realities of life in those times are a lot harsher than most Western directors cared to explore.

Leone understood the dirt, grime and utter insanity of the era better than most. What we are trying to do is give the reader the most realistic depiction of that time we can, with as much graphic storytelling we can get away with.

Gray: I don’t see him as Cooper or Eastwood, but clearly you can draw comparisons between Josey Wales and what John Albano brought to life in 1972. I look at it from a perspective of the “other” Sergio - Sergio Corbucci - and some of the more obscure westerns made in Europe as well as Sam Pekinpah. I see Hex as a strange amalgam of Django and Lee Van Cleef with a splash of Phantom of the Opera. A fractured and damaged man; this is best exemplified by the metaphor of his scarred face the dichotomy of the handsome cowboy and the vicious killer that make up Hex’s psychology.

NRAMA: What can you tell us about your storyline at this point? Where does this story pick up with Jonah, and what’s he fighting for/against?

Palmiotti: Jonah is a bounty hunter…he tracks down criminals for a living and once in a while takes on some freelance jobs, mostly offered to him based on his reputation. He is an excellent gunfighter and to most people seems to have the devil himself working hand in hand with him.

Gray: What we’re writing could easily be called “Legends of Jonah Hex", adding to his myth in single-issue, self-contained tales about a scarred, gun slinging bounty hunter who’d kill you just as soon look at you. We’re not as concerned with presenting a linear timeline as we would be with a book like Hawkman, but rather playing on the idea of sitting around by a campfire in the dead of night and the guy next to you says, “I heard of this fella they call Jonah Hex, they say he killed twenty men with six bullets and a broken hand…”

Hex is larger than life at a time when there was no real law or societal watchdog to keep the worst in people from spilling out. The most personally appealing aspect of Hex is his view of justice. We’re not looking at the square jawed and clean-shaven moralist with a six-gun. Jonah Hex has a moral compass that allows him to kill and torture people without regret so as long as they get what’s comin’ to them. Hex is everything Batman secretly wishes he could be, but polite society and the rest of the world won’t let him.

NRAMA: How about other cast members?

Palmiotti: Every issue introduces a different cast of characters with us, the readers, going along with Hex for the ride. If Jonah stays in one place for a bit, then there might be some repeat characters, but not likely in the first year of the book, at least it looks that way right now.

Gray: The book has two main characters, Jonah Hex and the Wild West, everyone else is either catching bullets or running in the other direction. At some point I’d really like to inject Diablo and some of the other DC western characters into the book but we’ll have to see how it goes.

NRAMA: Do you guys consider this series sort of “reestablishing” the character, like perhaps Adam Strange is doing for the DC cosmic/space heroes? Are more of DC’s Western heroes on the horizon?

Gray: Yes, this is absolutely a case of reestablishing Hex while respecting the history of the character, but not in the same way as you would a superhero because Hex doesn’t have the same kind of continuity as a Flash or a Superman. I guess if you look at what’s coming from DC in terms of Grant Morrison doing All-Star Superman, you can apply the same idea to what we’re doing. Hex is a series of tales based on the core idea of the character; a former Rebel Cavalry rider turned ruthless bounty hunter.

Palmiotti: We are taking the classic Western character of Jonah Hex and introducing him to a whole new generation of fans while aiming to please the fans of the original series. One of the thing we are going to do with the title is to handle each and every issue as a self contained story …to give the reader a complete tale - a beginning, middle and an end.

Both Justin and I feel it’s important to handle the title this way to constantly give the readers the chance to hop on to the book at any time and really dig in.

Kevin T. Brown · 03-21-2005, 11:29 AM

But who's doing the interior artwork??

By the way, definitely looking forward to more Jonah Hex.

I'd love to see Tony DeZuniga involved in some way.....

swol · 03-21-2005, 11:31 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by MattBrady
[BGray: Yes, this is absolutely a case of reestablishing Hex while respecting the history of the character, but not in the same way as you would a superhero because Hex doesn’t have the same kind of continuity as a Flash or a Superman. I guess if you look at what’s coming from DC in terms of Grant Morrison doing All-Star Superman, you can apply the same idea to what we’re doing. Hex is a series of tales based on the core idea of the character; a former Rebel Cavalry rider turned ruthless bounty hunter.

Palmiotti: We are taking the classic Western character of Jonah Hex and introducing him to a whole new generation of fans while aiming to please the fans of the original series. One of the thing we are going to do with the title is to handle each and every issue as a self contained story …to give the reader a complete tale - a beginning, middle and an end.

Both Justin and I feel it’s important to handle the title this way to constantly give the readers the chance to hop on to the book at any time and really dig in. [/b]

So, basically, All-Star Jonah Hex.
I can live with that.
I always thought that western comics tended to not lend themselves as well to multi-part epics than other genres did.

I wonder if any references will be made to the previous HEX series set in the future? I would tend to think not, but it was interesting that it cropped up on an episode of Justice League Unlimited.

corey j. · 03-21-2005, 11:31 AM

Love to see DC jump on the bandwagon and release "Essentials" type trades, including a few on this guy. Been picking up some of the old "Weird Western Tales," lately. Great stuff.

Best of luck making Jonah Hex a success

brydeemer · 03-21-2005, 11:36 AM

I am very much looking forward to this series. My only wish is that Timothy Truman would have been involved. Maybe we'll get a special from him.

Bry

David Vega · 03-21-2005, 11:48 AM

If ever there was a character deserving an archive, it's Jonah Hex. Please make this happen DC!

Arnout · 03-21-2005, 11:51 AM

I'll definitely give this a look. I loved the hell out of the Vertigo minies, and I'd like to see them collected (I know this hasn't been done because of those albino country twins or whatever).
It seems this will be regular DC universe (well, like 'The Kents' I guess, but without the voice-over) but will it be all ages or mature readers?
Reprints of old Jonah Hex interest me greatly! I've never read any of the 'original' material.

I'l like to know who does interiors, and Truman better at least do a couple of painted covers for this!

Though Cloudburst was pretty crappy, the G/P offerings of Monolith, Twilight Experiment & 21 Down (all for DC, in a sense) were & are plenty enjoyable, so count me in!

kingofcities · 03-21-2005, 12:04 PM

Way to dodge a question Jimmy and Justin.

Come on guys.....SPILL! Who is the interior artist?

Seriously though, this project sounds PERFECT all around. I love the campfire style story as they refer to it. That Quitely cover is wicked (I agree with Arnout though that we need AT LEAST one Truman cover!)

Can't wait to get this book! Wish I didn't have to wait till fall.....

Kent

Gordon McAlpin · 03-21-2005, 12:05 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by corey j.
Love to see DC jump on the bandwagon and release "Essentials" type trades, including a few on this guy.

I thought DC was doing a Batman Chronicles trade, which is sort of like Marvel's Essential books, though I don't quite remember the details, though. It was solicited a while back, so should be out soon.

I'm sure if that's successful (and it will very likely be), they'll expand on it like they did with their Archive Editions.

bcondray · 03-21-2005, 12:10 PM

Is DC really trying to bankrupt me?

I love Jonah Hex...heck, I even liked the post-Apocalyptic Hex series.....

I'll be adding another to the list...

It's all good.....

Phoenix_Tetsu · 03-21-2005, 12:33 PM

I'm sorry, Mr. Palmiotti, but you are no Joe R. Lansdale and whomever ilustrates is no Tim Truman, no Hex this time for me...

ParisCub · 03-21-2005, 01:03 PM

Well, I would have been happy with a new Jonah Hex series, but with Palmiotti and Grey as writers, I'm afraid I'll pass.

Monolith was sort of OK, and they've succeeded in pushing Hawkman out of the top 100 comics with their complete destruction of all that Johns had built... i'm not sure I want to see them do Jonah Hex now :-(

Shame, this QUitely cover looks great

Banana_Oil · 03-21-2005, 01:09 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Arnout

Reprints of old Jonah Hex interest me greatly! I've never read any of the 'original' material.

I'd liken it to Marvel's run of Conan from the same era: violent, bad ass, and very non-superheroic. Sold very well to people who didn't want to read about the tights.

I'd love to see some Jonah and Bat Lash reprints.

Allen Jaco · 03-21-2005, 01:10 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Phoenix_Tetsu
I'm sorry, Mr. Palmiotti, but you are no Joe R. Lansdale and whomever ilustrates is no Tim Truman, no Hex this time for me...

I'm sorry. I just don't understand this attitude. Jimmy Palmiotti does some great work (though I've never read Hawkman).

The only real thing that concerns me is putting a non-superhero book more geared for mature readers, like Jonah Hex in the DCU. Wouldn't this be a much better fit in Vertigo? It reminds me a little bit of the Fallen Angel fiasco.

Having said that, I am really looking forward to this series. Not only is Jonah Hex just an awesome character/concept, but the industry needs more genre titles.

kingofcities · 03-21-2005, 01:10 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Phoenix_Tetsu
I'm sorry, Mr. Palmiotti, but you are no Joe R. Lansdale and whomever ilustrates is no Tim Truman, no Hex this time for me...

So cynical my friend....

StoneGold · 03-21-2005, 01:26 PM

Kind of ironic, at the show, they held off on giving the artist's name so they could get a second story. Now no artist's name in the second story.

J.A. · 03-21-2005, 01:32 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by MattBrady
Hex is everything Batman secretly wishes he could be, but polite society and the rest of the world won’t let him.

Well, I'm sold.

[jude]

Von Raven · 03-21-2005, 02:19 PM

I'm getting this!!!

blackandwhite · 03-21-2005, 02:34 PM

sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeet!!!!!!!!

Hypestyle · 03-21-2005, 08:02 PM

So will this series touch on any horror/supernatural themes or will all that stuff be retconned...

rock334 · 03-21-2005, 08:10 PM

Man, I was thinking about getting out of collecting after 30 years. But now after the following titles returning from DC:

OMAC (OMAC Project)
Secret Society Of Super-Villians (Villans United)
Jonah Hex
Batman by Steve Engleheart, Marshall Rogers & Terry Austin
Kamandi Archives
Infinite Crisis

I'm back in for the long haul now. If I drop anything it will be a Marvel comic (not bashing Marvel, just a matter of economics and enjoyment). I feel like a kid again. Been waiting YEARS for the return of OMAC (My favorite character, bar none!). Now if we can just get a new series starring Kamandi (Kirby version).

Also, as asked above:
WHO IS THE INTERIOR ARTIST FOR JONAH HEX?

It would be wonderful if they could get Jose Luis Garcia Lopez, Luis Dominguez, Tony Dezuniga, & Vicente Alcazar for some stories. I hope all these artists are still with us. How about a story or two by Michael Fleischer?
I would also like to see a Jonah Hex Archives.
Keep the steam rolling DC, its way past time for you to take the #1 spot back.

Billy

COREMARK · 03-21-2005, 08:53 PM

I can't wait to check this series out, and as for an artist how about Phil Winslade. This guy did some great work over on Monolith, and his style would definitely suit a book like this.

AndrewP · 03-21-2005, 09:36 PM

Sounds good...I've loved most of G&P's work, so I'm looking forward to this one.

The_Adventurer · 03-21-2005, 09:40 PM

Awesome, I've been looking for a good place to get on the ground floor with Jonah Hex and I love a good western.

I for one am glad it's part of the DCU and not Vertigo, because there is no reason the DC Bullet lable can't bring us good Muture non-spandex books. And Hex is definitly a DCU hero who deserves to be there under the Bullet.

I wouldn't mind it being under Vertigo of course, but being under DC is bonus points.

Headless Roland · 03-21-2005, 11:07 PM

I hope that one of the first things they do is to get rid of that connecting lip/ skin thing. That has always bugged me. You know that every time Jonah Hex got into a fight , his opponent would have always gone to pull that thing right off his face, it would have been long gone by now. Hell, Jonah Hex would have ripped it off already just to make eating easier.