I don't know about "best"... but: if DC Comics ever published a cooler title than this one, then it surely must have escaped my attention.
Originally introduced (and with damned little fanfare, too, considering the not-inconsiderable artistic and critical cachet the series was about to amass, over the ensuing years) in the pages of the otherwise wholly insignificant WEIRD WESTERN TALES, the hideously scarred and embittered bounty hunter known as Jonah Hex was the oddling brainchild of longtime comics veteran Joe Orlando.

The basic premise was drop-dead simple: a chronicling of the grubby, knife's-edge life and times of one "gun for hire," in the storied days of the Old West.

What made this particular interpretation of the genre so unique, however -- at least in the medium of comics, where gunslingers were still (at that point), by and large, noble and cleft-chinned, in the classic Randolph Scott tradition -- was that the title protagonist was anything but "noble," in the commonly accepted Zane Grey sense of the word.

More to the point: Jonah Hex -- while undeniably possessed of his own peculiar "sense of honor" (a sort of free-floating"situational ethics," which -- boiled down to the essentials -- might best have been summed up as: "I will always attempt to Do the Right Thing... even it means killing every last man, woman and child in this here town, twice over") -- could be (and was), in turn, selfish; sarcastic; manipulative; mean-spirited; and possessed of the most unrelentingly bleak and gallows world-view of any adventure comics "lead" in the recorded annals of same. He had a considerable amount of anger; resentment; and ill-feeling in general bottled up inside of him, did Mr. Hex.

Much of this was understandable, certainly. As we later learned, over the years -- in a series of revelatory tales scripted by Michael Fleisher, who was never better than he was on this one title; nossir, not even close to it -- Jonah Hex's unhappy life had included such signal occurrences as: being sold to "th' injuns" by his drunken reprobate of a father, while still in the western equivalent of knee-pants; having his facial features savagely and deliberately deformed by said captors, in penance for a crime of which he was singularly innocent; being forced to take up arms against his own (later) adopted "brother," during the bloody holocaust that was the Civil War; being crudely framed -- and hunted, resultantly -- for the cold-blooded murder of same; and finding True Love twice in one lifetime, only to watch, helpless, as it was summarily gutted like a trout before his wide-struck and disbelieving eyes [see panels, accompanying].

Given a train wreck litany of circumstances such as these... Jonah's particularly desolate and dispassionate worldview becomes a bit easier to understand (and -- just perhaps, mind -- even to sympathize with).

He had no "friends," as such, throughout the bulk of the series' run; occupation and temperament both worked against it, and the very fact that he was "Jonah Hex" -- and possessed, therefore, of a "rep" that served as much to dehumanize as it did mythologize -- meant that (often as not) those who sought him ought only did so for their own selfish concerns.

The classic "Requiem For a Gunfighter" (WEIRD WESTERN TALES #37) is as perfectly illustrative of this conundrumas any to be found in the canon. Jonah's stunted sympathies are engaged by the plight of a grief-stricken young man whose family entire has been slaughtered by bootless desperadoes. The man-child, however, is singularly inept with any and all manner of firearms... and, thus, unable to secure the requisite portion of vengeance on his own behalf.

Jonah takes the angry adolescent (one "Frank Joad," by name) under his wing, teaching him each and every last trick and technique in his arsenal of same. Joad grows so resultantly enamored of his own newly-won status as a death-dealer -- answerable to no one, and acting with the most cold-blooded of impunity -- that Jonah, in turn, is forced to gun down the sole individual whom he had come to regard as something very like his own "son." [see page, accompanying]
One of the most rewarding elements of the JONAH HEX feature was the careful and intelligent use made by author Michael Fleisher of various snippets of authentic historical western fact and fancy, seasoning plots with such stuff as a practiced sous chef might wield a peppermill. A standout example of such is to be found in issue #13's "The Railroad Blaster," drawing upon the many well-documented instances of frontier sheep and cattle ranchers repeatedly sabotaging newly-laid (and expensive) railroad lines which they felt interfered with their cash-crop's grazing perogatives [see cover, accompanying].

Along a somewhat similar train-bound line were several intriguing tales regarding the criminal usage made by said rail barons of "celestials" as virtual slave labor for same; "celestials" being the derogatory term of the period reserved for Oriental immigrant laborers during that period. (The term was occasioned by the fact that said laborers -- often forced to endure sixteen or eighteen hour work days, under the most grueling and dehumanizing of conditions -- often resorted to the usage of opium and hashish at night, in order to ease their pains long enough to get a few hours worth of sleep. Their resultant [and inevitable] "spaciness" and distraction the following day, therefore, served to render them even more "other-worldly" in nature to their employers... hence: "celestials.") Jonah felt himself very much in sympathy with these unfortunates, whose own physical differences from the baseline societal "norm" of the period -- as well as their steadfast stoicism and ethics-oriented worldview -- both so well mirrored his own status and outlook, as the perpetual "outsider." Perhaps the oddest HEX story of them all, however, was a "possible future" coda entitled "The Last Gunfighter" [JONAH HEX SPECTACULAR #1]. In this bizarre tale, we observe the final days of a grizzled and bespectacled Jonah: now long past the age where most men would have hung up their six-shooters, and yet unable (or unwilling) to acknowledge the fact that the turn ofa new century has rendered his particular brand of rugged, frontier iconoclasm all but absurdly anachronistic.

He is brutally murdered by an amoral non-entity, during a game of cards in a smalltown saloon, and his corpse -- top this for sheer morbidity, if you can -- is (quite literally) stuffed, and placed on permanent display in one of the traveling "Wild West shows" so popular in the day! [see panels, accompanying]

Not even Sergio Leone -- at his most studiedly deconstructionist -- could have posited an ending more resolutely at odds with the riding-into-the-sunset mind-set of the standard western hero... within any medium.

MONSTERS, HEROES AND GOOD/BAD MEN
PAGE ONE (The Silver Age DOOM PATROL)