Yup, Susan Hillwig whose writings over at DC2 probably rank her as the third most prolific Hex writer (behind J/J and Fleisher and ahead of Albano and Lansdale). Starting in 2009 (yeah, I move slow) and into last year I shot her a few questions and one thing that I have learned from all of this is that if you ask a writer to write their answers, you'll get some greatly detailed answers! So, without further ado, I present to you the woman that explained how Jonah got home from the future...Susan Hillwig
Matching Dragoons: So tell us a little bit about yourself, at least as much as you want published to the entire world.
Susan: Well, I'm a mid-30's gal living in the frozen wilds north of
Detroit with my husband and a massive load of toys and books. I've been
reading comics since I was about ten or so, and started making a
serious stab at writing around high school. I'm currently shopping
around an original novel I've written, though I've had no luck landing
either an agent or publisher (if anybody reading this works in those
fields, drop me a line). It's a mish-mash of Western and fantasy along
the lines of "Connecticut Yankee", with some horror and spiritual
aspects thrown in...my friends call it the "genre-buster". Somewhere in
between that and the fanfiction, I manage to hold down a paying job.
MD: Would you like to talk about Weird Western Quarterly?
Susan: Hope you've got a lot of free time, because I'll talk your ear off about it.
Susan: To do that, we've gotta take a step back to early 2005, when DC
announced that Jonah Hex was getting a title again. I got crazy-excited
about that, but was also holding a grudge because of the whole "Future
Hex" thing...y'know, not having any proper answers regarding how Jonah
got back home. Knowing that DC was very likely never going to give us a
solution to the problem, I decided to cook up my own. I knew nothing
about fanfic at the time, I simply had a lot of writing experience and a
desire to finally set the record straight, and was actually going to
post my entire story directly on a DC Message Boards thread when I
stumbled across FanFiction.net.
So I signed up, then spent months pouring over comics and bugging
people online for minor bits of info until I was sure I had a concrete,
in-continuity story that nobody could disagree with, which became "The
Long Road Home". Of all the Hex stories I've done, that's still my
pride and joy -- I still get reviews from time to time about it, so that
makes me happy.
In the midst of doing this, DC2 site founder David Charlton was
soliciting around the DCMB for writers -- DC2 had not yet launched, and
the staff was rather slim to start. I told David that I had a story in
progress over on FF.net,
and it turned out he'd been following it, so we got to talking. The
whole idea of DC2 was a "square one" sort of approach, so my story
wouldn't work there (it relied too much on established DCU history), and
his suggestions of titles for me to work on weren't jazzing me, so I
said, "What if I did all the DC Western guys in one book? You know, not
just Hex, but Nighthawk and Johnny Thunder and Bat Lash and all that?"
I also had the condition of not being a monthly title, just so I could
still work on my novel and have a life. I didn't think David would go
for it, but he responded with, "Great! We'll call it Weird Western
Quarterly." So basically the book was tailor-made for me.
I've done other work on the site since then, like the first 5
issues of Seven Soldiers of Victory and a couple quick stories here and
there, but mainly I'm just the WWQ gal...I've pretty much got the run of
the entire 19th Century. There is another writer, Don Walsh, who does
the Johnny Thunder stories on the title (and who also took over SSoV
once I was done), but other than that, I'm in charge of the book's
direction. I get to decide which character gets the spotlight every
three months, story-wise, and I talk to the cover artists about what the
art will be on each issue. I like to think of it as a companion book
to Jonah's regular DCU title: you can read both and get a fuller picture
of both Hex and the rest of DC's Western era.
Susan: There's two reasons. The first is to bring attention to the
character. I've run into a lot of people the last 4 years who've said,
"I only know Hex from the Batman and Justice League cartoons," or that
their only comics exposure to him is his cameo in Crisis on Infinite
Earths. So I write these stories that revisit events from Jonah's past
or expand on some small thing we know about him for those people in
particular, the ones that know nothing about him but his face and his
name. There's the old comics adage that every issue is someone's
first...well, for some folks, my stories are the first time they've
heard about Jonah's time as an Army scout or his marriage to Mei Ling.
One reader compared what I do to a novelization, filling in the blanks
between the comics panels with prose...and in some instances, there's a
lot of blanks, or there's inconsistencies, or conflicting dates. So I
also get a chance to straighten out where things are crooked, or at
least draw the best conclusion based on evidence at hand. That's when I
have to walk a fine line, though, because I've had people take what
I've written about Hex as gospel, so I can't just spew out anything
without considering its impact on the character. In an early story, I
touched upon the notion that Jonah might be illegitimate since it's been
implied in pervious comics that his mother slept around, but I never
said it straight out, nor would I ever unless I knew for sure, because
that's an earth-shattering change in my opinion.
The second reason, which goes hand-in-hand with the first, is pure
love of the character. If you push aside the future junk and the
worm-creatures and such, you get a real person, who's had all the sorts
of ups and downs you get with real life, and who is far from perfect. I
mean, he comes from a broken family, he's a drunk, he can be cruel in
one moment and tender in the next...you watch him go through these
trials and sometimes it makes your heart ache. I've read Hex stories
where I've genuinely felt bad for what's happened to him -- Jonah Hex
(vol. 2) #50 is a recent example of that, it's just beautiful and
terrible at the same time. I just have this bizarre devotion to
somebody that doesn't immediately come off as likeable, and that
unlikeability almost reinforces the devotion...it's weird. Let me put
it like this: When I first started reading comics, I would eat up
anything with Batman or any of those related characters in it, but the
last few years, I've just found myself not caring about them,
comics-wise -- they've skewed so far from what got me interested in them
that I've stopped following those stories. But when they threw Jonah
Hex into these crazy-ass situations in the future and over in Vertigo, I
hated the stories but still cared about Jonah. I didn't want to
abandon him, I just wanted to see him get through this nonsense. You
care about this guy so much that you want to see him have a good day,
just once.
Susan: I've never submitted to DC directly. The closest I ever came was
when I submitted an open letter to Dan Didio on the DCMB months before
the first new issue of Jonah Hex came out. I stated what I hoped to see
in the new series, and touched upon the fact that I was working on this
fanfic that would "fix" the Future Hex problem. I offered to give them
the idea straight out on the condition that they publish it and make it
canon, adding, "If you don't do something about this, I will." So I
basically threatened DC, for all the good it did.
There's this honor-system sort of rule that DC employees can't read
fanfic, and fanfic writers can't make money off of their fics...it has
to do with copyright laws and keeps regular folks like me from getting
sued. So even though Jimmy & Justin know I write this stuff, they
can never "officially" read it and I can't send it to DC. Plus it's
hard for a writer to break into comics because writing talents are hard
to judge at a glance, unlike artistic talent -- if you're a writer, it's
best to have a good artist backing you up when you're shopping around
your story idea. All in all, I have no real desire these days to work
in comics, but if I get anywhere with my novel, and if DC one day rang
me up and said, "How'd you like a gig?"...yeah, I'd jump at it. Of
course, my smartass self would slide a copy of "The Long Road Home"
across the desk first, just to see if they'd bite. For now, though, I
think Jimmy & Justin are doing a very good job with Jonah Hex, and I
wish them a long and healthy run with the old man.
Next Time: We get Susan's insight into Jonah Hex as presented by the other writers.
Hey, the interview's up! Or at least the first part. I still find it strange that I've been interviewed, though I'm flattered as well. As for length...reckon if we'd done this over the phone, the answers would've been shorter, but less coherent. :P
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