Silver Age Hawkman's update seems lazy compared to the other DC Characters. He was never all that popular in the first place , you'd think they'd put some extra work into him.
Silver Age Hawkman's update seems lazy compared to the other DC Characters.
On the contrary, Golden Age Hawkman was one of DC's more popular characters. He appeared in every issue of FLASH COMICS and alternated on its covers with the Flash. He was the only Justice Society member to appear in all fifty-seven issues of ALL-STAR COMICS. He did not quite graduate to having his own quarterly comic in the 1940s but then only five DC heroes did (Superman, Batman, Flash, Wonder Woman and Green Lantern), He was right on the edge of the top tier characters. For the Silver Age,his costime was not greatly changed but he was given a new, science-fiction origin to replace his original mystical reincarnation theme. This was the major change,
And thus started the most convoluted origin, which was probably the reason for his downfall.
It was fine until Hawkworld introduced timeline issues, Earth 1 was the alien and Earth 2 was the reincarnated human
i dunno. Hawkman's 1960s title never was a great seller; toward the end they merged him with the Atom and it still sank. I think it was like twenty years later that they started making his origin all complicated and confusing.
What about Hawkgirl? Was it being in the Justice League cartoon that saved her or was she more popular beforehand?
She was never popular in her own right, as far I remember. For 1960, though, it was pretty good ton show her as a competent police officer in her own right AND actual married to her partner. The 1940s Hawkgirl was a bit useless. The cartoon show does seem to be when Hawkgirl got some exposure.
It was completely fine until the fricking Hawk Spirit shit in Hawkworld Vol 2--with all of that Zero-Hour frickery.
Problem is that Hawkman never performed well in sales and always had to piggy back on someone else's book. When he did get a solo it never lasted too long.
clearly after 70 years of trial and error, something isn't working with the character.
Maybe he just doesn't have top tier appeal. Not every character does. Then again, nobody thought that Swamp Thing would ever get any traction either.
Hawkworld was excellent, the frick are you talking about? Even Hawkworld Vol 2 was good, until it became generic superhero schlock near the end of the run.
You could say the exact same for Green Arrow. He's essentially unchanged from the Golden Age when he's reintroduced into the Silver Age, except his origin isn't involved with Native Americans anymore--only Roy's is.
True, Green Arrow and Speedy were essentially the same characters from 1941 until 1969 when Neal Adams gave him a new costume and Denny O'Neil gave him a recognizable personality for the first time. Aquaman also stayed static until around 1960, when he got his Atlantis origin and his own series... and even then, his only visual change was replacing the yellow gloves with green ones. (Of course, those two were pers of editor Mort Weisinger, who had created them and made sure they always appeared somewhere.)
Weisinger didn't like people changing his characters. He got mad at Kirby for the work Jack did on Green Arrow. Personally I liked Jack's work on Green Arrow. Weisinger was kind of a control freak.
From every single interview and article I've ever read, Weisinger was a complete dick who was abusive to his writers and artists. Roy Thomas called him "a malevolent toad." And, looking back, DC editors really blew it. They had Jack Kirby on board, ready to draw as many pages a month as they gave him, but they thought his art was too rough and energetic. Dummies. He went over to Atlas looking for work and look what happened.
They gave Kirby a big push and a plenty of books when he first came over to DC. I assume the stuff just didn’t sell all that well at the time
This wasn't in 1970, it was back in the later 1950s. Kirby didn't get any publicity back then, not even a credit anywhere. All he did was Green Arrow and some sci-fi shorts.
>when he first came over to DC
Jack Kirby was writing for DC back in the earlier years of the Golden Age...
The team of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby worked for DC right after they left Timely Comics in 1941. Then they left DC, started their own publishing house which flopped and broke up the partnership. On his own Kirby went back to DC, then left them again to return to Timely (then called Atlas) for nine years. Then he left THEM again, went back to DC for a few years and left them again to go back to Marvel (formerly Atlas). After that, he worked for smaller indies like Pacific Comics and did animation storyboarding. A bit of hopping around looking for a better deal or because he fought with his editors.
Will Eisner was right about Kirby
I can't remember, what did he say about Kirby? (I know Eisner, like Joe Simon, was much better at negotiating contracts and getting more benefits than Kirby was.)
It's also funny that Weisinger got mad because all of his "second wave" of DC characters were swipes of existing characters to begin with! Green Arrow and Speedy and Star-Spangled Kid and Stripesy were both swipes of Batman (with a little Cap thrown in to SSK&S's costumes), Aquaman was a swipe of Namor and Vigilante was a swipe of any number of singing cowboy features like the Lone Ranger. And yet he gets mad when people try to do something to distance one of their characters from their carbon copy origins?
Then again Weisinger was known to stiff his creators out of money by telling them their story or art was rejected, pretending to junk it and then publishing it anyway. And since his titles never ran credits nobody would know.
So true about Weisinger. I think he also swiped Green Arrow from a 1940 serial The Green Archer, Every writer and artist that worked for him said the insults were brutal and continous. From all reports, Robert Kanigher wasn't much fun to work for either. At least Stan Lee had enthusiasm and a sense of humor. He started giving splash page credits before anyone else, including the inkers and letterers (unsung heroes of comics!)
Did Green Arrow ever stop getting stories? A lot of the golden age characters just stopped being published when superheroes became unpopular in the 50s
For about five months in 1958. Last appearance of Earth-Two Oliver Queen is World's Finest #92 and Adventure Comics #245, in February. First appearance of Earth-One Oliver Queen is Adventure Comics #250, in July.
Scratch that; there was no break for the character. Adventure Comics #246 is listed as the first appearance for Earth-1 Ollie.
The only superheroes who had stories that continued on to the 50s were Superman (Superboy would also count into this), Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, and Green Arrow. Maybe a few others but I can't think of them right now.
Green Arrow and Aquaman probably didn't get canceled because Mort Weisinger had a hand in their creation, and was editor of the Superman books.
How would you make a silver age sci-fi green arrow? He's a robin hood esque master marksmen.
You put him in the future where he fights sci-fi shit with tech arrows because ray guns are banned or whatever.
Silver Age GA had the most hilarious, unworkable gadget arrows you ever saw. Atomic warhead arrows, boxing glove arrows, arrows with a red disc to cover the green on a traffic light, handcuff arrows, wet mop arrows (seriously, in JLA story). They were so silly you have to love them.
There is an entire issue of Morrison's JLA about this, with Connor having to figure out how to use some of ollie's vintage pure bullsa8y0whit arrows.
I am SO out of step, but I like super-heroes to be a little flamboyant and irrational. They're fantasy figures. An arrow with an actual boxing glove on one end cracks me up.
I like the trick arrows it's Agood explanation for why he hasn't killed somebody yet.
"Whoops! Thought that was the tear gas arrow,. There goes Brooklyn,"
How do you use an atomic warhead arrow without killing yourself and everyone around you?
You can't possibly shoot that far enough without the Aftershock killing you.
i guess it's an arrow you can only use once,.
Well... he does say it's a desperate situation...
Speedy, we're not coming back from this one..
And the military did work on atomic artillery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M65_atomic_cannon
There's a lot of footage of US soldiers being ordered to march toward a mushroom cloud after an atomic explosion to see if they got sick.
A davy Crockett or atomic Annie isn't comparable to a nuke arrow. The max distance an arrow can travel is 500 yards. You'd be dead no matter what. Atleast the AA had an effective range of 20 miles.
Oh, of course. It's just a sign of how lenient people felt toward atomic weapons at the time. An arrow with an atomic warhead is Silver Age silliness.
so Samurai Jack. I'd read it
He’s from space
Early Silver Age, sci-f doesn't work with Green Arrow. By 1967 0r 1968, though, he was great for "Relevance" stories as the GREEN LANTERN/GREEN ARROW stories by Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams. GA might have been obnoxious and shallow in his personality but at least he had a personality,
Green arrow green lantern was the start of the bronze age On DCs side anyway.
It's a good dividing point. Some fans start the Bronze Age with the easing up of the Comics Code to allow vampires and werewolves, or the slightly greater allowance of suggested violence and nudity. (As in Conan),. There was definitely a big shift in the early 1970s.
The grey wings and lack of a shirt make him so boring to look at. Nothing really pops
I like the Thanagarian uniform they have Katar Hol wear in Hawkworld.
We should remember that at the time, editors and writers didn't think they were introducing new Silver Age characters with those who had appeared continuously (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Green Arrow, Blackhawk). They were regarded as the same characters who had been introduced in the Golden Age. It wasn't until much later that fans decided a particular story had been the first Silver Age appearance of these characters. And it was arbitrary to some extent.
Nice trips
Golden Age comics in general had a very loose continuity, like the Daily Planet got introduced a few years in but no one remarks on the Daily Star changing to the Daily Planet. Clark being Superboy doesn't make sense with the 30s/early 40s Superman comics, and in early stories Superboy was shown to attend Metropolis High School and not Smallville High School
And it DC wasn't even the only one doing this, there's other publishers who had like two different origins for a character within the 1940s.
Barry was deliberately a different character from Jay though. His origin showed why he decided to become the Flash--He was a fan of the Jay Garrick comics he read when he was a kid.
Modern fans may realize that comics were aimed mostly at boys around ten or eleven years old. They would read them for a few years and then move on to other interests. So continuity wasn't considered because there was such a turnover of readers. That all changed in the mid to late 19560s.
During the 40s and 50s DC famously worked on a 4-year turnover, so once a story was 4 years old they could reprint it, re-do it, or just do a new story with the exact same plot because all the readers who saw the first story had grown out of comics and few people bought back issues.
Yeah, this seems like a different world, doesn't it? Very few collectors back the, no internet, no reference books. Kids reading comics only knew what they themselves had read. And there was a big stigma until well into the late 1960s that an adult reading super-hero comics had something wrong with him, It was like a secret vice.
it was a good design
Joe Kubert drew Hawkman in the Golden Age and was assigned to the revamp. Aside from changing the boots, he saw no reason to make any changes. He wasn't "lazy," that's a poor word choice to use.
You can’t update perfection.
My theory is that he's sort of like Angel from the X-man. Sure it was cool at the time and back then seeing an 'angel' or flying man was a big deal but nowadays with all the crazy powers and shit around, just being able to fly and strong isn't very interesting or impressive.
Also he now has the rap of being a huge cuck so that probably doesn't help.
True. Relatively few Golden Age heroes could fly (most were just tough guys in costumes),. Even in 1963, Marvel had such a small handful of heroes at all that the Angel stood out. Pretty soon, though, flying was as common as being able to sign your name. Same for Hawkman over at DC.
At least he's still got the ancient warrior thing going for him.
Hawk man’s helmet never looked great. It was main problem with the character never becoming an A-Lister
And in the 1940s, artists tried all kinds of variations but nothing really worked well. By 1948, they gave him a simple yellow cloth cowl which was as good as anything else.
I don’t really understand how anyone could think that a mask that has a full bird face on it, but it still leaves your entire lower jaw exposed, was a good design.
Hawkman was a blatant swipe of the Hawkmen from the Flash Gordon comic strip and 1936 serial, and they had artificial wings and winged helmets. So I guess DC took it a step further.
This guy did it better
Frick off.
>By 1948, they gave him a simple yellow cloth cowl which was as good as anything else.
God, I hate that frickin' thing.
There's that panel!
>hawkwoman stitched it together for him
It's cute, keep it.
It's not awful by any means, but it's just shittier than the helm. I mostly dislike it because of how Carter was relegated to using it for a long time once Katar Hol was invented--as to avoid confusion between the two.
After WW II, super-hero costumes became more mundane. The full-length cloaks shrank to butt level, for one thing.
>After WW II, super-hero costumes became more mundane
Tell me about it; just look at the OP, and how boring all their costumes got once remade for the Silver Age.
Atom's change is, by far, the worst; Golden Age Atom's costume is too damn good looking. The hood that drapes into a cape, those bracers... Bah! Silver Age Atom is neat for his powers, but damn it if he isn't a downgrade in terms of design.
The original Atom's costume is so damn odd you have to like it. It has a sort of bodybuilder vibe to it. Around 1948, he got the more modern looking blue and yellow suit, which was okay but not as interesting to me.What I want to know is why didn't Hawkman take off those wings at JSA meetings? He must have been knocking stuff over all the time!
Wait, you were talking about the Silver Age revamps and I was thinking about the late 1940s. Hope that's clear.
>late 1940s
Hh, wasn't so late in the 40s for some. Both Sandman and Crimson Avenger lost their cool, iconic costumes to shitty rip-offs of Batman's once Robin hit the scene--hence their sudden sidekicks.
I'll never understand why, after CoIE, they didn't make it so Carter and Shiera died after WW2 and reincarnated as Katar and Shayera
See? That right there would have saved EVERYTHING.
This still baffles me as well. It took as long as Venditti's run for somebody to figure out something along those lines, and even then it still doesn't make sense, given that Katar was alive while Carter was alive.
>>13
One of the draws for Green Arrow was his use of trick arrows. After all, arrows are very dangerous. A longbow shaft thumping home at sixty to a hundred mph is not something to chuckle about receiving, even if it didn't include a wide steel blade you could shave clean with. Getting one of those in the shoulder or leg may look bearable in the movies, but then in the movies people get slugged unconscious with a blunt instrument and jump to their feet a few minutes later like nothing happened. So to fit in with the general DC policy of heroes not leaving a trail of crooks who bled to death, Green Arrow started using trickery.
Some of the trick arrows seem entirely reasonable to me. Hunters in various cultures have used blunt-headed shafts to stun game for live capture. I don't see why an arrow with an explosive cap on the end, or an incendiary device or a small tear gas bomb wouldn't work. Tying a thin nylon cord to an arrow with a sort of grapple hook head also sounds workable.
Bluejay is dead, give Katar his costume.
You know, change the colors and that might work,
Why did Hawkman get the Wonder Woman treatment where his post-COIE origin was treated as occurring in the present day DCU (which had the side-effect of fricking up the character's history for years) instead of just getting retconned in the way Man of Steel and Year One were?
Who were the editors at the time? Did they mention this in letters pages or interviews? DC seemed very disorganized in the 1980s. Poor Roy Thomas had his beloved Earth-2 taken away for no good reason, and had to rewrite history several times until he sort of gave up,.
The weird part was that Hawkworld was heavily delayed, it was out in 1989, long after COIE ended and the new timeline started settling in
Also Hawkman after COIE but before Hawkworld was shown as the Earth-1 version, and Roy Thomas wrote Earth-2 Hawkman as being stuck in limbo with most of the original JSA, fighting Surtur in Limbo.
They should've just made Hawkworld an Elseworlds
Hawkworld was way too popular to be left as an Elseworld
The popularity of Man of Steel or Baman Year One led to Hawkworld's initial mini, even though Hawkman had already appeared Post-Crisis.
Then Hawkworld being popular led to an ongoing launching from it, and that on-going settling it as a current day series.
Carter had a few different masks didn't he? Honestly the classic hawk head and wings design is just too cool and iconic to replace.
True. Roy Thomas even had a panel where Hawkgirl looks at a row of different helmets on mannequin heads when she feels like a change, Maybe live action without the wings on the helmet would work?
Flash as the only upgrade
Hawkworld is really good, I'm surprised DC hasn't reprinted it because it was well regarded in its day
It was reprinted some years back.
Always bring along a dry ice arrow, you never know. I figure the Arrowcar trunk was packed with dozens of crazy arrows, just in case,
You can't say Jack Kirby didn't have a wild imagination.
At this point in history it is clear that Hawkman does not really work and cannot generate mass appeal. He has a small following, but not enough of one to keep a book alive.
This is the best that Hawkman has ever looked - Rags Morales redefined the character
Feels like Rags Morales' inkers not correctly inking eyes fricked his career up. Guy is great but everyone just thinks of him as the wonky eye artist. As someone who draws myself I think its because he pencils heavily so inkers literally interpret his marks too strictly.
Rags is brilliant, but I agree. Identity Crisis had some very wonky final art. I think even he's aware of the interest issues rendering his work.
It sucks because IC was obviously meant to be his magnum opus
Absolutely true. It is intensely true to the character's classic design elements, and updates the details in subtle ways that provide a lot of background information about who the character is just from visuals. The coarse chest hair, leather holster, it's super good.
Thank you! Also, anyone who makes the full-beak mask work is a savant in my eyes
I like it when he wears a bit more armor like that.
For sure, how would you change him?
Hawkworld did a good job of making Katar Hol distinct from Carter.
I dunno, the helmet was a huge upgrade and the Thundercats emblem is iconic. Also apropos of nothing but the original Atom outfit is fricking kino.
The funny thing about the Atom was that he was only five feet two, but a bodybuilder and boxer, He'd beat the hell out of big guys as Al Pratt and then show up in costume and repeat it. I mean, you'd think someone would make a connection.