OneMetal.com REVIEW:
Jonah Hex: No Way Back

DC and Warner Bros. Pictures tore up the wild west with their misfire Jonah Hex flick, which stars Josh Brolin, Megan Fox, and John Malkovich. In anticipation of the summer snooze, artist Tony DeZuniga hitched a spot on Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti’s writing team, and together the three whipped out the first-ever Jonah Hex original graphic novel. Does the comic fare differently than its Hollywood counterpart, or does the gun-slinging vigilante take center stage in a story about as interesting as a colony of prairie dogs?

I’d choose those grassland rodents any day of the week. Jonah Hex: No Way Back follows the DC icon as he traipses across the Nevada landscape in search of his long lost mother Virginia “Ginny” Dazzleby, who resorted to prostitution after abandoning a young Jonah and leaving him in the hands of an abusive, drunken father. Recounting influential moments throughout the character’s past, the book eventually forces Hex into a standoff against the savage El Papagayo and his gang of Mexican bandits.

The comic mashes together some coarse art that, while successfully bottling that classic old time feel and the personality of the rugged Hex, pins itself into some laughable situations. Characters aren’t always looking the directions they should be, and instead DeZuniga poses them unnaturally on the page. The result washes together in a sloppy mess.

At least the visual quality matches Gray and Palmiotti’s storytelling. The hackneyed tale of the misogynistic, cussing, trigger-happy outlaw who saves the day despite all his unlikable shortcomings proves why Jonah Hex isn’t a top-seller in today’s age: Readers want a sympathetic character, or at minimum, an anti-hero they can put their weight behind. The flashes into Hex’s childhood traumas afford him little depth, and when a reader starts rooting for the slightly less despicable villain—even after the unnecessary throw-in of animal cruelty—that’s when a writer has dug himself a troublesome hole. As the homely folk of Heaven’s Gate say, “Excuse us, mister, but there’s an awful stink coming from your wagon.”

Perhaps the comic’s single redeeming factor rests with the explanation of Hex’s facial scarring, a side note that the writers leave more to campfire stories and fantastical workings of the imagination than any definite act of brutality.

No Way Back stinks of unappealing cliches and boyish trivialities, and to top it all off, Hex, who somehow manages to attract various women in this book despite his classless demeanor and lousy table manners, earns the climactic victory by destroying the purity of a tranquil town full of honest, good people. Somebody call the sheriff (and speaking of him, rock that gaudy Jesus Christ tattoo, preacher).

Bottom Line

Wanted dead or alive, we'll tie Jonah Hex: No Way Back to the tracks, and never look back again.