From the longbox: Jonah Hex issue 50

It's a tricky tightrope to mix dark, heavy story with bright, cartoony art in comics. Series like The 'Nam and Queen and Country - about Vietnam and British espionage, respectively - are still debated in fanboy circles as to whether the art complimented the story or was a speedbump to its enjoyment. And Queen and Country personally took me a little effort before I came to appreciate the various pencillers and the almost Disneyesque art approach the book took even as it told stories of spies and the ruins of their personal lives.
In the same vein, I can see some people having trouble with the art of Darwyn Cooke in Jonah Hex #50 (DC Comics, Dec. 2009, $3.99). Cooke, whose work looks like a cross between Ditko and Harvey Comics, is best known for his retro projects like New Frontier (which retells the DC universe story in the 1950s) and his mid 2000s relaunch of the classic Spirit character, also for DC. Cooke's art has a decidedly Silver Age feel, with clean lines, little shading and eyes a little bigger than life. All of which makes it an interesting choice for the 50th issue of the latest Hex series. The Old West bounty hunter antihero - known for his horribly scarred face and always wearing remnants of a Confederate uniform - dates back to the early 1970s. The 21st century relaunch of the book by DC, written by Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti, is notable for its constant bleakness and refusal to give Hex any redeeming qualities. He's a humorless, remorseless killing machine. In issue 50, we see the story of Hex and Tallulah, a female bounty hunter who similarly is facially scarred (she also has an eye patch), with whom he had a child. And in the course of the story, we see several dozen killings, one dog kicking, a baby cut out of a pregnant woman - Tallulah - and a final image of an infant-sized coffin. Fun for the whole family. If your family watches Leaving Las Vegas together.
A saving grace of the book is the levity in amidst all the darkness. The single panel of Hex with a lit cannon pointed at an occupied outhouse like some kind of weird Roadrunner cartoon bit, an arched "are you kidding me?" eyebrow of a prostitute Hex gives to a grizzled prospector type for information. All those moments come in the first half of the book, the second being about the collapse of the domestic idyll Tallulah had tried to create and then Hex's search for their infant kid and the climactic gunning down of a huge collection of fugitives for whom he was searching.
Another saving grace is the fact Hex is always fascinating to watch, just like any skilled tradesman. His trade in this case being riding and shooting and chasing down people roughly as bad as him (though history is written by the winners). While there's no easy simplistic "good guys winning" motif here, the book would quickly become unreadable if not for the audience's realization that. as horrible as life is in this largely lawless universe where the good men and women who make up the background characters routinely suffer and die miserably, at least the villains regularly get the comeuppance. I need to get some trades of the Gray/Palmiotti run. I imagine they will become well thumbed.