#hawkworld should be treated as hawkman year one

[cantsayidont]

August 1989. The first chapter of Tim Truman's three-issue HAWKWORLD miniseries wastes no time in presenting its thesis statement. On the planet Thanagar, a young aristocrat Katar Hol, just out of military academy and not yet Hawkman, joins his world's paramilitary police force, the Wingmen, and quickly learns what the Wingmen really do: brutal raids into the slums of Downside, Thanagar's overcrowded ghetto — ostensibly to prevent insurrection and root out caches of weapons and other contraband, but really to maintain a climate of terror for an already oppressed population of conquered beings from many worlds. As Katar is already beginning to suspect here, his cynical commander, Byth (the one speaking, above), is actually running guns and drugs to Downside, and takes advantage of these raids to rid himself of rivals and no-longer-useful accomplices, lining his own pockets while perpetuating the social inequity and exploitation on which Thanagarian society depends.

Many elements of this miniseries are drawn from the Gardner Fox Hawkman stories of the Silver Age: Byth was the the villain in the first Silver Age Hawkman story in THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #34, a statue of Kalmoran was seen briefly in BRAVE AND THE BOLD #43, and Illoral was a world the Hawks visited in HAWKMAN #6 in 1965. Truman (who originally intended HAWKWORLD to be a direct prequel to the Fox/Kubert stories) frames those elements in a new context, giving them much greater thematic weight.

HAWKWORLD sold well, thanks in no small part to the magnificently realized artwork, by Truman and Argentinian artist Quique Alcatena (with superb color by Sam Parsons), but it drew some criticism for the darkness of the story and its ugly portrayal of a militarized Thanagar. The reality is that Thanagar had been presented as a fascist dictatorship for about a decade by this point, something that the previous version of Katar Hol had eventually accepted and even endorsed so long as it didn't directly threaten Earth. What Truman did was to remove the pretense that Thanagar hadn't been that way to begin with, and thus reassess Katar's relationship with that brutal imperial state — whose resemblance to our world was in no way coincidental. The story (which puts Katar through the wringer in every respect) ends more or less where BRAVE AND THE BOLD #34 begins, so the full ramifications of Truman's reframing of Hawkman's origin would play out in the first 26 issues of the ongoing HAWKWORLD series by John Ostrander and Graham Nolan between 1990 and 1992.

#comics #hawkworld #tim truman #enrique alcatena #sam parsons #hawkman #katar hol #byth #thanagar #thanagarians #truman and editor mike gold thought that #hawkworld should be treated as hawkman year one #rather than a full reboot #but dc senior management thought it would sell better as a reboot #and since the previous hawkman book had recently flopped #preserving past hawkman continuity was not a high priority #gardner fox #joe kubert #mike gold

[tessatechaitea]

Darkstars #7

The "A"s in the logo have genitals.

In the 90s, comic book readers accepted that professional artists were now drawing like every kid in the 2nd grade. Not exactly, of course! I wouldn't want to be taken literal by everybody on the Internet who doesn't understand exaggeration and hyperbole. Unless the do understand it but they understand wanting to sound smarter than everybody else on the Internet so much that they can't understand whimsy and mockery. So the figures are drawn better than I could have done in 2nd grade. But I know every single time I drew something in 2nd grade, I'd misjudge perspective and depth. So after drawing the first guy (who I decided was standing in mist because I didn't want to draw his feet in that foreshortened way that feet need to be drawn but which is difficult to pull off), I'd begin drawing the second character. But at some point, I'd realize I'd gotten their proportions wrong and so I'd wind up making them stand in a hole in the ground. Then the third guy would look like he was floating so I'd draw a mound of dirt for him to stand on (and not stand on in the way we would see a person standing on dirt but standing directly on top of the horizontal line that was the top of the mound of dirt). Then I'd think, "Should they be standing in a city or a forest or a battle scene full of corpses?" But that thought would only lead to the thought, "No, that's too much work," and then I'd just sketch some lines for clouds or air movement or something and call it done. So, you know, just like this. Maybe I should have realized at the time that my 2nd grade style was the popular style because it is the only time I've ever had a work of art hung in a museum (the Triton Museum in Santa Clara)! Fuck, I missed my calling! I could have helped found Image Comics! This issue begins with an alien wearing a fart collector on his head.

The only reason you haven't seen me on Shark Tank with my Fart Collector is because I know what a fucking scam it is. Sure, you have to pay back loans if your business fails while investor money is free. But if your business is successful, the loan is eventually paid off while the investors stick around sucking off your profits until the day you die.

How do you know if you're good at poetry? Poems are like farts. Most people leave the room in order to avoid yours but they can't get enough of their own. The fart loving alien is some despot whose people have finally turned against him and hired an assassin to kill him. It's 1993 and Darkstars could sure use a bump in sales with a Lobo guest spot but I'm guessing it won't be Lobo because I'd fucking remember that. The poor despot. He's a terrible ruler who treats a certain segment of his population as not worthy of life and he longs for their love anyway. That's exactly the kind of leader who should be assassinated. I am now winking and nudging you with my elbow.

This is the exact face of every protagonist in every comic during Image's first year in business (except for the ones that were demons from Hell or had one mechanical eye).

Darkstar and Hawkman become best friends and promise to team up again in the future. Then he fucks off to go do whatever Hawkman did in Hawkworld. Fuck if I ever read that. Have I mentioned how much I don't like Hawkman? Or Green Arrow?! Or Hal Jordan? Or Superman? Maybe I should just list the DC heroes I like: Halo and Blue Devil. The fart-sucking despot faces his assassin and of course it's not Lobo. Judging by the 90s Image look, his name is probably DeathDie or Crushblow or DeadBlast or PunchAbort.

Did all 90s artists design new villains using the same standard template?

The assassin's name is K'lassh. Yeah, two S's instead of two A's. It's an alien tongue. It probably means "He Who Sucks The Entrails Out of a Rabbit's Asshole and Fucks the Corpse." Now it's time for more art because holy fuck is it terrible. But it's terrible in that exactly specific way that comic book readers were blind to in the 90s. In the 90s, this art was fucking radical, dude.

Part of me gets it. Part of me thinks, "Whoa! That art is fucking dynamic and bad ass!" But that's also the part of me that smells my finger after it breaks through the toilet paper while wiping my ass.

Flint quits his job as deputy Darkstar before Darkstar can even yell at him. Then he's all, "I'm just like you!" And Darkstar flies off thinking, "Yeah! He is just like me! I bet we'll be good friends in a few more issues!" The next issue is the last one I own so I hope I never see that asshole cop again. Sorry to be redundant. The story of K'lassh killing alien Trump was told so that by the end of this story, when the drug runners bring K'lassh to Earth to battle Darkstar, we, the readers, will be shitting in our pants thinking, "Oh no! That guy is really powerful! Darkstar is in trouble now!" Or we laughed at loud at the stupid costume and name and stopped buying the comic book forever. Darkstars #7 Rating: C. I think seven issues of any mediocre comic book is just too many to read without another series to break up the space monotony. And I've still got one more! But after this, I'll be done with this box of old comic books! I don't know how long I've been re-reading my old comic books but I think it's been a few years now. And I've just finished the first box. Granted it wasn't a long box or a short box; it was a big old fruit box. So there were a lot of comic books in it! I can't wait to see what comic books await me in the next box I open! But whatever series winds up being in that box, I think I need to alternate titles to keep myself interested. I'll figure it out when I get there. In the meantime, how about buying my Role Playing Game, Places & Predators? I know Amazon sucks. If you're ideals mean more to you than buying my hilarious and fun game, you can always Venmo $3.00 to GrunionGuy and I'll send you a PDF.

#Darkstars #Travis Charest #Michael Jan Friedman #DC COmics #DC #Scott Hanna