If people think Josh Brolin is playing a rightwing cowboy antihero onscreen this month — in W. — wait until they see his next role: DC Comics’ grim and frighteningly disfigured cowboy, Jonah Hex. And the current comic book series is now explaining (after decades) why exactly Hex wears a Confederate uniform.
I suspect the left-leaning writers (the same ones who turned the Freedom Fighters I love into living figures of mostly-left political satire in two miniseries) will depict Hex as more or less an anti-racist who wears the uniform as a (punk-like) deliberate effort to make himself a social outcast or something like that — but regardless, if we end up with a huge box office hit in a year or so featuring a loner Confederate while in the real world having a black president, that should make for some cautiously-written, irony-filled entertainment-section articles.
But speaking of p.c.: tomorrow I promise to write about Brown University (as part of my Book Selection entry, about David Lipsky’s Three Thousand Dollars), and I won’t mention comics again during the remainder of the Month of Horror, I promise.
There’s a blog called Matching Dragoons which is mainly about Jonah Hex but also covers old comic book ads and old comics in general. A recent entry reviewed the Jonah Hex’s appearance in the Jan. 1982 issue of Justice League of America.
ReplyDelete“I won’t mention comics again during the remainder of the Month of Horror, I promise. ”
ReplyDeleteThat sounds like a challenge to the rest of us– can we bait Todd into mentioning comics again, by saying stuff in a comments thread that he can’t resist responding to?
I don’t know if the confederate uniform will be as important when doing a film adaptation – the character is “unknown” as far as larger audiences go, so Neveldine and Taylor, the auteurs who made Crank and wrote Pathology, are getting a (mostly) blank canvass to work on. As long as they keep the facial scars, I think they’ll working safely within “the look” established for the character.
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