pax du crop

As some of you know, there's a piece of good news, although I won't be able to announce it officially for another week. But if you see me looking kind of happy, there's at least a reason for it. And if you see me looking snappish and distracted--well, that's just me being me. (Actually, it's probably because my ear popped into "blocked" position as our plane was descending last night, and has not yet unblocked.)

While I was in New York (killing time while Sterling dozed next to his new present, a stuffed life-size komodo dragon in brilliant metallic red, courtesy of Liz Gorinsky--it's at least four times his size), I read Showcase Presents: Jonah Hex, vol. 1, a fat paperback collection of the early-'70s stories starring a horribly scarred bounty hunter in the post-Civil War West. (Jonah Hex's series has just been revived, doubtless because of Deadwood--same reason Loveless-the-comic exists. DC/Vertigo seems to be taking a lot of cues these days from HBO's original programming. The pitch for The Exterminators is "Six Feet Under but with cockroaches." The Sopranos = Bite Club, Oz = Hard Time, Sex and the City = DMZ, etc.)

Anyway: it's patchy and repetitive and formulaic and the troweled-on dialect bounced up and down on my nerves, and I couldn't stop reading it anyway. I love how John Albano and Michael Fleischer set up big revelations and then switch them out at the last second for other big revelations or decide they aren't important, and I really love how dusty and grubby the artwork looks. I really hope the reprint series continues--I want to find out the rest of the life story Fleischer keeps hinting at (let's just ignore Hex, shall we?), & have never read the Jonah Hex Spectacular I've heard so much about.

But I also hope the reprint series concentrates on the actual Jonah Hex stories from now on. The last hundred-odd pages of this one are reprints of a couple of ill-conceived, short-lived series from, I think, All-Star Western around the time Jonah was introduced. "Outlaw" only lasted four or five episodes, and I can't tell if the twist three pages before the end of the final one was planned from the beginning--it might've been, but by that point the premise has worn so thin that it collapses more than it really concludes. And "Billy the Kid"--well, there were only ever three episodes of that one, probably because someone realized that every episode was going to end with exactly the same twist.