HAWKWORLD


By Timothy Truman, Alcatena & Sam Parsons (DC Comics)
ISBN: 1-56389-021-6

In DC’s post-Crisis on Infinite Earths re-imagining of the company’s hottest properties, a lot of beloved continuity was rewritten only to be un-written in the decades since, which only shows how fiercely us fanboys can hold onto our treasures. One of the few incidences of a reboot that deserved to stay untouched was when the Silver Age Hawkman was recreated in the wake of the 1989 braided mega-epic known as Invasion!

Previously Katar Hol and his wife Shayera had been police officers from the utopian planet of Thanagar, stationed on Earth to observe police methods, and subsequently banished here when their homeworld fell to an alien “equalizer plague” and the dictator Hyanthis, but this was all abandoned for a back-story where Thanagar was a sprawling fascistic, intergalactic empire in decline, utterly corrupt, and bereft of all creativity and morality.

Here lords lived in floating cities, indulging in every excess whilst servants and slaves from a thousand vassal worlds catered for their every whim and festered in gutter-ghettos far below. In this version Hol was just another useless young aristocrat, but with an unnamable dissatisfaction eating inside him.

Joining the security forces or Wingmen he saw the horrors of the world below and rebelled. Corruption was the way of life and he used that to advance the conditions of the slave, earning the enmity of his drug-running commander, Byth Rok. His secret charity discovered, Hol was framed and imprisoned on a desolate island where he met alien shaman/philosophers and underwent a spiritual transformation.

Learning compassion he set out to right the wrongs of a world, aided only by the dregs of the underclasses and fellow Wingman Shayera Thal: a mysterious, warped version of his girl-friend, murdered years previously…

This lost classic, originally released as a three-part Prestige miniseries, lovingly blends the most visual, visceral elements of Gardner Fox, Joe Kubert and Murphy Anderson’s iconic Hawkman, with shades of The Count of Monte Cristo, and Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination against the backdrop of the harsh and cynical 1980s to tell a dark moody tale which garnered great success and quickly spawned a compelling monthly series.

Now that DC is acknowledging its infinite variety through the 52 universes concept, it’s high time that this masterful thriller was again in print.
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