The six-gun is having a midlife crisis. In Michael Walsh's Jonah Hex and the Shadow of Death, the famous bounty hunter has reached the sort of retirement nobody advertises: a shack, a dying town and ample time to remember everyone he killed. Then something arrives that shooting cannot fix.

DC's first issue, released October 7, finds its menace in Ashecott, where an otherworldly threat pursues a child with mysterious abilities. Walsh writes and draws; Toni-Marie Griffin supplies the colors. In a launch-day interview, Walsh describes discovering an unexpectedly nurturing side to Hex. Beneath the accumulated damage, someone still wants to protect another person.

That flicker of tenderness connects Hex to a surprisingly persuasive new frontier. Across this fortnight's releases and announcements, survival carries obligations. Somebody is waiting. Somebody has been taken. The heroic journey acquires a return address.

Consider Crowbound, Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen's dark fantasy from Image. Its second issue also arrived October 7. Rose works in an enormous Factory until her daughter Ava is taken, sending her beyond its walls toward the Scarecrow Queen and a bargain that could cost her soul. The landscape trades familiar cattle-country horizons for submerged settlements, woods and swamps. The emotional coordinates remain brutally clear: a parent, a child, an intolerable distance.

Then comes Turok: Son of Stone, announced at New York Comic Con on October 9 for March 10, 2027. Stephen Graham Jones and artist Leandro Fernández will send Turok through a collapsed New Mexico dig into a valley where dinosaurs and Ice Age creatures coexist. His destination is home, where his son remains.

For Jones, a Blackfeet novelist whose The Buffalo Hunter Hunter makes historical violence horrifyingly intimate, this is an intriguing assignment. An Indigenous adventure icon gains a writer practiced in making the past disturb the present. The announcement promises possibilities; the comic's execution will have to earn them.

These stories retain the pleasures that make the Western irresistible: perilous distances, hostile territory, people forced to improvise when authority fails. Their intimate stakes give those distances a different weight. A mother can occupy the position once reserved for the solitary rider. An exhausted gunfighter can discover that care demands more courage than another killing.

The frontier still offers room to disappear. Its most interesting travelers now have a reason to make it back.