The Tearoom of Despair

Wednesday, February 4, 2026

Ornery, Dusty, and Gross: The Oddball Jonah Hex Comics of DC’s Vertigo Imprint

In the early 1990s, DC launched the Vertigo imprint on the back of years of comics full of sophisticated suspense – with long-running titles like Sandman, Hellblazer and Doom Patrol easily and obviously folded into the new mature readers line, keeping the cool kids coming back.

It was still finding its feet in the early days, though. Those first few months and years were full of wild experimentation, even if the tried and true tactic of ‘getting some British guy to write it’ didn’t always pay off. The line only really started to find its voice by embracing the sexy, with legendary editor Karen Berger and her crew deciding they wanted their comics smart and they wanted them attractive.

So they made comics that made all the goths feel a bit funny inside, and comics for the club kids who wanted to look at the bright pictures while coming down at dawn. There were, also, comics that made attempts at non-binary identification that can now feel horribly ham-fisted, but were genuinely progressive at the time.

However, one of the line’s first notable little hits didn’t just reject any kind of sex appeal, it took down its drawers and took a giant turd on the very idea. In fact, Joe R Lansdale, Tim Truman and Sam Glanzman’s revival of the classic Western character Jonah Hex were arguably the least sexy comics Vertigo ever published, revelling in filth and dirt to a truly disquieting degree.

And while a lot of Vertigo’s shambling early efforts now look like adolescent fumblings, the most ornery Jonah Hex comics of all still stand tall.

Hex was created in 1972 by writer John Albano and artist Tony DeZuniga as an obvious answer to the revisionist westerns that filled cinema at the time, with his history and character fleshed out by writer Michael Fleisher in a long run. Wherever he rode, people spoke his name in whispers.

The series was always a bit meaner and a bit weirder than your average cowboy comic, and lasted for a decade, long after more square-jawed cowboys like the Two-Gun Kid and the Lone Ranger bit the dust. It ended after a brief diversion into science fiction as DC comics hurtled towards its first big Crisis and then Jonah didn’t really have much of a place in the new DC universe. He became a legend and an easter egg and a stuffed corpse in a carnival. (No, really; the series ends by showing his corpse, stuffed, in a carnival. The 1980s could be surprisingly brutal.)

And then someone at DC had the bright idea of getting Lansdale and Truman involved.

Joe R Lansdale was – and still is – a prolific and talented novelist and short story writer, who has found vast depths in the dark hearts of men and beasts, and mined genuinely unsettling horror on the back roads and swamps of East Texas. A sly wit with a genuine touch for the macabre, the fantastical and the weird, he can write gritty crime novels that scar your soul and stories about the God of Razors at the end of all things.

By the time he started on Hex, Tim Truman had established himself with the violent pan-dimensional western comic book series Grimjack and was fondly known as one of the few creators to actually make a decent Hawkman comic, while the third indispensable part of the team came in the form of veteran inker Sam Glanzman, who always delivered on the shocking bloodshed.

When, in mid-1993, less than six months after Vertigo launched, Jonah Hex: Two Gun Mojo blasted on the scene, it was easily the grossest thing in the entire line. This was not the gorgeous intimacy of Peter Milligan’s Enigma and Shade comics, or the hot sweat of Rachel Pollack and Linda Medley’s Doom Patrol. There were no Constantine charms or the Endless possibilities of the Sandman’s family. It didn’t even have the seething repression of the Sandman Mystery Theatres.

Instead, Two Gun Mojo was just full of the ugliest people in the comics, with sweat and dirt and mud on every page. It does have Hex dosed up on drugs at some point, because it is a mature readers comic from the 90s, but his hellish trip stays mostly inside his ornery skull. A lot of people die very badly and the never-ending carnage brings instant flies and rapid decomposition, and the great bounty hunter Jonah Hex will literally hide in some manure if it’ll keep some bushwhacker from getting him while he sleeps. Assorted scum often accidentally shoot their own kin in the head.

The Truman/Glanzman team is one of the finest at this kind of grossness and, as a result, the old West never looked so moody. Truman’s line is always straight and clear, and that just gives you more detail of the mire.

Under their pen, Hex himself is grotesque. He is a tiny bit charming in his usually obvious manner, but is a world away from the rugged capability of Jessie Custer, or the fetish-wear fun of King Mob. His trademark scar isn’t just a weird thing in the corner of his mouth, it’s a chasm of flesh ripping up the side of his face, into a devilish red eye. His hair is lanky and filled with beads, and his greys haven’t been washed since the war. He stinks.

In fact, there is a stench and aroma to the whole comic, not least because the unfortunate souls who dwell within these pages are always commenting on it. Baths are rare and good laundry rarer, and body odor is almost drifting on the page. A lot of the stink in their first Hex comic comes from the walking corpse of Wild Bill Hickock, still walking around and still shooting his pistols, long after he left most of his brains behind on the floor of a Deadwood bar.

None of this is a criticism – it takes real skill to get that kind of dank mood out of lines on paper, and while Truman’s clarity really brings out the horror of the tale, there is some definite deep south dark humor. These are inventive, smart and really fucking funny comics. But they really ain’t sexy.

(Unless this kind of thing is your kind of thing. Good for you. No judgments here.)

Even though it was still fucking around with comics about Di Vinci and adaptions of the Tank Girl movie, Vertigo was well into the sexy two years later, with The Invisibles and Preacher underway, and Tim Hunter getting his faerie freak on. Animal Man and Black Orchid came to hot and heavy conclusions and a whole generation of geeky kids would give everything up for the heroes drawn by Phillip Bond in Kill Your Boyfriend – never realising that they’ll always be the Paul in that story.

But again, after Two Gun Mojo had been successful enough to be quickly collected, Jonah Hex came along to stink up the joint, with the truly repulsive second series, Riders Of The Worm and Such. Lansdale’s stories have often had the edge of the fantastical, and Hex stumbles into a proper science fiction story for the first time since his 80s adventures in the future. There’s worm people and lost underground civilizations and graffiti left by Cave Carson and Rip Hunter.

It’s still another gross experience, with plenty of filth. Oscar Wilde is in there, somehow, trying desperately to stir poetry in the hearts of Americans, but getting the tar beaten out of him by inbreeds and rednecks. There is the only real sex scene in this cycle of Hex, and it explicitly takes place on the grave of a dead cat, and a truly horrific home invasion yields even more terrible results.

The comic even gained some weird fame when Johnny and Edgar Winter sued the creators for the portrayal of the (definitely fictional, and in no way related to the Winter Brothers) characters, the Autumn Brothers. Lansdale said it was all satire and part of the story’s general pastiche of Texan music, but you almost can’t blame the Winters for taking such offense, when their analogues are thick as pigshit and have revolting tentacles bursting from their chests. (The case was thrown out of court.)

There was one final burst of this Hex in the last year of 20th century, when Vertigo were starting to look for a new direction while several legacy titles started to wrap up. The comics that would keep the imprint strong for another decade – Y: The Last Man, Fables and 100 Bullets – were still around the corner, but nobody seemed very interested in following the example of Jonah Hex: Shadows West.

It’s a relatively quiet final three-issue bow for the Lansdale/Truman/Glanzman Jonah Hex, with a lot of straight action and more absurd humor, with Hex is blasting away at a carnival crew to save a baby with the head of a bear. Jonah and his world is still as gross as ever, and still an outlier in Vertigo’s dreamy line-up.

And despite the consistent solidity of this interpretation, that was all the world got of this Hex. Lansdale and Truman worked so well together (and still do, with the artist providing spot illustrations for the writer’s Ned The Seal adventures as recently as 2019), but there was no more of this Jonah.

Shortly after the Two Gun Mojo series, they also produced a revisionist Lone Ranger – he gets his teeth knocked out by Tonto on page one - for Topps Comics that also embraced the weird, but didn’t quite have Hex’s truly grungy attitude. After Hex, Truman drew an adaption of Lansdale’s short story On The Far Side Of The Desert With Dead Folk for Avatar Press, with lots of dusty zombie carnage and grotesque undead nuns, kept fresh through the miracle of refrigeration.

As for Jonah, there was a movie that nobody ever needs to talk about ever again, and the character was revived with a new comic series in the 22nd century, led by writers Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray, who proved far more suited to short, weird western tales than long-winded superhero nonsense. But with glamorous artists like Darwyn Cooke, Moritat and Jordi Bernet on the character, they couldn’t help but make Jonah more palatable. He certainly doesn’t stink that much, and that era of Hex even ends with an unscarred Jonah literally sailing off into the sunset and given the most unlikely of happy endings.

The Jonah Hex of the Vertigo series had no sailboat in his future, he would be lucky to keep his skin away from roving Native Americans with legitimate grievances. His was a harsh world and he was a harsh man.

The entire Vertigo imprint itself faded away several years ago. Some sex appeal is still dripping off the pages of the books that remain in print, but any new reader who stumbles across this Jonah better be prepared to get dirty. And speak his name in whispers.

Tuesday, February 3, 2026

Sharp lines and wired figures: The legacy and influence of Martin Emond

Martin Emond didn’t want to be remembered just as a comic artist. He had a massive Calvin tattoo on his back, but the Kiwi artist thought comics were for geeks.

In his painfully short career as a working artist, Emond did do some fantastic comics, but he was an all-round incredible illustrator; having done gig posters and album designs – both for his own band Flame Job and for other local bands - and created designs for tee-shirts and hoodies for all the skater kids. Even now, decades later, his designs still somehow look fresh and amazing.

But – with all of those parts of his talent aside – if Marty Emond didn’t want to be remembered primarily as a great comic artist, he shouldn’t have produced a couple of hundred pages of idiosyncratic, mystifying and beautiful work. In that respect, this is his own fuckin' fault.

Emond’s comic art was always sharp, always propulsive, and always bouncing right out of the panels –full of ultra-thin and uncomfortably wiry figures, dealing mayhem at a thousand miles an hour; the velocity of their movement stretching out their anatomy and sneering at notions of gravity or general physics. The art was always so alive and fevered and absolutely fucking hilarious, showing very clearly that this brand of creativity was not a place for realism – this was a heavy trip into painted exaggeration, with a wicked sense of dark humour.

His work first started appearing at a time when British comic publishers were thirsty for comic book artists whose art was like Simon Bisley, who had just blown everybody’s mind with The Horned God. The comic book market was flooded with artwork full of heavy oils, trying to recapture the magic that Bisley had bestowed on the world, and that Frazetta had established even before that.

The best of the Bisley-esque boys managed to find their own styles and needs, getting around the editorial constraints to produce idiosyncratic work. They managed to find some real artistic freedom for a full-painted R18 edge while the big American artists were still mucking-about with variations on Spider-Man. But Emond certainly made his own mark, carving into the comic scene with a razor and leaving scar tissue still lingering here and now within the comics stratosphere.

Emond even stayed with the Bisley-style for a while; picking up many of the UK artist’s beautifully raw tricks, such as giving everything a soft and airbrushed sheen –smooth and rounded and three dimensional – often outright pastels shining right up off the page, before cutting it all up with the most jagged and heavily-inked lines possible (often exposing all the viscera beneath the surface). It ain’t easy creating senses of bulk and momentum in painted comics, and many of the Bisley followers of the time just got bogged down in the sludge of recreation and blending. Emond’s comics, however, blasted out of their painted constrictions with absolute glee.

Martin Emond was born in Scotland in 1969 and grew up in South Auckland, after moving to New Zealand as a kid. After traveling back to the UK in the early nineties, the left-handed artist blew onto the scene when he teamed up with the legendary Pat Mills for the most energetic series of Accident Man comics, appearing in the first few issues of the short-lived Toxic!

Emond came back to New Zealand from Britain after that 18-month visit, established a studio in central Auckland with Fred The Clown’s Roger Langridge, and got to work on White Trash – a concept that heavily showcased the slick anarchy of his art. A demented four-issue mini series first published in British indy comic magazine Blast!, then put out by Tundra in regular comic issues, it was later collected in a trade by an Auckland comic shop retailer who got sick of people asking him for it, before being republished in a snazzy new edition by Titan in the past decade.

Starring extremely twisted versions of Elvis and Axel Rose fucking up shit in a semi-apocalyptic hellhole, White Trash was written by Gordon Rennie and is full of absolutely gorgeous art - thick, deep colours that drag you into the page; Emond’s wiry, inked lines still clear and utterly confident, shining through the paint and always driving forward into a neon nuclear sunset.

At 128 pages, it’s the biggest body of work left behind by Emond, which is a terrible shame, but at least it’s 128 pages of beautiful mayhem. You could do worse.

Around the same time he was getting his freak on with White Trash, Emond drew a tiny amount of comics for the editors of 2000 AD and its side publications, including a Chopper one-off story in Judge Dredd Megazine #36 (v2) in 1993 that’s really something else; riding an insanely long board, his long ginger hair cutting through the air as easily as his board.

Written by a young Garth Ennis, the Emond comic is a simple 8-page story, an interlude between the skysurfer’s usual revivals, but it has a power and thrust that is often lacking in Chopper’s high-flying adventures. The use of color is just as sky-high as Marlon Shakespeare faces up to his past – thick, vicious reds for the blood left in his wake; searing yellow for the violence of the last Supersurf; hauntingly deep blacks for a final confrontation with death; and the bright, blue of a hopeful future.

And then Emond was off again, and in turn his strange work would show up in strange places.

He would be doing covers for Glen Danzig’s Verotik comics – the kind of comics that you 100% had to hide from your Mum – and then you’d see his work in an Axel Pressbutton comic for A1. You could then find his comics in an issue of Heavy Metal or Epic, or he would be off working on a mysterious something called Rolling Red Knuckles for a Japanese publisher.

It’s no surprise that one of the very few things he did for Marvel, other than the odd Punisher sketch, was a truly mind-bending cover for the publisher’s Woodstock ‘94 commemorative comic book, because there was no way his style was suited for anything else at the House of Ideas.

Unsurprisingly, a few Lobo comics were his highest profile comic gig in the US. The joke behind the Main Man really only works when it is taken to the total limits of gratuitous absurdity, and truly needs a real rock and roll artist. They occasionally got a good one, with creator Keith Giffen really digging deep for some of his Lobo comics, while a lot of the 2000 AD boys would show up for an issue or two. And sometimes they got an Ace.

Emond would do a couple of rare pages in a Lobo annual or special, and was given a couple of one-shots written by Alan Grant just as the general public’s interest for all things Lobo started to fade. But the artist got his own hooks into the Main Man, and his Lobo was as beefed up as you would expect, but also truly malevolent. Not just his usual hilarious wrecking ball, leaving gleeful carnage in his wake, but something properly evil and extremely dangerous to be around.

Emond’s brief glimpses of long-standing DC concepts are like nothing else. In Lobo The Brave And The Bald, Emond’s ectoplasmic Deadman takes Kelly Jones skeletal ideas about how Boston Brand works and amplifies it even further into even more grotesque skinniness, while a mean and muscular Etrigan the Demon - with all the charm of a WW2 tank - makes a short appearance in the Bounty Hunting For Fun And Profit one-off. A truly striking Spectre comic cover shows that Emond’s talents in this area went well beyond brainless mayhem, and he could have done a properly wicked comic starring all of DC’s supernatural miscreants.)

After years of comics full of extreme violence, Emond took his cartoon sensibility all the way back into fuzzy cuteness in the early 2000s, with his Switch Blade character, where unrelenting carnage evolved into something out of a 1930s animation studio high on the merriest of mescaline.

A mascot that appeared on more clothing and stickers and posters than comic pages, with just a handful of one-page strips and one single 7-page story, Switch Blade was always recognisably Emond’s work but with extra layers of unexpected cuteness. It’s all offset by that eternal sharpness – the title character’s hair is even more cutting than Chopper or Lobo’s – but this time that blade is aimed at the local community cop.

It was an enormously endearing character and overall concept with promises of a tight universe of memorable characters pulling together some kind of an adopted family from the harsh streets of the world. After all the blood and guts, Switch Blade seemed like the purest Emond comic creation yet. He poured his heart and soul into it, eager to get it out to the biggest audience he could.

Emond took his own life in his LA studio in 2004, shortly after signing a contract with a US company to turn Switch Blade into an animated series.

Comics are just a little less bright without him, but there are still some warm embers of influence seeping through into the world. Beyond the relatively small body of comic work, he has been a powerfully influential artist for streetwear labels with his still-lauded work for the Illicit brand, and punk kids skating down at their local bowl, all over the world, still wear the sort of designs that Emond pioneered.

In the tiny New Zealand comics scene, Emond’s influence has been immense. Artist Ant Sang devoted several pages of his excellent Shaolin Burning graphic novel to an extended homage to his old pal, (plainly stating that Emond was the best of them, and that it wasn’t even close). Hellboy universe artist Ben Stenbeck has his own style but has been inspired by Emond’s confidence in putting your art out into the world, even when you live on the arse end of the planet. Emond’s old studio mate Simon Morse – whose work has always had that same beautiful wiry intensity - moved into tattooing and now has an extremely flash and successful studio in central Wellington, (although he has also been promising some new Straitjacket Ninja comics for a couple of years).

Emond is still remembered in his home town for his passion, energy, and generosity towards other artists, as much as for the things he produced himself. That Emond will live on in their hearts forever, and the rest of us were just lucky we got to see some of it in his art.

The artist once told a friend that people felt bad because they were alienated and felt alone, but that everyone felt that way, so people really needed to recognize this collectively. And while it’s too easy to look at his art and scour for the darkness that sometimes filled his head, there’s something else there, even in the dopiest of Lobo drawings.

Martin Emond didn’t do things subtly and he didn’t do things quietly, but that was just to make sure you knew you heard that you weren’t alone. Even if you were just a total fucking geek.

Monday, February 2, 2026

‘Izzat so?’ - The unlikely innocence of Judge Dredd's Mean Machine Angel

One of the great dark jokes about Judge Dredd is that he doesn’t have that much of a rogue’s gallery, because most stories end with him just shooting the bad guys in the drokking face. Even the great psychopath PJ Maybe eventually found justice at the end of Dredd’s lawgiver, after decades of mayhem, murder and a reign as Mega-City One’s finest mayor.

The most notable exception to this rule is - of course - Judge Death and the other Dark Judges, who can’t be stopped with something as mundane as a bullet. Dredd can shoot them to hell and they will just keep crawling out of the grave to kill, over and over again.

There is one other villain who has constantly butted their way into Dredd’s orbit without being permanently dispatched, and that’s the mighty Mean Machine Angel. He’s a cyborg monstrosity who just kept on coming back, in dozens of stories over more than 30 years.

While Mean Machine’s longevity can certainly be attributed to the fact that he’s funny as hell and a fucking cool looking character, he’s also one of the few true innocents to cross paths with Dredd.

And in the harsh-but-fair (but mainly harsh) world of Judge Dredd, that innocence counts for a lot, and even leads to Mean getting the rarest of farewells.

Created by John Wagner and Mike McMahon – although it is notable that the late Alan Grant joined Wagner as Dredd co-writer at about this time - Mean Machine Angel first appeared in 2000ad prog 160 in early 1980, along with the other members of his murderous clan.

The main villains of the Judge Child Quest mega-epic, the Angel Gang were a homicidally ornery crew, quick to torture and murder, and fleeing into the galaxy with the Judge Child. Mean was the gang’s big heavy, with a metal skull that could headbutt anybody into oblivion.

It did not end well for the Angel Gang. Along with his Pa and brothers, Mean was quickly despatched once Dredd finally caught up with him, blowing himself up after getting his dial stuck on 4½, (an event that would keep happening to Mean with guaranteed hilarity).

The editorial and creator droids at 2000ad quickly realised that while dead usually meant dead in the Dredd universe, Mean was too good a character to let rot on the planet of Xanadu. When his long-lost brother Fink Angel came looking for revenge a few weeks after the epic ended, a significant part of the story was devoted to Mean’s origin.

It showed how he was a sweet, innocent young man who happened to be born in a family of the most ruthless scum, and they decided the only way to fix him was some dirty brain surgery, creating the psychopath with their brutality.

A year later and Mean was brought back to life by the Judge Child, and went on a rampage that never really stopped. He butted heads with Dredd multiple times and always lost the fight, but was never permanently dispatched, his misadventures almost always ending with him back in the padded walls of a psycho cube. He accompanied Dredd on several incursions into the Cursed Earth and had a few solo stories of his own, although he was always at his best when he went toe to toe with the law.

Mean Machine Angel only has four moods, all controlled by that thoroughly punk dial that has been soldered into his brain. On one, he’s surly; on two he’s mean; on three he’s vicious; and on four he’s downright brutal.

But like a lot of the wonderful freaks in Dredd’s world, his appeal has more sides to it than that. A lot of it is in how the man looks – such an incredible design from McMahon, with the claw arm, one bulging and red robotic eye, and the greatest of redneck sneers.

All the great Dredd artists – including Carlos Ezquerra, Ron Smith, Ian Gibson, Steve Dillon, Henry Flint – had typically powerful interpretations of Mean, while Simon Bisley’s amped-up look for Mean in the Judgment on Gotham crossover became the default beefy look for the character for the next decade.

It’s such a striking design, that it’s little surprise that it was one of the few things that genuinely worked in Danny Cannon’s misfire film adaption of Dredd in the 90s. His monstrous form - based on concept art by Chris Cunningham - gave the film a real kick of sci-fi absurdity, and was almost enough to forgive it for Dredd taking his helmet off 10 minutes into the film.

Another great appeal of Mean Machine is that he does tend to be very funny when he shows up in stories. While full of animal cunning that has kept him ticking, he’s not exactly a smart man, and is frequently getting up to all sorts of weird escapades.

The comic effect of his altered nature clashing with Dredd’s unbending strictness never went out of style, and that moment where he inevitably goes butt-crazy is always funny.

(It’s even arguable that Mean is an advocate for disability rights, as he spends almost all of his adventures with no arms. After his left limb is blown off by Dredd towards the climax of the Judge Child Quest, it’s never replaced and he just has that robotic claw and a stump. And it never slows him down or bothers him, he’s just as capable as anybody else. As long as he gets to lead with his head.)

All of this is obvious to anybody who has ever glanced sideways at a story with Mean Machine Angel in it, but the Judge Dredd strip is all about playing the long game, and all those tales of Mean’s misadventures over all those years have created strange depths.

Because one thing that slowly becomes clear is that Mean Machine Angel is a true innocent. He’s committed more crimes than anybody, but he’s not really guilty, because he’s mentally impaired, and it was done to him by his own goddamn family. Underneath that grizzled and harsh exterior, somewhere behind that metal plate he has for a skull, there is a kind soul.

Mean headbutts a shitload of people, some into absolute paste, but never anyone who doesn’t really deserve it. The people he pounds tend to be other scumbags, or dickheads, or arrogant arseholes who think they can easily push Mean around (before finding out that he has some kind of smarts they didn’t reckon on.)

Even Judge Dredd knows it would be wrong to summarily execute Mean, although a little light maiming may be necessary. The world of Mega-City One is a true nightmare, and terrible things often happen to good people, but the truly innocent have a chance.

Consider the case of Mrs Gunderson - another Wagner co-creation - a little old lady who is almost completely blind and deaf, and still tottering along happily. Gunderson is one of the very, very few people to survive prolonged contact with Judge Death and somehow walks through all the gunfire and other madness on a regular basis.

Mrs Gunderson might not look much like Mean Machine Angel, but it would be wrong to do either of them any real harm. It would be mean.

The last time we see Mean Machine Angel in a story by John Wagner, he’s given the quietest of exits from the series – all the aggression finally burned out of him, the dial removed, his monstrous claw replaced by a thin prosthetic limb. His endlessly optimistic son, who shares the rare gene of kindness in his bloodline, takes him in happily.

He’s done, he’s just another citizen and no threat to anybody. He’s another reminder to Dredd that even an Angel gets old, and isn’t a threat forever.

There has been another story since then by a non-Wagner writer, that has Mean turned back into a monstrous figure roaming the Cursed Earth again, but there was something so understated by Wagner’s version, that it’s easy to ignore.

Because there shouldn’t really be a blaze of glory ending for this damnable robo-hick. Just a quiet shuffle off the stage, where he can take the time to smell the flowers again. That’s all Mean ever wanted to do.

- This was originally published by The Gutter Review, and edited by the most excellent Chloe Maveal. The Gutter Review site doesn't exist right now, so I'll be reposting all the essays I did for it here in the Tearoom for the next week, because everyone must know how Mean Machine is really a big softy.