Jonah Hex has spent decades wandering the American frontier, collecting bounties and leaving bodies in his wake. For Michael Walsh, that dirty, bloody history makes DC’s scarred gunslinger an ideal horror protagonist.
Walsh — the writer and artist behind The Silver Coin and co-creator of Exquisite Corpses — officially takes over the character with Jonah Hex and the Shadow of Death #1, launching October 7. (Walsh is joined by colorist Toni-Marie Griffin.) The six-issue opening story finds an older Hex living in the small town of Ashecott, his bounty-hunting days seemingly long gone. However, when something ancient and otherworldly arrives, Hex is brought face-to-face with a threat unlike those outlaws he spent planting in the ground.
For Walsh, horror and the Western have always been natural companions.
“I think Western America is a great setting for horror,” Walsh said. “I think there’s a lot of atmosphere. There’s a lot of isolation. There are no cell phones, which makes horror a lot better. There’s no artificial light. In terms of a setting that has an incredible amount of atmosphere and tension and roughness and dust and grit, I don’t think you could ask for a better setting for a horror story.”
It is territory Walsh has wanted to explore for years. He previously considered doing a Western installment of The Silver Coin, and he and Joshua Williamson had discussed collaborating on a horror Western long before Shadow of Death ever came together. When DC approached Walsh about writing and drawing a title for its Next Level line, he considered characters like Deadman and The Creeper before eventually landing on Hex.
Hex also has more horror lurking in his publishing history than his reputation as a Western character might otherwise suggest. Walsh points specifically to Joe R. Lansdale’s 1990s Jonah Hex stories (notable including Two-Gun Mojo) as proof that the character can thrive in the weird Western space.
“That is a big-time horror, weird Western vibe story, and I really like that one,” Walsh said. “I think there’s a lot to love in that story, and I think that it’s a kind of good representation of what you can do with weird horror in Jonah Hex’s world.”
However, Walsh’s version of Hex will operate under different restrictions.Shadow of Death exists within DC’s main continuity, meaning he is working at a PG-13 level rather than embracing the graphic violence possible in some of his creator-owned horror. That limitation has pushed him to think carefully about where gore appears and how terror can be generated without relying on it. And, truly, Hex himself already looks like someone who belongs in a horror story anyways.
“If you look at Jonah Hex’s face, there’s already so much terrifying stuff to mine there out of the aspects of what the guy has already gone through,” Walsh said. “He’s got 60, 70 years of history in DC Comics, and I think that I’m still trying to find different things that haven’t been done with the character before, which is always fun as well.”
An Old Gunslinger Haunted by Himself
The horror within Shadow of Death is not confined to whatever has arrived in Ashecott. Walsh is also turning Hex’s past inward to explore things dark and scary.
This is an older Jonah, removed from the period of his life most stories explore. The years of killing, surviving, and adhering to his own brutal moral code have finally given him enough distance to reconsider the man he used to be. Walsh found his way into that idea partly through his own experience of getting older and reconsidering moments from his younger years.
“Sometimes I reexamine my past, the behavior, the things that I’ve done when I was a young man and more naive and more innocent,” Walsh said. “I always thought I was a good person, but sometimes I did things that, when I look back at them now, I’m like, ‘That was questionable. I don’t like the person that I was. That wasn’t the best version of myself.’”
Apply that thinking to Jonah Hex, and the implications become considerably darker right away.
Hex has spent much of his history operating according to his personal understanding of honor and justice. Walsh was immediately interested in what happens when age starts breaking down the certainty behind said code.
“With Jonah Hex, I thought it would be interesting to put him farther down the road in his life and have him kind of reexamining his past because of things that are coming up in his present,” Walsh said. “It’s made him feel guilt over the things he’s done and feel remorse, and I think that’s a new direction for the character.”
That makes Shadow of Death sound remarkably close to a ghost story even before any literal monsters enter the picture. Hex has survived long enough to become haunted by his own history. At the same time, Walsh also doesn’t believe that Hex somehow thinks that salvation is waiting for him.
“I don’t think he believes he deserves redemption,” Walsh said. “I think that’s kind of clear at the beginning of the story. Very early on in the first issue, he says he thought he was going to die so many times throughout his life, and he’s almost always welcomed death.”
Hex has been cursed multiple times across his long history, and Walsh is tapping into that core mythology as his protagonist wonders how he’s been so “lucky” for so many dang years.
“He doesn’t know why he hasn’t died yet after all of the things that he’s been through, and he almost feels like he’s cursed to have to deal with his own history and his own past,” Walsh said. “There are moments now for him that he’d rather just let it all go and fade into the darkness, but he hasn’t been given that privilege yet.”
That dynamic ultimately lends Shadow of Death the potential as a final chapter in the long, sordid legend of Jonah Hex, whether or not it ultimately serves as said finale. This is a man staring backward as much as forward, with Walsh asking what remains after a lifetime built around violence.
Something Awaits in Ashecott
Hex’s internal reckoning unfolds as something far less metaphorical begins infecting the town of Ashecott.
Walsh is introducing new villains and mythology that will reach into the history of the larger DC Universe. His hope is that some of those same ideas might survive his own run and eventually be picked up by other creators.
While there are, indeed, supernatural elements in the first issue, Walsh intends to gradually reveal their larger meaning. The mystery itself draws heavily from folklore, including stories associated with early America, Irish immigrants, Indigenous traditions, and the recurring monsters that appear in different forms across cultures.
“There’s a different kind of vampire in all different cultures. There’s a different kind of werewolf in all different cultures,” Walsh said. “So I want to get to the root of this folklore and talk a little bit about how these campfire stories disseminate through time, and that feels very much like the Wild West to me, a bunch of people sitting around a campfire eating cowboy coffee and telling stories.”
That idea also provided Walsh with a useful tonal north star, adding, “I wanted this book to feel like a campfire story in a certain sense.”
Grounding all of this are Ashecott’s inhabitants. Walsh believes the supernatural can become increasingly strange as long as the people encountering it prove to be a kind of counterbalance. Walsh said there’s a “wider cast of characters within this town that feel real and lived in and hopefully truthful to how people lived in the Wild West…those characters will root the story, and you’ll feel the fear through their eyes.”
There’s also another major influence lurking around Ashecott, too: Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Walsh calls it one of his favorite novels, with Judge Holden ranking among the most terrifying antagonists he has encountered.
“The first time I read it, it absolutely decked me,” Walsh said. “I was on the floor just like, ‘Wow, this is the great American novel.’ I think the Judge is one of the most terrifying villains, antagonists of any book ever.”
Walsh isn’t looking to simply recreate McCarthy’s nightmare, but readers may still recognize some of its DNA.
“I wanted to mine that a little bit without going too on the nose with the Judge,” Walsh said. “But I think you can see that there are characters coming in this that are a little bit referential to that theory or that book.”
Making The West Truly Wild
The exaggerated personalities of Walsh’s frontier even extend to his visual approach.
Historical photographs gave him permission to push Ashecott’s population toward caricature. Faces are weathered, noses are large, features are distinctive, and very few people look actually glamorous. Walsh looked toward European comics and artists such like Spanish artist Jordi Bernet, along with the cartooning tradition of Western comics, while developing his distinctive cast.
“I wanted to play with that idea that each of these characters really feels different and stands out from each other on the page,” Walsh said. “Especially because with the West, a lot of the costuming is really similar. There’s a lot of people wearing cowboy hats and standing in shadow, there’s a lot of trench coats and a lot of cowboy boots.”
That then pushed him away from some of the realism of The Silver Coinand Exquisite Corpses, moving into more “playful” territory.
“I really set out with the goal that I wanted to do a lot more cartooning and feel like I was having a lot more fun,” Walsh said. “This is a hard horror book, but I wanted to Disneyfy some of the characters, make them feel like their character models were really exaggerated and make them stand out that way.”
As part of that, Griffin’s colors lend a major assist, helping to establish a horror Western that has room for darkness without sacrificing the expressive quality Walsh wants from all of these characters.
The Horror Character Hiding Inside Hex
There is something fitting about Walsh arriving at Jonah Hex right now in time and his overarching career.
The Silver Coin let him explore horror across genres and time periods. Exquisite Corpses gave him a laboratory for building killers, victims, mythology, and sustained suspense. Now, Shadow of Death offers him a character whose entire existence has been shaped by violence, isolation, death, curses, and the uglier corners of American history.
Maybe Jonah Hex was a horror character all along.
Walsh certainly sees plenty left to excavate. And while guns will inevitably remain part of Hex’s vocabulary, the first issue’s cover offers a hint that the old bounty hunter will be expanding his repertoire.
“You can see on the first issue cover, he’s holding an axe,” Walsh said. “I’m going to be introducing some new interesting stuff into Jonah Hex’s repertoire of violence, and that axe is gonna be a part of the story. And you’ll find out why as you read it.”
For a man who has spent most of his life sending other people to their graves, Jonah Hex and theShadow of Death may finally force Hex to confront what has kept him out of his own.
Jonah Hex and the Shadow of Death #1 is due out October 7. (The FOC is Monday, September 14.)
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