Palmiotti much?

Sometimes you accidentally end up reading a lot of stuff by a writer or creative team. Recently I have read and or bought what I feel is quite a bit of Jimmy Palmiotti. Fortunately for me this has been a so far very enjoyable thing.

You may recall that i gave a good bit of lip service to the recent Terra mini series that he wrote and Amanda Conner drew. I liked it a lot. I also just bought the floppies of the Superman, Supergirl Maelstrom mini, but I haven't read that yet.

This post is really all about Jonah Hex

Jonah Hex: Face full of Violence, Guns of Vengeance & Origins - Palmiotti, Justin Gray, etc. (DC, $12.99 each) - I had not read any of this latest incarnation of the scar-faced gun slinger. My older brother was a big Jonah Hex fan when I first got into comics way back when. He collected Jonah Hex and Black Lightning. I read his Jonah Hexes, as well as picking up some of the post apocalyptic Hex series, and some of the supernaturally themed stuff that I didn't care for. This series is mostly made up of 'done in one' stories. It's nice. You can pick up any of the books and flip to a story and have a complete little morsel that doesn't require you to have read much else to enjoy.

Palmiotti and Gray do a great job with the character, and a great job with the series. Jonah Hex is sort of like a Western version of the Punisher, if the Punisher also worked as a bounty hunter. He looks like a cold hearted bastard of a killer, and to some degree that's true, but that isn't the whole story with him. Like the Punisher, he has a mission of sorts, and a very real code that he lives buy and enforces. There are a lot of things he won't tolerate, and lord help you if you end up on the wrong side of him.

The fact the stories are generally stand-alone, does not mean that they don't tell an over-arching story, or that you don't have events that relate to one another from story to story. Quite the opposite, you do get a sense that the guy you are seeing is the same guy, that he has one history from story to story, and that events from the stories you see may matter in later stories. It works well for making a solitary character compelling and real seeming.

I am thinking that I will see if my Dad wants to have a look at this. He is very into westerns, and he used to read our comics when we had them laying around the house. I imagine he would like this a good bit, as well as Brubaker's Criminal.

If you like gritty and violent western action that is pretty well written and mostly well drawn (although somewhat inconsistently). I recommend picking up a copy and giving it a chance.