Jonah Hex Books in Order

Joe Lansdale's Jonah Hex work leans hard into the part of the character that was always half ghost story anyway. Hex is a bounty hunter in the post-Civil War West, scarred in body and spirit, and he moves through a landscape where greed, cruelty, and superstition are never far apart. Lansdale takes that grim setup and happily shoves it toward full weird western territory.

It suits both men.

In Lansdale's hands, Hex is not polished into a noble antihero. He stays mean, practical, suspicious, and nearly impossible to shock. That makes him a perfect guide for stories where frontier violence spills over into body horror, monsters, and supernatural rot. The collected material in Two Gun Mojo and Shadows West shows that approach clearly. Hex is up against a mad doctor with plans for zombies, a Wild West show hiding uglier secrets than the public performance, a demonic infant, and even ancient man-eating worms from below the earth.

Those are ridiculous ingredients on paper. On the page, they work because Lansdale never treats them like a joke. He writes the West as a hard place where the unbelievable can still arrive dirty, hungry, and armed. Hex accepts danger the way some people accept weather. He does not like it. He just knows it is there.

The tone matters as much as the plots. These comics are violent, pulpy, and fast. They have black humor, but it is bone-dry humor, not wink-at-the-reader parody. Lansdale gives Hex sharp lines and lets the ugliness around him stay ugly. Even the strangest elements usually come back to the same core idea: the West is full of predators, and some of them are not human.

That keeps the books from feeling like random monster mash-ups.

There is also a nice visual fit between Lansdale's storytelling and Jonah Hex as a comics character. He thinks in set pieces. He likes memorable freaks, brutal reversals, and dialogue that sounds both exaggerated and lived in. So even when the plots get baroque, the momentum stays clear. Hex wants to survive, get paid, and maybe settle a score. Everything else is complication.

These books are a strong entry point if you like westerns but want something nastier and stranger than a straight frontier shootout. They are also a good fit if you already know Lansdale from prose and want to see how naturally his voice carries into comics. The same taste for outrageous setups, sudden gore, and rough humanity is all here.

Start with Two Gun Mojo if you want the cleanest way in, then move to Shadows West for the fuller collection of Lansdale's Hex material. Expect dust, blood, bad smells, and the feeling that the American West has always had monsters in it. Lansdale just has the nerve to put them on the page.