Inside his modest home in the Mount Washington district of Los Angeles, 69-year-old retired comic book artist Tony DeZuniga sits on his plush leather couch glowing about all the publicity he's been receiving lately.
"I'm loving every moment," DeZuniga says.
And why not? DeZuniga, a former comic book illustrator for industry leaders DC Comics and Marvel Comics, is in the spotlight now that Warner Brothers has released a $47-million action movie that's based on his Jonah Hex character and stars Josh Brolin, John Malkovich, and Megan Fox.
DeZuniga and writer John Albanonah created the Jonah Hex character for DC Comics in the early 1970s. Hex is a Western anti-hero — a rogue-like bounty hunter with a scarred face who has won a cult following among comic-book aficionados over the years.
"It's been great," says DeZuniga. "Think about all the thousands of characters in comics, and they chose mine to make a movie."
DeZuniga has been plenty busy since he strutted down the red carpet for the movie's Hollywood premiere on June 17. He's done countless interviews with mainstream and Filipino media to promote the film. Now he's getting ready for a number of book signings for a new graphic novel titled "Jonah Hex: No Way Back," which he illustrated to accompany the motion picture.
Indeed, despite the "retired" label, DeZuniga is busier than ever.
"I've never really been retired," he says. "I'm always doing something, whether it's consulting or commission work."
DeZuniga has more than Hex to his credit. He has also illustrated editions of Batman, Superman, X-Men, Conan the Barbarian, and the Black Orchid character he created, among others.
But if you think his ability to draw has dwindled under the workload and long career, you've got it all wrong.
One reviewer of the new Jonah Hex graphic novel recently praised DeZuniga's illustration of the main character as "solid, gritty and harsh."
"Fans of clean and crisp art may be disappointed, but DeZuniga's art fits the tone of this dark graphic novel perfectly," wrote Mark L. Miller, reviewer and co-editor of AICN Comics.Filipino. "When one of his characters gets shot, the bullets explode out the back of them. His women are drawn curvy, his men gnarly. DeZuniga's style is authentic to the time. Much of his work looks as if it were drawn with a jagged pencil, the way a good Jonah Hex story should look."
DeZuniga was born and raised in Manila, where be began drawing at the age of four. He says he started after watching a Western film with his father. He went home and began to sketch everything he remembered, he says.
"My father looked at my drawings — the cowboys, the horses, the mountains — and started giving me more pieces of paper and pencils," he recounts.
DeZuniga says his parents encouraged him to pursue the arts. He began illustrating comics in high school, and later graduated from the University of Santo Tomas in Manila with a degree in commercial arts. After working for a few advertising companies in the Philippines, he left to attend the New York School of Design.
DeZuniga says he later bounced between the Philippines and the U.S., providing illustrations for education material for McGraw Hill and Scholastic Inc., before meeting Joe Orlando, an editor at DC Comics at the time. Orlando asked DeZuniga to join him at DC, where be worked on illustrations for Girl's Love Stories and Phantom Stranger. It was only a matter of time before other DC editors noticed DeZuniga's work and asked him to create his own character. They wanted him to come up with a character that would fit in DC's new Weird Western genre of the 1970s.
DeZuniga and Albano soon created Jonah Hex, but only after a fortuitous trip to the doctor's office. The two couldn't get the character just right, according to DeZuniga, until inspiration came from an anatomy poster on the wall of the office.
"There was a poster that had picture of the human face that was half skeleton — and that was the concept for Jonah Hex," he says.
DeZuniga is also credited for bringing talented Filipino artists to the U.S. comic industry. He played a key role in opening up trans-Pacific pipeline of talent after DC began publishing reprints rather than original comics in the 1970s. DeZuniga says he convinced then DC Publisher Carmine Infantino and editor-and-chief Orlando to visit the Philippines and scout out local talent.
"During that time there were a lot of artists in the Philippines that had no work," he says. "Everyone was having a hard time publishing magazines and newspaper," explains DeZuniga.
Among those DC recruited were Nestor Redondo, Alex Nino, Alfredo Alcala and "a lot more," according to DeZuniga. "I can't even remember all of their names."
DeZuniga says the DC team loved Filipino artists because of their thoroughness.
"Filipinos are very meticulous," he says. "We are so good with detail — but one thing that many of those Filipino artists lacked and had to train in was how to tell a story. A comic is like a silent movie. Comics don't need words to tell a story."
After 18 years with DC Comics and Marvel, DeZuniga went onto serve as a video game conceptual designer for Sega. He "retired" in 1999.
These days there are many Filipinos working in the comic industry, but not many know the name of DeZuniga and his contributions to Filipinos in the comic industry.
"I think there are more American kids who know me than Filipinos," he says.
But DeZuniga says he doesn't mind.
With the Jonah Hex movie out, and the publicity he's receiving, more people are aware that a Filipino's ingenuity created the infamous character.
"I just wish the movie could have been better," DeZuniga says.
Joseph Pimentel is a writer for Asian Journal.
Photo of Tony DeZuniga from Asian Journal. Jonah Hex illustration from Wikipedia.
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