Trade Post: Jonah Hex Bullets Don't Lie & Hack/Slash Vol. 2

With all the Halloween Scene goodness throughout October and my recent unemployment/attempt to make it as a freelance writer has limited the number of trades I'm reading. To try and put a dent into the two longboxes of trades taking up way too much space in my closet, I started just grabbing blindly and came up with these two trades, both of which I liked, but didn't necessarily love. Hit the jump for both reviews!

JONAH HEX: BULLETS DON'T LIE (DC)
Written by Justin Gray & Jimmy Palmiotti, drawn by Paulo Siqueira, Jordi Bernet, Darwyn Cooke, Mark Sparacio, J.H. Williams III & Rafa Garres
I am a huge fan of the Jonah Hex comic. I got into it while at Wizard, went back and read all the back issues and trades. There are three big reasons why I keep coming back to Hex and his crazy western adventures (this is my first Western label!). One, Hex is just a badass. I'm not a big fan of westerns, but Gray and Palmiotti have such a handle on Hex's badassness that he feels really consistent, even when he helps some kids and doesn't help others. The second reason is that I love the (mostly) one-off format that the book is written in. Right now, we're being treated to the book's first 6-issue story which brings a lot of past stories back around to bite Hex in the ass. In a comics world where you have to remember one storyline for a minimum of six months, it's very refreshing to only have to remember "Hex is a bad ass killer," instead of "Wait, how many Avengers teams are there?" The third reason is the staggering amount of fantastic artists this book pulls in. This trade boasts J.H. Williams and Darwyn Cooke, two fine artists, but it was the work of guys like Jordi Bernet and Rafa Garres that really blew me away.

Now on to this trade in particular which covers issues 31-36. One of the problems with the series is that it can tend towards incredibly wordy, as is the case with the Darwyn Cooke issue. It's about a kid whose dad dies up in Canada and Hex comes around and saves him for a bit before abandoning him. It's a pretty simple story, but one that definitely has an emotional center. The thing that might turn new readers off, though, come in the form of these huge, dense blocks of text both in narration boxes and dialogue from the boy's dad before he dies. It was an issue like this that actually put me off the Hex bandwagon for a short period of time. Normally, I'd say you can hand anyone any of the collections of Jonah Hex and they'd be fine, but I would suggest maybe not giving them Bullets Don't Lie for the reason that it can be a bit dense. THOUGH, if they're big art fans, you can't go wrong with this trade, so just know your noobie reader.

HACK/SLASH VOL. 2 DEATH BY SEQUEL (Devil's Due)
Written by Tim Seeley, drawn by a ton of people
Hack/Slash is the kind of comic book that seems like it should be right up my alley. It's about a cute chick and a big lumbering monster going around killing slashers and other horror movie villains. My experience with the book has been scatter shot at best, and as it turns out, is mostly collected in this volume (which collects The Land Of Lost Toys, Trailers and Slice Hard minis and one-shots). The Land of Lost Toys story is pretty interesting, with a spoiled demon kid killing other people in their sleep with dreams of their favorite toys. As a big toy guy, it was cool to see slightly altered versions of some of my favorite 80s toys like He-Man and Thundercats. Trailers was a one-shot consisting of several few-page stories that act as trailers for Hack/Slash movies with different artists. Then Slice Hard involves a cosmetic company who captured a number of slashers to figure out how they stay so young/come back from the dead. Of course that goes wrong.

I enjoyed the stories as a whole, though I had already most of them and remembered most of the bits and that cosmetic company thing is a brilliant idea. My problem with this volume is that the art is so incredibly inconsistent. Sometimes it looks stellar (and I'm not talking about the Trailers stuff, which was all pretty solid, just the regular issues) and then you'll turn the page and it's just bad. Figures don't look in-scale with their surroundings or just look very rough. It's really disappointing and takes me out of the story.

There's been word for years about Hack/Slash becoming a movie. In fact, the version of the trade I have (which differs from the image above) has an above-the-logo line that says "Slated to be a major motion picture from Rogue Pictures." That came out in 2007. I have no idea what the deal with the movie is, but I hope they get a good writer and director on it and really knock the hell out of this concept. It kind of reminds me of Scott Pilgrim, a book that I like, but felt like the first volume had a TON of pacing problems. When I heard Edgar Wright would be working on it, I was really jazzed because I figured he would improve on the source material while also bringing all the elements that make the book awesome to the screen. I'd like to see Trick r Treat writer and director Michael Dougherty get his hands on it.

I don't know if I would recommend this second volume to someone who hasn't read the first volume (like me). I've got the 3rd volume in my aforementioned longbox-filled closet, but still haven't gotten my hands on the first. I definitely want to check more of it out though. I can't say this is a must for horror fans, but you'll probably dig it.