I didn't read Jonah Hex during the initial run. I wasn't alive for a lot of it, but when I found Lansdale's rendition, I had to hunt down the originals. I loved it, even though it was a western, not the weird western that Lansdale gave us. (Which is funny considering Jonah Hex regularly appeared in a comic called Weird Western Tales before handing the reins to Scalphunter.)
Imagine my horror when I read the last issue only to discover Hex, in which our antihero is transported to the distant future where he has SF adventures, laser blasters and all. It turned my stomach, but because I'm a completist, of course I read it. I found that it was almost entirely useless as a story.
Almost, but not quite. Because the final issue gave us clues as to Hex's fate. While he was still trapped in the future (and don't get me started on the more recent ones where he's hanging out in modern day Gotham City), he found something . . . interesting . . . in a warehouse. It proved that eventually he would get home, but it still did not bode well for him.
Hex found his own taxidermied corpse, posed like he'd just done a fast draw. How fucking cool is that? The series was worth it for this and this alone. And it was canon. When they revived Jonah Hex years after Lansdale's turn, they referred to his demise a few times. Hex's body traveled the carnival circuit, which isn't all that far fetched. Americans historically love displaying criminals' corpses. Think about how many visitors Dillinger got in that Chicago morgue, how many pictures were taken as souvenirs. In the Wild West it was common to have postcards of dead gunfighters, usually still holding the guns with which they plied their trade.
Imagine my surprise when I found out about Elmer McCurdy. He wasn't necessarily a Wild West outlaw. He came along a little too late for that, although he might have had a run in with Bill Tilghman of You Know My Name fame. When the cops gunned him down, the mortician refused to release the corpse without having his services paid for. When he realized he'd never recoup the loss, he dressed McCurdy's corpse up and put a gun in his hand and put him on display. Before long the corpse had been sold . . . to someone traveling the carnival circuit. McCurdy passed from owner to owner before being more or less abandoned in a warehouse. The only reason we know his story is fucking insane, especially if you're like me and were raised on stuff like The Six Million Dollar Man.
While filming an episode, a propman accidentally broke the arm off a mannequin . . . only to discover an actual human bone poking out of the "wound." They called the cops, and after doing some digging they discovered the truth about Elmer McCurdy, who somehow inspired one of the weirdest Jonah Hex stories ever. Well, weird yet still staying within the realm of the possible, that is.
He was buried in the Boot Hill section of an Oklahoma boneyard, appropriately, but if you want to see the man who entertained carnival goers for decades . . .
