"He had no friends, this Jonah Hex. But he did have two companions. One was death itself ... the other, the acrid smell of gunsmoke."
That's the tag line for a certain scar-faced bounty hunter who debuted in DC Comics in 1972 and premieres on the silver screen Friday. But while Jonah Hex's first and last names indicate bad luck, the Josh Brolin-Megan Fox vehicle could be good luck for all of us.
Jonah stars in the best Western comic book I've ever read, an eponymous monthly written by Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti and drawn by top-drawer artists. I asked Palmiotti to describe the character for movie-minded audiences.
"Jonah Hex is a scarred bounty hunter set in the Old West right after the Civil War," he said.
And, of course, Hex was on the losing side. That's sort of a pattern for the star-crossed Hex of the comics: His mother ran off with a traveling salesman and became a prostitute, his dad sold him into slavery at age 10, the Apache scarred him for a crime he never committed and fellow Confederates despised him for a betrayal that didn't happen. He became a lone bounty hunter feared throughout the West for his cunning, determination and sheer ruthlessness.
So is Hex a good guy or a bad guy?
"There is nothing cut-and-dried about the character," Palmiotti said. "I believe him to be fair and impatient; a drunk and hardly ever charming, and holding a lot of anger and disappointment and resentment toward the human race. But overall, I think there is a fair man in there somewhere that understands the difference between right and wrong -- and chooses whatever may work for him at the time. To me, he is a good guy ... with a bad attitude."
That attitude will be on display in the movie, although there will be some changes in Jonah, including a touch of the supernatural. Palmiotti said he and Gray were consulted on the film, but ultimately the moviemakers "had their job making the film and we had ours writing the book, and that was fine."
