1 - Posted on 2/27/2023

Brilliant

Posted on 2/27/2023

Agreed! He continues to impress!

1 - Posted on 2/27/2023

Really cool you get to see the detail in the original for how Reilly completes the ground and sky that is mostly lost in the colored version.  It's like a scene out of an old western in how we see this in widescreen. 

1 - Posted on 2/27/2023

I feel like when you look at this, some music by Ennio Morricone should play with a voiceover stating "NOW IN WIDEVISION CINEMASCOPE"

1 - Posted on 2/27/2023

I DO love Jonah Hex is this piece is an example of great, graphic design!

1 - Posted on 2/27/2023

Hex is one that I always loved the look of and the setting was always intriguing, just never picked up any of the books. As someone who loves the character, what would be your recommendation as to where I should start?

1 - Posted on 2/27/2023

Well, I have to admit I really enjoyed the original series when I read them as back issues. However, I was blown away by the series DC published in the mid 2000's, written by Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray. The main reason I bought and read it was because it was the first time in many years that DC had published a title WITHOUT the "You must write each story to last exactly 6 issues!" editorial edict that every other title had. So it took me back to the days before the collected editions were a thing and writers wrote the stories to last as many or as few issues as it took to tell the stories in the best way possible. It also proved the point I'd been making for years that the publishers can still stick to the 6 issue TPB format if the stories were single issue or two issues long. So that was great. The vast majority of that Jonah Hex run was written as either single issue stand alone stories or 2 issue stories. It clearly worked, too, because the vast majority of the stories were great! Also, the artists constantly changed for different stories, on purpose, as they didn't want to have a regular series artist. I really enjoyed that and there was only one artist throughout the entire run whose work I wasn't a big fan of, but the stories were good so it didn't bother me. So yeah, I recommend starting out by trying the first one or two trades and if you enjoy those, then you can continue buying the rest as long as you continue enjoying the stories.

Not shockingly, after approximately 5 years, DC's bean counters just couldn't keep their heads up their asses where they are often best suited to be, so they pulled them out and declared that the title could only continue if Palmiotti and Gray started writing the stories to last exactly 6 issues each. They were still enjoying writing the title, so they acquiesced to that demand and DC relaunched the title (of course!) as All-Star Western. Given how good I found the Jonah Hex series to be, I imagine there's a decent chance that the All-Star series was good too, but I wouldn't know as I was so pissed off about the "6 issues per story" edict that I chose to excercise my right to protest by not buying or reading that relaunched series.

1 - Posted on 2/27/2023

Perfect! Thank you so much for the valuable insite. I have the DC digital subscription and it looks like that entire run is there. The idea of (fairly) self contained stories is very appealing, much easier to consume and digest! That's where I'll start! Much appreciated!!

1 - Posted on 2/27/2023

Absolutely my pleasure, Carl. I just hope you like them as much as I did! By the way, for whatever it's worth, in the years since I read the series I have mentioned a few times both in private and publicly on more than one episode of my YouTube shows, how much I love it and other people who had also read the series were unanimously in agreement about how good I feel it was. Or to put it another way, I can't recall ever being told by a single person who read the series that they DIDN'T think it was great. Given that like me, you also enjoy the thought of self contained shorter stories, I think it heightens the odds that you'll enjoy it.

1 - Posted on 2/28/2023

Clever use of horizontality. I love his work as well.

1 - Posted on 2/28/2023

Agreed, clever and it absolutely adds to the appeal of the piece for me. A big draw for westerns in the 50's was how camera technology advancements at the time allowed for a widescreen, all encompassing large format cinema presentation. This "letterbox" layout fits in with that tradition incredibly well!