PS: Drew, you sound stressed, man. Have a bubble bath. I'm serious.

latest X-factor?

both?

On the upside, Palmiotti told me that the script to the Jonah Hex movie was pretty damn kick ass and stays true to the character, and that if they cast it right it should deliver the goods to fans, so if the movie ever happens here's hoping they get the right man to wear the scar. Tom Jane just aint it though, not in this Hex fans opinion anyhow.

In '85, during the big Crisis on Infinite Earths maxiseries shake up (in which Jonah Hex himself played a small but crucial part) Hex found himself catapulted into a post apocalyptic future, and as cheesy an idea as this was on paper, it was actually quite a good book, still remaining very true to the Jonah Hex character and legend, largely because it was written by Michael Fleisher, who had written the vast majority of Jonah Hex stories for the past decade plus, and no one knew or wrote the character better than Fleisher. Like many of the post Crisis 'shakeup' books though it had trouble finding an audience and only lasted about a year and a half, befoe Jonah was finally returned to the old west. Unfortunately he returned without a regular series to call his own, and short of a guest spot here and there, spent most of the next few years on the shelf.

In the mid 90's or so Jonah Hex was resurrected over at Vertigo, in a series of 3 seperate miniseries written by Joe R Lansdale, however these took on a more supernatural bent than many of Hex's previous encounters, and found only moderate success. Although not considered "pure" Jonah Hex by some, they were still pretty entertaining reads, and it's not like Jonah Hex didn't already have a history of weird shit happening to and around him. Still, after the third of these miniseries wrapped up in the late 90's Jonah Hex was once again to lay dormant for a good long while, outside of a very occasional guest spot here and there, such as in the the Guns of the Dragon miniseries.

Fast forward all the way to 2005 and Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray once again resurrect Jonah Hex in an all new ongoing series, and they do so with style, resulting in one of the most consistently enjoyable monthly books on the market to this day. A book that recently hit issue 32 and is, while not exactly setting the sales charts alive, still doing consistently month to month, as well as doing quite well as a series of collected trade editions, and in fact it's the popularity and quality of this book that got Hollywood interested in bringing Jonah Hex to the big screen.

This isn't the first time that Hex has circled Hollywood though, during the late 70's, at the pique of Jonah Hex's popularity, there were attempts to bring the character to the big screen, there was even hope that Clint Eastwood would star, and it was said that he was at one point interested. However the project never came together for whatever reasons, and as the decade was drawing to a close Westerns just weren't bringing in the box office like they had previously, and when Superman came out and hit big it seems that Jonah Hex was pretty much forgotten from that point on, as DC instead turned their attention to properties like Batman...something which itself would have a decade long rocky road to the screen.

I'm a huge Jonah Hex fan, and I'd love to see him on the big screen, and done justice, and he's a character that holds a lot of cinematic potential, but I still remain unsold on Jane as the guy to do it. Although to be honest casting the character in this day and age, when real "tough guy" actors are so very few and far between, let alone ones that are still in their prime, is going to be one hell of a hard task to pull off. Maybe someone like Kiefer Sutherland, he seems to have the grizzled hard ass act down pretty damn well these days.

***SPOILERS**** Jonah Hex winds up stuffed when he dies and put on display to prove he was killed. Decades pass and he changes hands, winds up in part of a Buffalo Bill carnival tour. When Buffalo Bill dies and his tour is disbursed, he passes hands within regional travelling carnivals in the 1920s and 1930s. As those carnivals come and go and are bought and sold, he winds up a prop outside of a shop in an amusment park called YesterdayLand but is clearly meant to be Disney. When YesterdayLand is given a facelist during an off-season, Hex's stuffed body is put into a back-lot storage shed. The final pane is his stone hardened face with the popping eye visibly only by a thin crack of light through the slightly ajar door of the storage shed.

the end.