The latest issue of Jonah Hex, #61, features a character we haven't seen in many a moon: Hex's first wife, Mei Ling!

This story seems to take place shortly after they were married, traveling from someplace to someplace else.  (She mentions leaving behind her father and brother in San Francisco, but it's not clear that's where they came from.) 

In this story, she is still as committed as ever to making Jonah give up his gunfighting and brawling in favor of a peaceable way of life. However, in this incarnation, she's a butt-kicking babe who takes on a whole saloon of thugs who threaten them, and asserts that she's no delicate flower who needs protecting; she can take care of herself. Interesting ... 

I discovered Jonah Hex with this issue of Weird Western Tales, and read it and Jonah Hex off and on, but I didn't buy the title in earnest until I saw this cover:



The sight of Jonah Hex, of all people, getting MARRIED, was so outlandish, I HAD to buy it! 

I mean, what woman in her right mind would possibly marry HIM? Right in the story, one of Hex's cronies says to the two of them, "If somebody told me Jonah Hex was getting married, I'd have spit in his eye and called him a liar to his face!"

With that, I bought up every back issue I could find until I completed the run and started getting the new issues going forward -- and still do today.

As for Hex and Mei Ling, the course of true love, as they say, does not run smooth ... 

(Do I need SPOILER for a nearly 30-year-old story? If so, here 'tis. )

She would up leaving him after they settled for a time as farmers, and have harvested the crop, and he "accidentally" tosses aside a cigar that burns down everything. So how can he get the $500 to pay the bank by tomorrow? Three guesses and the first two don't count.

I wonder, however, what Mei Ling's presence means for today's Jonah Hex title, whether she'll be around and they'll start telling continued stories, or jump around as they always have.

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  • The "blood wedding" blurb on the #45 cover might be after Frederico García Lorca's play of that name.
  • I have a nice stack of Jonah Hex issues just sitting there waiting to be plowed through. Maybe this is the weekend for it...
  • I read Mei Ling's first appearance and she definitely needed protection but she saw something in Jonah, perhaps the man he could be instead of the man he had to be. She brought something beautiful into his life that he had been denied. And there was a racial aspect to as people commented that Hex could not "get" a decent (white) woman. Of course, being Mrs. Hex does have some advantages as no one in their right mind would get her upset if her husband was nearby.

    Though, IIRC, in Hex's "how-he-died" story, it was a Native American woman who was his wife.

    BTW, LOVED the Kubert cover! Did he ever draw a Jonah Hex story?
  • Philip Portelli said:
    I read Mei Ling's first appearance and she definitely needed protection but she saw something in Jonah, perhaps the man he could be instead of the man he had to be. She brought something beautiful into his life that he had been denied. And there was a racial aspect to as people commented that Hex could not "get" a decent (white) woman. Of course, being Mrs. Hex does have some advantages as no one in their right mind would get her upset if her husband was nearby.

    Maybe, but it seems that Jonah Hex is quite frequently challenged by people not in their right mind -- to their dying regret.

    Though, IIRC, in Hex's "how-he-died" story, it was a Native American woman who was his wife.

    Yes, "The Last Bounty Hunter" in Jonah Hex Spectacular (officially, DC Special Series, Vol. 1, #16, Fall 1979) introduced us to Tall Bird, his second wife, a Comanche Indian. It seemed that she was killed in that story, but she turned up alive in Secret Origins #21, December 1987, "The Secret Origin of Jonah Hex."

    BTW, LOVED the Kubert cover! Did he ever draw a Jonah Hex story?

    No, I don't recall that Joe Kubert ever did a Jonah Hex story. More's the pity; that would have been cool to see.
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