Jonah Hex
1838 - Jonah Hex is born.
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 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 White Fawn) Noh-Tante. He is left for dead by a rival tribe, the Kiowas, and is then shot in the stomach by renegade scalphunters 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 scalphunters 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.
1866 - 28-year-old Jonah confronts Noh-Tante, and is forced to pull a knife during ritual combat. He is branded with "the mark of the demon". He becomes a bounty hunter & takes his first bounty.
1871 - 32-year-old Jonah Hex and John 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, Apache Chief, when he kills White Fawn. He teaches Tallulah Black to fight.
1875 - 37-year-old Jonah marries Mei Ling & promises to give up gunfighting.
1876 - 38-year-old Jonah's son Jason is born. Mei Ling leaves him & takes their child.
1878 - 40-year-old Jonah joins the Justice Riders to stop Vandal Savage & personally gunns Savage down.
1880 - 42-year-old Jonah's mother dies. He meets his half-brother Joshua Dazzleby, sherif & preacher of Heaven's Gate, Colorado.
1888 - 50-year-old Jonah's life is saved by Tallulah Black. She becomes pregnant with his child, but loses it.
1894 - 56-year-old Jonah marries Tall Bird & retires.
1899 - 61-year-old Jonah meets his son Jason.
1904 - 66-year-old Jonah is gunned down in a saloon by the coward George Barrow with a shotgun while cleaning his glasses.
DC loves that they own Jonah Hex, but they have no idea how to use him. He's undoubtedly an awesome character. He was invented in 1971 in the pages of All-Star Western, which means that the idea of the American Western had already lost it's popularity.
But it doesn't really matter if westerns weren't at the height of their popularity anymore, because Jonah Hex was never really all about the western. His scarred face and the bloody swath he cuts across the American west make his story more of a horror. In truth though, the way his story unfolds, winding across the alien landscapes of frontier, meeting and killing all sorts of wild characters, actually make him something out of a film noir. Ultimately, it's the layering of all these disparate story frameworks that makes him such a fascinating and hard-to-nail-down character. Before the new 52, Jonah's story was actually remarkably easy to transpose into our timeline because most of the major events of his life have actual dates associated with them, up to and including his death Some of the stories contradict each other slightly, but those are easy enough to resolve. The biggest changes we had to make were all the times various modern heroes crossed over with Hex's. DC LOVES this character, and every time someone time travels, it's only a matter of time before they meet him. Hex actually spent a large chunk of time living in a post-apocalyptic mad max-style future, if you can believe it. All that nonsense had to go. What remains is a great character to build the Wild West portion of our timeline around. |