All Star Western #29

My dad would love this trip back into old technology!

I just received an email from my dad in which he asked me for my Social Security number for reasons. This is how he ended the email: "I need your Social Security number to set that up so give me a call when you have a chance (don't e-mail it to me I don't trust e-mail)."

This was my response: "How about I write it in code in invisible ink. Then I'll put it in a lockbox with a combination that will only open via voice recognition software on midnight of a specified date (which I'll send to you in coded bird whistles) in the heart of a graveyard. I'll send the lockbox by certified post. No wait. Can't trust the government. I'll hire a private courier who will take a pill which will kill him as soon as the box is delivered. I think that should be secure enough.

Crap! I sent the plan by email. Scratch that! I'll come up with something else!"

I think the email was actually just an elaborate plan by a parent to get his child to call him! He could have just emailed, "Hey! Call me sometime!" Or, God forbid, actually picked up a phone and called me himself. Hell, it might not have even been an email from my dad! Maybe Google cobbled together enough of my personal information and sent it itself to get my SSN! Did I miss a news report about Cyberdyne Systems buying out Google?

Hex and Gina have arrived back in the past and are about to be killed and/or kidnapped by Apache because Jonah Hex doesn't have his old face anymore. They're also not drawn by Moritat anymore which is really disappointing because I liked his style. Now they're being drawn by that guy who sung "Devil Woman" and "The Young Ones," Cliff Richards.

But like I noted last issue, Jonah proves he's Jonah by killing them all. Which is a pretty impressive feat seeing as how he's hip-firing dual six shooters and out gunning men with rifles at long range. According to the Boot Hill RPG, the negative modifiers on that kind of shooting puts his chances at less than zero percent! It's nearly as unbelievable as Boomerang blocking bullets with his, well, boomerangs! Maybe I shouldn't cross pollinate my DC commentaries with shit from my Marvel commentaries! People are going to think DC's Boomerang did that ridiculous bullet blocking feat! But don't worry! I meant the Marvel Boomerang and we all know how slow bullets move in the Marvel Universe so it's totally believable.

She had one job: Don't get shot! Jesus. Jonah can't time travel anywhere with Gina!

Since they don't have any alcohol or Ambien or opiate derivatives, Gina can't sleep with the pain in her leg. So she figures the next best thing is to listen to Jonah Hex tell her a story. What does she think is going to happen? That the steady lull of his voice will slowly carry her off to dreamland? More like he's going to tell her the most sordid, violent, gory story she's ever heard because that's just the kind of day in the life stuff that happens to Jonah! He doesn't have any stories where he played with a box of kittens and then had a nice bowl of ice cream before falling asleep in a comfortable bed with a cheap whore. If you change the kittens to rabid wolves and the bowl of ice cream to blood soaked spider eggs and the bed to an already occupied coffin and the comfortable sleep to desperately trying to remain quiet so he's not heard by all the fully armed outlaws playing poker on the casket, you might have a Jonah Hex story. The cheap whore can remain a cheap whore.

Jonah's tale is about a man telling Jonah a tale! And since Jonah began the story by saying storytellers were liars, I have to assume this man's story about his family being burned to death by Indians is also a lie. Just like whenever a white person commits some felony now, they say they saw a black guy at the scene, back in Jonah's time, the whiteys always blamed their own horrible acts on the Native Americans.

Or, since this is All Star Western, this guy is some famous DC Character that's basically the Dr. Kimble of the Old West.

Or he might just be an overreactionary dickhead like my high school friend Soy Rakelson.

Just like my friend Soy, this guy doesn't quite get it. It's not that there isn't a place for white Christian males. It's just that there isn't a place for racist, homophobic assholes who equate attacks against their backwards beliefs as attacks against their religion and race. Also, if your religion is homophobic or sexist or violent or ignorant or, let's face it, simply downright annoying, it deserves to be commented on and joked about and treated as silly and beneath contempt. Remember, you're still free to act like a douche! My well informed opinion that you're a douche is not oppressing you. Hurt feelings because somebody made a joke about Jesus is not oppression. Having to hear that some people don't believe in God is not an attack on your faith. Men fucking other men is not going to cause you to want to fuck other men. Unless you actually do want to fuck other men. And then you're going to see how sweet it is and, the next morning, you'll have to apologize to your Christian God. Or the Jewish part of the Christian God. Maybe the Allah part of Yahweh? So confusing!

This guy points out that since his family was killed by Indians (he actually says "savages" so if he meant a different non-white ethnicity like "Mexicans" or "Irish," I apologize to the Native Americans for jumping to conclusions), that gives him a right to kill anybody that looks kind of like the people that killed his family. Seems fair.

Jonah Hex is trying to bring this immigrant in for killing Americans on American soil. But this guy just wants to cloud Jonah's mind with philosophical bullshit and inequitable analogies. He's just trying to stall and to save his life because who wouldn't? The guy kills innocent people and he's trying to compare himself to Jonah who kills people who kill innocent people. Jonah also might have a history of killing people that may have been innocent of everything except the one mistake they ever made: pointing a gun at Jonah himself. But sometimes life goes that way. You can live a perfect life and then you make one mistake and it's over. Not everybody gets the luxury of a second chance. Especially if you expect that second chance to come from Jonah Hex.

The man's bullshitting serves its purpose as his son comes out from the trees and gets the drop on Jonah. He must have snuck up on the bad side of Jonah's face.

I should probably quit saying shit. That last caption probably cost me half a dozen followers alone! If you include that with all the Irish that were upset by my "non-white" ethnicity comment and those upset that I was so disrespectful and sassy to my dad, you'd have to say I'm on a pretty decent roll here.

Once this family gets Hex digging his own grave, they decide to smoke Jonah's tobacco while regaling him with the real reasons behind their slaughter of Native Americans. It won't surprise anybody that they're doing it because they feel the white man is losing his place of authority and power. It's also no surprise that they think that place is due somehow to a white god having given them a special kind of righteousness to rule over the other races. And it's just this kind of comic book propaganda against this kind of thinking that's making white supremacists look bad! How dare the liberal media judge people that judge other people? So you can't make racist jokes but you can write a comic book making white supremacists bad guys? If only Soy Rakelson were dead, he'd be spinning in his grave!

I don't mind that this guy is against Native Americans getting even one tiny portion of their land back or freed slaves being allowed to vote or giving celestials the right to wearing queues or letting women speak their mind but when he says that apathetic people are a part of the problem, well that's when I realize he's gone too far! Actually, I don't care about that either. The thing that really makes me dislike this guy is that he's a breeder! I can't believe he brought another racist dick into this world!

But the real downfall of these men is their vice of smoking.

Hex wouldn't have taken me out with this trick! First off, I don't smoke. Second off, I'm totally into this kind of trip!

Jonah's story ends when the Apache he brought with him get their revenge on this man and his son, bringing truth to his lie but not exactly in the way he would have liked. Not that he would have liked his family to have been killed just to make his lie the truth!

I think she's known him long enough to have known better. You brought that on yerself, Gina.

The next day turns into three long days and nights with no food or water. They didn't prepare very well for traveling back in time. Or Booster Gold was a dick and could have transported them to an urban area. But what's done is done and past is past and when Hex and Gina do find shelter and sustenance from a Native American woman and her child, it's too late. Gina falls down dead.

She couldn't last more than three days in the past? What a weakling!

That was just my elementary school bravado masking my true feelings of worry that Gina might really be dead since she doesn't really fit into Jonah's world. Did Jonah learn CPR while he was in the future?

All Star Western #29 Rating: No change. For a, to quote Gina, "blood-spattered racist murderfest of a campfire story," this was pretty good! I'm not a fan of the art. It's just too middle of the road and run of the mill and other cliché phrases that mean average. As for Hex, he continues to be my absolute favorite DC character. For realsies this time. All the other times I say somebody is my favorite, I'm using hyperbole. I actually mean it when I say Hex is my favorite because Hex is practically just like me. Except all the superficial things about him like how he kills people!