I’ve never read “Jonah Hex”, and my only exposure to “Generation X” was that awful TV movie. Clearly I’m not the target audience for “Generation Hex”, but it’s the next stop on our journey through Amalgam Comics anyway.
The best I can do without embarrassing myself is to tell you that this combines miscellaneous DC western heroes with various Marvel mutants. Rather than make a fool of myself by trying to put names to these people, I’ll just let you take a look at the roster and decide for yourself.
This is a DC production written by Peter Milligan, pencilled by Adam Pollina, and inked by Mark Morales.
The plot
The first act of the book tells the story of Jono Hex as a boy. He and his parents moved to the western town of Humanity, where they were treated poorly for being “malforms”, the 1800s word for “mutant”. Because of the town’s bigotry, Hex’s mother died from lack of medical care and his father was burned to death when some children set his house on fire. In anger, Jono’s malform powers swelled up and burst out of his jaw, scarring his face.
In act two, Jono is an adult leading a band of malform outlaws who call themselves “Generation Hex”. No descriptions of their crimes is given other than Marshal Bat Trask calling it a “reign of terror”. To stop them he lays a trap using a train carrying money. When Generation Hex tries to rob it, they find some steampunk sentinels inside.
Thereafter follows a very slow, very boring chase. Generation Hex rides away as fast as they can, not stopping until their horses were nearly dead. They prepare to sleep when they hear the sentinels coming on horses that are somehow not nearly dead despite carrying heavy robots just as far and slightly slower. So they ride until they think they’re safe. Then they hear them coming. Then they ride again. They hear them again. Eventually, Hex recognizes where they are.
Act three is when Hex returns to Humanity. His gang rides in without him first and terrorizes the town a bit without actually harming anyone. Then Hex rides in and “chases them out”, becoming the town hero. Somehow, no one notices that big, distinctive scar on his eye that marked him as a malform as a boy. Women throw themselves at him. Men offer him all the things they denied him as a boy. Hex warns them the malforms will return and tells them he has a plan to keep them safe.
Hex rides out and rejoins his… generation, I guess? Then he leads them back through town, where all the non-malforms have put on prosthetics and are pretending to be malforms too. They even changed their town sign to read “Welcome to Malform Town”. Hex loudly announces that everyone is a malform “like us” to his gang, so they ride on through to “find someplace else to terrorize.”
The town celebrates as Generation Hex leaves, but the sentinels arrive before they can remove their disguises. Hex watches the massacre from the hillside laughing, then he and his generation ride to Mexico.
What “Wizard” thought then
“Wizard” felt the second wave of Amalgam Comics had “more questionable” combinations, and this was their top example. Aside from the title pun, the base characters had nothing in common. Readers and retailers knew it, which is why this was near the bottom of Amalgam order rankings. Unforced errors like this were cited as the reason there would be no third Amalgam wave.
What I think now
Milligan set out to tell a morality play, but he needed more space to make it work. The whole story is horribly compressed in a way that leaves some plot twists contrived beyond believability. Why would an otherwise competent man think bigoted Humanity was a good place to settle down with his obviously unwelcome family? How could the people of Humanity be so clueless in Act three? First they didn’t recognize Hex as a malform himself despite the giant scar on his eye that tipped them off when he was a boy. Then a few hours later they see him leading the same group of malforms that attacked them. They don’t question this, nor do they ask themselves how dumb the malforms are to not recognize the town they were just in. None of these problems are insurmountable – the basic idea is fine. It just feels half baked.
Pollina’s artwork, however… I don’t know Pollina from anything, but based on his work here I would be hesitant to pick up anything else he worked on. In story, White Whip is described as beautiful. Pollina drew her like this:
The non-beautiful characters are even uglier, so maybe this is on purpose. People were ugly in the 1800s, right?
His storytelling is mostly fine. There’s a few spots where characters are indistinguishable, but I fault their lack of development in the script more than the art. The members of Generation Hex get very little dialogue, and even less time to show their malform abilities.
Bob Lappan’s lettering was done in an unpolished font, which evoked the time period well. You can see an example of it below, along with a pet peeve of mine:
See how the balloon from the top panel should be read between the balloons in the bottom panel? Personally, that really breaks the flow of the story for me. It’s not Lappan’s fault – this is the only solution given the script and the art. I’m not sure how if “Generation Hex” was done as full script or Marvel style, but either way this should’ve been fixed by editor Frank Pittarese.
I agree with “Wizard”: this was a sub-par effort, and I’ll go farther to say it was sub-par because everyone involved knew it was a one-shot. There was no pressure to sell a second issue, so there would be no consequences for phoning it in. If there had been a follow up, I wouldn’t give it a second glance.
