Review: Hawkgirl: Hath-Set

Hawkgirl: Hath-Set collects Hawkgirl #61-#66, and thus completes the three-trade collection of writer Walter Simonson's short-lived Hawkgirl monthly, a 2006-2007 book I think has some relevance to some important (or at least important-ish) discussions of mainstream, superhero comics today for a couple of reasons.

First, because it's "One Year Later" launching point looks, in retrospect, like a sort of smaller-scaled, practice run at DC's 2011 "New 52" initiative, which similarly reinvented the entire DCU line at once. Secondly, because it was a pretty honest attempt at getting another comic with a female, headlining protagonist on the stands that didn't quite take, and that the publisher could then use as an example to justify not trying other ones like it in the future (I don't think DC has done that in the intervening years, though). Thirdly, it was a pretty honest attempt at a "trans-media" approach of making one of their paper comics better reflect their animated properties, with Hawkgirl being part of the seven-hero ensemble starring in the Justice League cartoons (In general, and to this day, DC Comics generally only publishes special tie-in comics that reflect the characters or contents of their the TV shows and movies based on their comics, and continues to do whatever they like with their DCU line).

And, finally, it was at its conception at least, a modern comic book by two talented, old-guard pros, veterans of the comics industry with massive bodies of great work behind them who, for whatever reason, don't command the same amount of market force they once did, and age-ism and this particular publisher's occasional reluctance to hire vets has become something of an online conversation, thanks to the efforts of Jerry Ordway. Here's a particular example from the very recent past of DC hiring guys with Ordway-like resumes, and it didn't really work out for anyone, did it? (Although if DC had put Ordway on Hawkgirl when Chaykin left after six issues, maybe it would have lasted longer? Arlem's contributions could not have helped the book. Similarly, I can't help but imagine what a New 52 Hawkman by Ordway might have been like, if they hired him to remake the character instead of Tony Daniel and Philip Tan and then a rapid succession of ever-changing creative teams).

This final volume is all Arlem, save for the guest-star filled issue #64, which features art by Dennis Calero. The rest of the book is done in the tedious, lazy style Arlem demonstrated on Hawkman Returns and that undreadable Freedom Fighters miniseries he "drew."

The artwork hasn't improved any.

Here's an image of Batman, wearing his old, blue cape and cowl for some reason, swinging above Gotham City:

Looks alright, right? Look a bit closer, though. Why is Batman swinging horizontally over the city like that, as if the end of his bat-rope was tied to a rotating helicopter blade or something? Could Arlem not find a non-aerial photograph of a cityscape to drop into the background? Or could he not be arsed to draw Batman in a more vertical position?

Here's a particularly lazy example of Arlem's work.

The cliffhanger ending of one issue, a splash page, no less:

And the first page of the following issue, also a splash:

Talk about picking up where you left off!

I could scan almost any image from this and point at it to demonstrate how lifeless and obviously pieced-together using photo-reference Arlem's artwork is here. It's particularly galling in the opening chapters of this volume, however, as that's when Simonson's script calls for the introduction of various Fourth World characters and concepts.

The first issue opens with a pair a Parademons on a satellite orbiting Apokolips, and the entrance of The Female Furies. Arlem draws them all with the same supermodel body and face, and only their costumes suggesting who they are supposed to be. If you've ever seen The Female Furies, you know how weird and wrong that is.

Here, for example, is a Kirby drawing of Bernadeth, and a Byrne drawing of the same character:

And here's Arlem's version:

His Mad Harriet is also particularly off-model, her crazy, bestial face and knotted muscles disappearing, replaced by a particularly toothy grin on the same face on the same head on the same body and her fellow Furies (Stompa, the biggest and most distinctly-shaped of the Furies, is MIA).

In this volume, Simonson seems to be doing a bit of a last hurrah, taking a victory lap that allows him to play with some DCU toys before bringing the Hawkgirl (and Hawkman) vs. Hath-Set conflict that's been running throughout his time on the book (and was actually introduced by Geoff Johns in JSA and the Hawkman monthly that Hawkgirl spun out of) to a climax, with the Hawks finally defeating their reincarnating warlock foe for the final time.

So: The Female Furies come to Earth to recover a cosmic weapon that ended up in ancient Egypt (It's a weapon that grows a giant Hawkgirl robot, which lead to an awesome cover so awesome I remember buying the serially-published issue it was on simply because of that cover.

Then Hawkgirl goes to Gotham City, where she fights a mind-controlled Batman in a burning museum.

Then she goes to Metropolis, where she teams up with Superman and then Oracle (Oracle was then living in Metropolis; if I remember correctly, that move and the addition of a rotating third teammate joining Huntress and Black Canary in the field was the "One Year Later" change of direction for Birds of Prey) (UPDATE: Please see comments for clarification on the actual "One Year Later" changes to Birds of Prey, by someone with a much better memory than I).

Then she's taken to a pyramid in Egypt in a coffin on a boat—which necessitates her wearing a bandage bikini for one scene—where she and Hawkman battle with Hath-Set and his many mummified sons.

Then the pyramid collapses and we get one of those egregiously shitty pages Arlem is so fond of assembling, the ones that make it clear he's not really intersted in drawing comics at all—

—and the title ends, with the super-couple flying off to live happily ever after.

I forget what happens next, exactly. I think the Hawks don't show up again until they get killed in Blackest Night, and become part of the ensemble cast of Brightest Day. And then DC New 52-boots the DCU, Hawkman appears in the almost-but-not-quite-as-quickly-canceled Savage Hawkman and Hawkgirl is relegated to an alternate dimension version of herself in James Robinson and Nicola Scott's Earth 2 title.

Review: Hawkgirl: Hawkman Returns

The seventh issue of 17-issue existence of Hawkgirl, the one that makes up the first chapter of the second collected volume, is where the series started to crumble visually, as that's the point at which artist Howard Chaykin the interiors, never providing anything more than cover art for the rest of the series' short run.

Why did Chaykin leave after only one arc? Was the book not selling well enough that DC could afford to pay someone of Chaykin's stature the page rate he demanded and/or deserved? Did the return of Hawkman mentioned in the second collection's title threaten fewer opportunities to draw the title character fighting crime in her lacy black bra? We may never know.

Well, I suppose we could ask Chaykin or someone, but that would assume we care to go to the trouble, and we don't. The fact of the matter is, Chaykin left after six issues, and the quality (as well as the noteworthiness of Hawkgirl as a 21st century super-comic by two legendary creators of the 1980s) took a swan dive.

For issues #7 and #8, 52 contributor Joe Bennett took over art chores (Bennett would later be one of the several artists drawing Hawkman in the just-canceled New 52 Savage Hawkman series), and then Renato Arlem would take over art chores for the remainder of the book. This second collection also features artwork by Simonson himself, however; sandwiched between issues of Hawkgirl are two issues of JSA: Classified written and drawn by Simonson, dedicated to following what exactly Hawkman was up to in outer space while he was MIA from this book (Short answer? Space stuff).

Visually, this collection is all over the map, then: 44 pages of Bennett, 22 pages of Arlem, 44 pages of Simonson and then another 22 pages of Arlem. Additionally, much of that artwork is fairly terrible.

Simonson's clearly the best pencil artist and the best visual storyteller of the three. His figures are big and muscular and always in movement; even in conversation, they're tilting or at least emoting like crazy. It's the sort of over-the-top artwork that makes for pages of story that could be just as easily read were all of the dialogue and narration boxes stripped from them, with nothing but the characters' actions and expressions to go on.

His action scenes are naturally explosive, full of big, violent John Workman sound effects and whirls, whorls and diagonal lines shooting across the pages as explosions, beams, rays and arcs of energy.

I'm not terribly fond of Bennett's work, but there's nothing terribly wrong with it, either. I think it's perfectly acceptable super-comic art, getting the job done without calling much attention to itself either positively or negatively.

Arlem's art on the other hand...

It's not impossible to envision how an editor might have looked to Arlem as a decent replacement for Chyakin. Like Chaykin, Arlem uses a lot of photo reference and seems to incorporate photos and/or filtered versions of photos into his work to add texture to it. Arlem goes much, much further than Chaykin though; while Chaykin draws his figures and uses effects occasonally for their clothing, or to, say, put the bricks on a brick wall or the grooves on an ancient column, Arlem uses such effects for everything, and the characters and figures look like altered photos themselves.

Look at this panel, of Kendra "Hawkgirl" Saunders having dinner with a friend:

Nothing in the whole image seems to have been drawn by human hand, and using photos and computers doesn't even seem to have gained anything in terms of versimilitude—it actually looks less real. See those "drawings" of glasses in the foreground...?

I don't really like comic book art that uses all these little tricks or shortcuts, but Arlem compounds that by using them badly and, apparently, extremely lazily.

Here's a climactic scene from this volume, where Kendra tells Hawkman they are never ever getting back together again (because of an ancient curse generated by their foe Hath-Set, who murders them each time the two constantly reincarnating lovers find one another in new lives):

Hawkman's in four panels, but Arlem only had to draw him twice! Hawkgirl's in five, but Arlem got away with only drawing her three times. He got a lot of use out of that first panel; by cropping it differently, he used it three times on the same page. So what if it implies that Hawkman was frozen in a single gesture for the entire length of a conversation?

Arlem keeps Chaykin's sexualization of Hawkgirl going, but, like everything else about his art in this volume compared to Chaykin's in the first, it looks lazier and less elegantly.

For example:

Did he draw some somewhat saucy cheesecake, or Google Image "lady with not pants," cut-and-pasted a favorite result and have her butt colored green and throw in some shading...?

Simonson's plotting remains fine, but now that we get to the solution part of the "Where's Hawkman?" riddle, it gets a bit more needlessly complicated and confused. This volume is mainly about problems form outerspace visiting Kendra in various ways.

Blackfire, the evil sister of former Teen Titan Starfire, sics a Thanagarian killer on Hawkgirl and, when our hero kills her would be killer, Blackfire arrives herself, wearing Hawkman's wings and boasting that she's killed Hawkman and will do the same to Hawkgirl!

Then we backtrack to the JSA: Classified issues, and learn that Hawkman's been hanging out on Rann, trying to get enough legal proof that Blackfire is evil to present to some space cops or whatever and bust her, and then he rejoins Hawkgirl on Earth to finish off Blackfire (Well, they let her live, but Hawkman depowers her).

The final chapter is the talky one, in which the Hawks have conversations with the supporting cast and one another, essentially deciding who will continue to star in the book, which used to be called Hawkman but was changed to Hawkgirl as part of DC's "One Year Later" promotional effort. There's also a bit of set-up of a conflict that will come into fruition in the third and final collection of Hawkgirl: A Parademon from Apokalips escases to ancient Egypt with a weapon of mass destruction, which Hath-Set puts in a jar and then forgets about.

The third volume, Hawkgirl: Hath-Set, features guest-stars galore—Batman! Superman! Oracle! The Female Furies!—and has lots of full-on crazy superhero madness, but even more poorly drawn than this volume (It's all Arlem, save for about an issue's worth of Dennis Calero art). We'll discuss that tomorrow night, though.

Meanwhile...

I had a pretty busy week at Robot 6. I wrote a piece on the cancellation of The Savage Hawkman (which DC just made official), another on DC's totally insane "WTF Certified" promotion, a review (perhaps the most thorough review!) of Young Love: The New 52 Valentine's Day Special (which I mentioned here last night) and, because I also sometimes write about comics that have nothing to do with DC Comics, a review of Matt Baker: The Art of Glamour, a TwoMorrows book about the artist.

Oh! And I also contributed to Robot 6's What Are You Reading? column.

Elsewhere on the Internet, I have a review of Fluffy, Fluffy Cinnamoroll Vol. 5, the final volume of the series, at Good Comics For Kids.

And, finally, this isn't a review by me, but a review of me (sorta). Rob Clough reviewed my mini-comic The Mothman Comics. You can read Clough's review here, and you can order your own copy (still!) here.

If this is Brightest Day, can you imagine what a dark one might look like?

And here I thought all the weird tension between them was because of their political differences.

So what I get from this panel is that Hawkman wants Green Arrow's ass, but he'll settle for Hal Jordan's...?

Oh and also Hawkgirl likes to watch.



(Panel from DC's Blackest Night #3 by Geoff Johns, Ivan Reis and Oclair Albert)

"Hey Batman, have you seen The Atom anywhere? We were--Seven Hells!"

Hawkman:

Hawkman vs. the vaguely Muslim, crypto-Arab bad guys

Thursday night we checked out the Namor portion of the 1965 edition of Jules Feiffer's The Great Comic Book Heroes, so now let's turn our attention to another Golden Age great who's been active superheroing for decades, despite his inability to make purchases from most convenience stores (on account of those blasted no shirt...no service store policies).



That's right, Hawkman! This is, of course, the original, Golden Age version of Hawkman, not the alien policeman Silver Age version or the amalgated Confusing Version I Don't Understand which is currently part of Justice Society of America's sprawling ensemble cast. Despite the seeming simplicity of his schtick—Hey, what if we took one of the hawkmen from Flash Gordon and made him a hero named, uh, Hawkman!—he actually has a double gimick, laid out in the two sentences in that little box. In addition to dressing up and flying like a hawk, he also "fights the evils of the present with the weapons of the past."

But what he really had going for him was how fucking weird he was. Look at that mask. Look at it. Does it make any sense? There's a bird mouth, right above his person mouth...he's like a two-mouthed bird man. I love this helmet. There's something to be said for the Silver Age Hawkman, with his creepy giant hawk eyes, but the eccentricity of this particular costume really can't be beat.

But enough about costuming; let's see what Sheldon Moldoff has in store for the Winged Wonder...

The adventure begins with Carter Hall—The Hawkman—wearing a robe and reading the newspaper. "Strange, this attack" he thinks. "One was made last month on the king of Emporia. And before that an attack on the premier of Frappe! I wonder what's behind them..."

I wonder if we'll find out in the course of this story...

Soon—as in, the very next panel—Hall is at the opera:

Yes, this fresh air feels so good, why not foul it with some pipe smoke? If only you'd brought your cigars! Please note that Golden Age Hawkman is blonde and wears a green suit with a bow tie. He looks an awful lot like his contemporary, the much-maligned JSA member Johnny Thunder, doesn't he?

In the next panel, he engages in some Golden Age racial profiling:


"Same sort of fellow," eh Hall? What "sort of fellow" is that, exactly?

According to the newspaper he was perusing, the attacker was merely described as "a fanatical Easterner":
(Above: an example of the yellow journalism of the period. I believe that's canary yellow journalism, in fact).

Of course, perhaps there's somethign to be said for racial profiling, as before Hall can even exhale his first lungful of pipe-smoke, the bearded, be-turbaned fellow pulls a huge blade from somewhere, shouting,

"The crazed Easterner leaps for a young blonde..." the caption reads, as we get a tight close-up of a screaming blonde girl, but "Carter Hall interferes!" by elbowing the crazed Easterner in the beard and saying "This'll hold you!"

And that was all on the very first page of the story. Man, comics sure didn't mess around back then.

On the next page, Hall identifies the dagger as a "Khanjur," and talks with a policeman who has arrived to take "the Easterner" away. When he turns to find the girl, she's completely disappeared, but hold on, what's this in his pocket?

Why, that's rather forward of her... I like the last panel of this sequence. Hall looks like he's about to strike her with his wave, and she flinches.

She immediately starts telling our handsome, bow-tied hero that she's going to "Araby to-night," and that the sect of assassins formed by Hassan Ibn Sadah in 1070 has been revived. They plan on murdering those in authority and all countries and seting up their own rulers. So, a pretty ambitious plot. But how does Ione Craig know all this?

Well, she's oviously not that secret an agent, if she blabs about her status to a complete stranger she just met. Hall stalks off, smoking another pipe, and decides on a plan of action. Once home, he straps on his fannypack and prepares to shadow the pretty agent:


This leads to a pretty comical page of The Hawkman flying behind Craig's ship, day and night. At night, he holds on to two ropes attached to the back of the ship and apparently sleeps in the air while being pulled behind it.

Once in Cairo, he presents himself to Craig and offers her his assistance. Showing the shrewd, suspicious mind of an international spy, she decides to trust this second, masked, shirtless stranger, giving him a map of the area and the assignment of finding Alamut, the city of assassins.

It proves an easy enough task for a man with wings. Craig finds her own way there, when she is accosted by two assassins in a dark street. Hawkman is sneaking around the grounds of the palace when he spies Hassan Ibn Sadah, the descendant of the original Sadah, who plans to be "the first ruler of all the world!"

Hawkman thinks to himself, "If I can lay low that Hassan nut! I can end all this nonsense!"

But just then...


Hawkman's unable to hit Hassan without endangering Craig, so he uses his sling to kill the guy next to Hassan, and then retreats until nightfall. Then he creeps through the palace, beaning guards with his sling, until he enters the "lavish feasting room" of Hassan, puts his hands on his hips, and announes, "Good evening gentlemen...sorry to disturb your party!"

Sure, she thrills to the sight of the Hawkman against a hundred, but Moldoff doesn't show us this thrilling scene, simply an image of Craig thrilling to it. Hmm...perhaps he chose wisely; that is a pretty sexy panel. For a panel in a Hawkman strip, anyway.

Only eleven panels left! Better wrap this story up! Hassan screams, "Kill him! Kill him!", Hawkman grabs a scimitar from the wall, he fights with the power of ten men, slashes the chains that hold Craig, and take us home, Shelly:

And so ends...Hey!
Watch the hands, Hawkman!