With Blackest Night on hiatus for January, DC has conjured up an interesting plan to fill the comic stores with one-shots of discontinued titles that involve the Black Lanterns. Weird Western Tales #71 was one of the first of these one-shots and interested me for a couple of reasons. First off this issue was said to feature Black Lantern Jonah Hex as well as Bat Lash and it’s also the first written work by DC Executive Editor Dan Didio in quite a while. With Didio soon to take over The Outsiders, I was curious to see how his warm up with this title would do.
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Weird Western Tales #71 isn’t bad, it’s just extremely uneven, a fact that can mostly be attributed to Didio’s writing. It’s not that what Didio is doing is all bad it just has no rhythm to it, no sense of dynamics at all. The story itself is a little lackluster and feels like DC just slapped WWT #71 together to give Black Lantern Jonah Hex a venue to make his appearance. From what I can gather, a scientist named Ray, who has an overdeveloped love of the South, has built a research facility under an Old West town. They never explain why, it just is. Said scientist is mean to his lab assistant and operates under the thumb of a billionaire who not only funds the place but also dresses like Boss Hog in his Sunday best. Apparently this boss man has captured one of the Black Lantern rings and wants to use it for -I kid you not -finding alternative fuel sources.
At no point does Didio explain why these men think these rings can find new energy sources nor is he inclined to explain why some hero named The Ray was able to capture a ring that the world’s greatest heroes haven’t been able to. There’s nothing organic about Weird Western Tales #71, it feels entirely like a set up. It’s as if Didio wanted to make sure the comic felt like the Old West but since it had to take place today, he threw together this lab-under-a-town thing to try and suit it. The big appearances by both Jonah Hex and Bat Lash are really short and kind of anti-climactic. Some of Didio’s dialog is spot on and great to read while the rest is written the way scripts for the old sixties Marvel cartoons were, where the characters explains every single one of their actions out loud. For example:
“Oh God, Ray he’s hurt! And there’s no other way to stop them.”
“The Ring’s our only hope but we are completely cut off from it.”
See how that sounds clunky and more like narrative than dialog? Didio runs into that problem a lot, especially through the middle of the book. As for the art by Renalto Arlem it’s fine but nothing to really write home about. This guy was given the chance to create the look of the Black Lantern Jonah Hex, something that just oozes cool. What Arlem does with Hex isn’t awful but it isn’t what it should’ve been, it doesn’t make you want to tear out the page and hang it on your wall. Weird Western Tales #71 is a one-time filler issue that sadly really comes across as such. I hope Didio can take the various failures here and rework them before he takes over The Outsiders.
