Jonah Hex: cowboy, bounty hunter, killer, survivor (of a pretty bad Josh Brolin movie) — DC’s Wild West antihero has spent so much of his existence in comic books pulling the trigger without remorse.
But for writer Michael Walsh, that made Hex an unusually fertile subject for existential horror. His new DC book, Jonah Hex and the Shadow of Death, takes the character into supernatural territory where guilt and more literal specters splash across the pages.
Quoth DC’s official summary:
In a small town called Ashecott, something evil has arrived. Something more dangerous than a gunslinger, more sinister than an outlaw, and older than the town it seeks to infect. Something from a world beyond the only one its victims have ever known. Something darker. Unfortunately for that evil, Jonah Hex has taken notice. Not just of the otherworldly entities surrounding his home or the child with mysterious abilities they seek to capture—but also of the chance to finally redeem himself.
On the wavelength of Something Is Killing the Children or Walsh’s own collab with James Tynion IV, Exquisite Corpses, Jonah Hex and the Shadow of Death is highly graphic without being gory — it’s a DC book, after all. But from the opening panels, it should be clear to readers that what Walsh and colorist Toni-Marie Griffin have achieved here, merging words and colors and jagged lines, is a more intensely intimate experience than most of what we see from major publishers. Their advantage isn’t obvious.
The colors, Duke, the colors
Walsh and Griffin are approaching the book as both collaborators and spouses, making the comic from the same home where they are also raising their young son. It gives their partnership an unusual immediacy; Walsh can be drawing a page, glance downstairs, and ask Griffin what she thinks about a color idea. Griffin can build a palette, turn around, and get an answer without composing a 1,000-word explanation of what she’s trying to do.
“Instead of sending this long-winded email trying desperately to explain myself, I can just nudge Toni’s shoulder,” Walsh says. “And we can kind of like watch as things progress.”
That back-and-forth is particularly important in Shadow of Death, because the book’s horror isn’t simply a matter of putting monsters in a Western, and the book’s themes likely wouldn’t have emerged without the day to day work of parenting (which, as anyone with kids knows, is full of self-reflection and guilt). On the art side, Walsh and Griffin are building an emotional vocabulary for the supernatural, allowing the comic to move between the dusty physical world of the Old West and something stranger. Walsh’s line work draws heavily on texture: rough wood, rock, earth, and the “craggy roughness” he associates with the frontier. He also uses Ben Day-style halftones, an old comics printing technique, to create values between black and white and give his figures additional shape and dimension.
Griffin then pushes against that earthy foundation with color that defies the “rules” of a traditional Western. Her palettes begin with the expected oranges, browns, and desert warmth, but supernatural intrusions arrive in colors that feel almost offensively wrong for the landscape: bright purples, pinks, strange greens. “I just really wanted stuff to feel odd,” Griffin says.
“It’s the mix of having warm tones and then this one singular cool tone on a page that feels so out of place and otherworldly,” Walsh explains. “And I think that’s what makes it feel really unsettling.”
Griffin also creates watercolor textures specifically for the book. When Hex is simply moving through town, those textures can remain subtle and organic. When the supernatural arrives, the surface of the comic can change with it — watercolor becomes splattery, almost unstable. Blood spills, and so do the colors.
A horror book with a growing mythology
Each artist brings a swirl of influence to Shadow of Death. Walsh loves body horror and gore, citing David Cronenberg, John Carpenter, Stephen King, Ari Aster, and newer horror like Titane and Raw among his influences. Griffin is much more interested in thrillers, atmosphere, and the visual language of horror. When they watch a movie together, Walsh might be studying the creature design while Griffin is admiring the hues in the background.
For Jonah Hex, that difference is useful. Walsh has to work within DC’s PG-13 boundaries, which means he can’t simply rely on the gore that powered some of his R-rated work on Exquisite Corpses and The Silver Coin. Instead, he has to make the reader wait. “It forces me to be really creative,” he says, describing the restrictions as a way to explore creature design, supernatural imagery, and pacing rather than defaulting to blood.
I have a lot more stories to tell in this world.
And underneath all of that is the revisionist Western’s oldest horror: the possibility that a man who thought he was righteous was wrong. Walsh says he wanted to imagine what happens when Hex finally has time to sit with the people he killed and question whether they deserved it. That idea connects the supernatural nightmare in Shadow of Death to a much older kind of Western reckoning: the gunfighter discovering that surviving your past doesn’t mean escaping it.
For now, Walsh and Griffin have six issues to tell this particular story. But Walsh already sees a much larger mythology taking shape, potentially a three-act story spanning multiple arcs and new corners of the Wild West. “I have a lot more stories to tell in this world,” he says.
If DC lets Hex ride beyond those six issues, Griffin has already seen what’s coming. “It’s about to get way more creepy,” she says.
Jonah Hex and the Shadow of Death #1 hits stores on Oct. 7.