You Can't Judge a Comic by its Cover
I was pleasantly surprised by 'Bigfoot's Death Song', the Jonah Hex story of Weird Western Tales #36. The writing and art have both taken a bit of a decline in recent months, and this issue was another one about Hex encountering Bigfoot's Paiute Indians - in the Arizona region, rather than the Great Basin area, their traditional tribal lands. Worse still, the cover had the caption
"Jonah Hex -- alone and unarmed against the Indians!"
and a picture of Bigfoot attacking Hex with a tomahawk as a sneaky Indian steals his guns.
Well, the story still has the Paiutes located in Arizona, but otherwise was much more respectful of Native American culture than the cover would seem to indicate. That tag line quoted above never really happens, and the scene illustrated on the cover isn't a lie (another of my big pet peeves is when a cover image depicts something that doesn't actually happen in the story), but it turns out it was just Joe Bigfoot and his friend Red Eagle having a little fun with Hex.
Anyway, the plot involves Hex accompanying a U.S. Cavalry delegation to the Paiutes to establish a peace treaty. But when one of the army's scouts kills Bigfoot's wife in an attempted rape, Bigfoot and his braves kill the scout and all the members of his patrol, in violation of the treaty. Chief Running Pony asks Hex to track down Bigfoot and bring him back to the tribe to be punished.
'Bigfoot's Death Song' might not win any awards for its sensitivity and accuracy - I've already mentioned the Paiute tribal location for one thing, the comic's use of terms like 'squaw' that are now out of fashion and hotly contested is another - but at least Michael Fleisher made the attempt to at a Cowboys & Indians tale that wasn't as one-sided as most pre-Modern Age comic westerns were.