Walls and Bridges:
by Joel Meadows

01-02-06

I’ve been thinking a lot about westerns recently. Unfashionable for so many years, thanks to the success of HBO’s Deadwood, they are back in vogue. Their appeal to British audiences and readers is clear to me: We never had cowboys over here and so the Western whether it’s on the screen or on the page, exudes a sort of cool exotic charm to us in much the same way that the latest Jane Austen film adaptation captures the imagination of US audiences. So I thought it would be a good time to take a look at two new titles put out by DC: Loveless and Jonah Hex. Loveless is published under DC’s Vertigo imprint and when it was announced, the omens that it was going to be a superb read were very good indeed: writer Brian Azzarello is responsible for the consistently brilliant hardbitten crime series 100 Bullets and artist Marcelo Frusin finished a very solid run on Hellblazer last year. Azzarello is born to write crime and westerns and the first two issues of Loveless, set during the American Civil War, illustrate this to great effect. Loveless is cut from the same cloth as Clint Eastwood’s The Beguiled and the spaghetti westerns and brings us Wes Cutter, a man attempting to reclaim his land from the Union soldiers who stole it. Frusin’s wonderfully atmospheric art works as an elegant counterpoint to Azzarello’s sometimes vicious dialogue. Loveless deserves to be a huge hit if the first two issues are anything to go by.

Jonah Hex is published as part of DC’s main product line but it’s no less intelligent and ambitious than Loveless. Writing team Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti have surprised audiences over the last few years with their measured and stimulating writing on titles like 21 Down, The Monolith, Hawkman and The Resistance. Jonah Hex brings back DC’s seventies western character and, with the aid of artist Luke Ross, gives us a welcome slice of cowboy action. Ross’s coloured pencils give the series an almost faded look and his contribution here shouldn’t be overlooked. Unlike Loveless, each issue is self-contained but Grey and Palmiotti have a very good handle on Hex and again Jonah Hex is a title that deserves accolades and decent enough sales to prevent it from staggering through its first year before an untimely end.