I’ve been reading DC Finest: Hawkman – Wings Across Time recently. Still got a little bit to go, but I thought I’d talk about it and how weird it is.
So, Silver Age DC super-hero reinventions were all about science fiction. The Flash went from a guy who might as well have been magic to a scientist with pseudo-science powers. Green Lantern went from having a literal magic ring to a space guy with a super-science ring that might as well have been magic. Atom went from being an angry short man to a guy who used pseudo-science to change size and density.
The key thing about all those reinventions was that the original creators weren’t involved. New creative teams had free reign to completely rethink the characters. That isn’t the case for Hawkman (and Hawkgirl) though. The GA Hawkman was co-created by Gardner Fox while the SA Hawkman is created by Gardner Fox, along with Joe Kubert, who drew the Golden Age strip near the end. I think it’s fair to say Fox doesn’t achieve any distance from his creation in the update process.
The GA Hawkman is Carter Hall, an archaeologist who finds Ninth Metal, which allows him to create a pair of wings, which he uses to fight crime, along with priceless archaeological treasures “weapons from the past”. He’s assisted by his wife Shiera, who becomes Hawkgirl.
The SA Hawkman is Thanagarian police officer Katar Hol, who along with his wife/partner Shayera, comes to Earth chasing a criminal. Their police uniforms coincidentally include a big pair of wings powered by Nth Metal, which lets them fly and looks otherwise identical to the GA Hawkman and Hawkgirl costumes. Arriving on Earth, they meet the police commissioner of Midway City, who suggests they take human identities and jobs in order to learn Earth policing methods. His brother has just retired as curator of the Midway City Museum, so he sets Katar up with that job (immediately get a sense for how Midway City is run) and Americanises their names as Carter Hall and Shiera. They fight crime under the names Hawkman and Hawkgirl and, arbitrarily, decide to use “weapons from the past” (ie any old shit lying around the museum) to aid them.
It’s a bit of a mess really. The sci-fi elements are constant – their Thanagarian ship hanging around in orbit gets a lot of use, as does their Absorbascon, which summarised and implanted all knowledge from Earth in their heads when they arrived – but they don’t really add that much. It really feels like Fox just wanted to seamlessly carry on/revive the original Hawkman in the new era – as the characters that hadn’t gone away like Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman etc had – but had to bolt on a few contrivances to appease an editorial mandate. As a SF focused reinvention of the character and concept, it’s weak as hell.
But it is late 50s/early 60s DC, so my expectations weren’t high, especially for a Gardner Fox comic. He had a special talent for writing the most scientifically illiterate nonsense possible and then presenting it as if it’s the biggest, galaxy-brained thinking imaginable rather than just a contrived twist. If you wrote a summary of the plot of one of these issues and had someone read it, they would have you sectioned. And yet, Fox is drawing on real science at times. There’s one story where he utilises thermal wake from submarines. Another where the plot hinges on “cold light”, which is silly in how it’s presented, but is really the concept of low-energy lightbulbs decades before it became mainstream. It’s an odd mix of arrant nonsense and the occasional smart idea.
Even having read some Silver Age Gardner Fox comics before though, nothing could prepare me for the fact that Hawkman and Hawkgirl can talk to birds. I had no idea this was part of their power-set! How on Earth do they get a free ride for this while Aquaman is constantly ridiculed for telepathically commanding whales? At least Aquaman’s not dressed as a giant fish.
As I often do with mediocre old comics, I find myself thinking about how this could have better. And I think there is the bones of a decent concept in here. There’s too much that’s just hand-waved away or given a ridiculous explanation. For instance, the Thanagarian police uniforms being giant wings and hawk helmets is explained in a story where it’s revealed the wings were invented by Katar’s father to help fend off a race of space-faring giant birds wearing human face masks that were looting the planet. The police service was set up in the aftermath of this, using the wings and wearing hawk helmets to… remind them of their origin? It’s just silly. I think they’d have been better off breaking the fourth wall a little (as Flash had already done) by having Katar and Shayera get to Earth, use the Absorbascon thing – with possibly it not working correctly – and they chose to emulate the costume and wings of the GA Hawkman and Hawkgirl that they learned of from comics. They’re essentially play-acting their lives anyway in the Carter and Shiera identities, why not go the whole hog? Or the weapons from the past conceit could be the result of them only having remote, out-dated information about Earth so they’ve only previously researched/trained with ancient weapons, not guns or whatever.
Which isn’t to say what is here is terrible. I’ve ragged on it, but the stories are largely enjoyable in a hokey way, it’s nice seeing Hawkgirl be almost Hawkman’s equal and the art by Joe Kubert and Murphy Anderson is pleasant. But neither of the leads have any real personality, it’s all very low stakes, there’s next to no continuity. There’s so much potential for something more interesting here.
One hypothetical that often crops up in comics communities is the old “if you could swap two characters between Marvel and DC” thing. Usually that’s taken as happening now, but I’ve always thought it would be more interesting if looked at a hypothetical for when the characters were created. And in that context, I think Hawkman would be a prime candidate. This would have been great if done by Lee and Kirby. Ok, Hawkgirl probably wouldn’t have come out of that as well as she does here, but it would have rocked.
