Flipping The Bird: The Savage Hawkman #1 Review

Editor’s Note: This review contains spoilers. But what do you care? It’s not like you were gonna read Hawkman anyway.

And, as usual, one last Wednesday morning review before the comic stores open…

For good or ill, we’ll end our coverage of DC’s New 52, which officially ends today with a new batch of #2 issues, with The Savage Hawkman #1. The Savage Hawkman is the story of Carter Hall, who has a harness made of Nth metal that allows him to… um… fly and stuff… and he… has… yeah, sorry. The problem is I don’t care about Hawkman. The problem is that nobody cares about Hawkman. The only person who cared about Hawkman was Hawkgirl, and nobody gave enough of a fuck about Hawkgirl to leave her alive.

The upside of that general apathy is that it allows writer Tony Daniel to try almost anything he wants to make Hawkman interesting for a new generation. The downside is that what he tries feels like throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. Almost literally.

Daniel opens this new chapter in Hawkman’s rebooted life by showing how exciting it is to be Hawkman… by having him be a depressed alcoholic who hates being Hawkman so much he tries to kill his costume with a flare gun.

Let’s take a moment and examine that, shall we? As a New 52 book, this is meant to make new readers excited about characters they aren’t familiar with. And Daniel has decided to introduce us to this new Hawkman by telling us that:

1. Even Hawkman thinks that being Hawkman sucks, and:
2. Hawkman’s power set is so weak that even Hawkman himself thinks he can be defeated by a roman candle.

Anyway, apparently Hawkman’s costume has other ideas and attacks him, showing that even Hawkman’s pants have more balls than Hawkman himself. He later awakens with no memory of what happened to him, but later when he’s threatened, his costume erupts from his skin, complete with a set of three claws made of an exotic metal, in no way similar to Venom or Wolverine! Because, um… well, they can’t fly, can they? Nope, this is completely original! There is no precedent in comics to the idea of a bitter, depressed drunkard in a flying suit of armor!

Let’s cut over to the good stuff in The Savage Hawkman: Philip Tan’s artwork and Sunny Gho’s coloring. This is a Goddamned good looking  book. It’s clearly standard pen and ink under there somewhere, but between what seems like grease penciled embellishment and coloring that looks like someone took a set of watercolors to the pencils, this book is simply gorgeous. I mean, look at this splash page:

Is that not… the fucking hooded woman? After four weeks of cleverly hiding her in crowd scenes, you need to shoehorn her into a fucking cave? Stinking up the best splash page of the book? Jesus, even DC doesn’t care about the quality of The Savage Hawkman. What? Right; the art…

Seriously: it’s awesome. It has a look unlike any of the other New 52 books, and would look right at home in any of the DC Dark books, like Animal Man or Swamp Thing. Which is excellent news for this team, because it means that they might have a place to land when The Savage Hawkman gets canceled.

Look: what’s happening here isn’t entirely Tony Daniel’s fault. After all, the man did the excellent Detective Comics #1, so we know he can write a good book about an existing character. Part of the problem here is that he’s saddled with a character that is innately uninteresting. Let’s face it: Hawkman can fly with a stick. In our world that’s pretty awesome. In a universe with Superman and Batman? He’s a pet bird he can talk to away from being Sky Aquaman.

But I can’t absolve Daniels completely, either. I’m guessing the reason Hawkman want to hang up his winged jock is because Hawkgirl was killed… but it’s just a guess, because nowhere in this book does Daniel explain why Hawkman is depressed and wants to quit. For all we know, Carter Hall is just a surly drunk with wings, making him no more remarkable than any Southwest Airlines pilot.

Further, while I can empathize with the challenges of making a zero like Hawkman interesting, Daniel falls back on the oldest of comics gimmicks for revitalizing characters: a new costume and one or two new powers. These are moves that are almost as old as comics themselves, and you usually see them late in a failing book’s run as a Hail Mary to revitalize interest in the character to avoid cancellation… which is not a good sign when you consider that this is Hawkman’s first fucking issue.

If you want to check out some interesting art, give the book a shot. But if you want to good story by Tony Daniel, pick up Detective Comics and give this one a pass.