Broken Frontier

The Star Man has murdered lawmen across the west but what is Jonah Hex’s connection to this killer?

Saddle up with writers Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti as they spin another complex human drama with some Western trappings.

Jonah Hex has the tables turned on him when the man he is hunting captures him instead. This killer, dubbed "the Star Man" has been killing lawmen so it is quite a surprise when he shows kindness to Jonah instead of a bullet to the brainpan. The Star Man, however, shares a bit of history with Hex and the two may, perhaps, have even more in common because the Star Man is not what he seems.

After a few recent rather experimental stories using Jonah Hex to stretch the boundaries of the Western genre, Gray and Palmiotti here return to some more familiar ground. This issue is rooted a lot more firmly in human emotional drama. This is not to say that there are not elements that will buzz in the reader’s mind long after the comic is closed and stored away. Questions linger about the correctness of the Star Man’s crusade, about his own level of sanity and about the nature of obsession. The wonderful thing these two writers do, however, is allow those questions to dance lightly in the background. The reader can see them but is never smacked over the head with them in obvious fashion. The other nice thing is that Gray and Palmiotti allow said reader to draw his or her own conclusions about those questions – we know only where Jonah Hex stands on things.

Spanish comic artist Jordi Bernet also makes a return appearance here, penciling and inking this interesting tale. The intervening time between his previous work on Hex’s origin story and this tale shows that he has become a lot more familiar with this world. Although his work still contains some cartoony overtones it feels even more gritty and grounded than before. Bernet has really gotten a handle on Hex now and it shows in the way he draws the bounty hunter’s scarred visage and Confederate uniform and even how the background settings are treated.

In the course of over two years, Gray and Palmiotti have been constantly evolving Jonah Hex, both as a character and as a title. They experiment with form and genre and storytelling methods but this issue illustrates what they do best – tell gritty stories with fascinating characters. Good and evil sometimes mix to form shades of gray and this issue is nothing if not a good example of how haunting that kind of story can be.