Thursday, May 3, 2007

Jonah Hex and Other Western Tales #3 - Feb. 1980

While the books were of consistent quality, obviously DC's experiment at giving Jonah Hex his own digest series didn't work sales-wise, as this was the final issue.

The one minus this third volume has is it doesn't have another excellent El Diablo story by Neal Adams. But behind the excellent, unsettling cover (didn't Conan find himself in situations like this a lot?) by Luis Dominguez we've still got a nice collection of stories:

• Jonah Hex in "Killers Die Alone" by John Albano and Tony DeZuniga
 
A fun four-pager called "Turnabout" by Sergio Aragones and Gil Kane(!!) 
Outlaw in "Draw Death" by Robert Kanigher and Tony DeZuniga 
Jonah Hex in "Face Off with the Gallagher Boys!" by Michael Fleisher with art by Doug Wildey 
A 3-page(!) feature called "Town Tamer" written and drawn by Gil Kane
 Scalphunter in "The Black Seer of Death Canyon" by Michael Fleisher, Dick Ayers, and Frank Springer 
A horror-ish tale "The Night of the Snake" by Denny O'Neil, Gil Kane, and Tony DeZuniga 
Jonah Hex in "The Hangin' Woman" by John Albano and Tony DeZuniga

...and we end with a one-page feature "Frontier Justice" by Mike W.Barr and Mike Nasser. But not before one last nice back cover painting by Dominguez. And so we bid farewell to Jonah Hex, and his tiny, hard-to-read adventures!



3 comments:

Plaidstallions said...

that's one thing I noticed about the Hex digests (which I just purchased recently) they seemed more hard to read than most. I just blamed it on my eyesight.

Anonymous said...

I was never a big Jonah Hex fan, but I did pick up the recent b&w reprint of his early adventures, and have to say that the Doug Wildey story that appears in that book and in this digest is absolutely gorgeous.

Anonymous said...

For hard to read digests, I'd suggest the Spider-Man, GI Joe and Transformers Marvel put out in the mid-80s. Man, those things require an electron microscope to be able to decipher them.

I'm in the thinking that DC put out Hex and Sgt. Rock digests early on to try and grab an older market, figuring digests and paperback novels were relatively the same size. The novel spinner rack was a staple of many drugstores next to the magazine rack.


Chris