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.

If 2007's Uncle Sam and The Freedom Fighters isn't the worst comic I've ever read, it's only because it was so bad I couldn't read it.

As discussed at (far too great) length in yesterday’s interminable post on the subject, DC’s 2006 eight-issue miniseries Uncle Sam and The Freedom Fighters was followed in 2007 by another eight-issues miniseries with the exact same title and logo. (I feel sorry for anyone trying to collect those series from back issue bins in the future!).

The collection of the 2007 series at least got a sub-title to help differentiate it from the previous series: Uncle Sam and The Freedom Fighters: Brave New World (DC Comics).

Despite not really liking the trade collection of the first series, I had somewhat higher hopes for this second one, because a) it had a different artist, with Renato Arlem taking over for Daniel Acuna and b) the characters were all introduced and/or reintroduced and their status quo and mission statement re-established, which would theoretically eliminate the existential crisis I felt emanating from the pages of the first series.

Oh, and c) the cover is awesome. It’s by Dave Johnson, who drew Uncle Sam cradling a tattered U.S. flag in the same pose and making the same expression as Superman holding the dead body of his cousin Supergirl.I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be hilarious or not, but I was incredibly amused by the implication that Uncle Sam loves every single random American flag as if it was a close relative of his, and makes an anguished Crying Superman face whenever he sees one damaged.

As it turned out, I should have lowered my expectations rather than raised them. Because you see not only is this second series actually worse than the first, it is the worst comic book series ever published.

Okay, maybe that’s not fair. Admittedly, I can be a bit hyperbolic about superhero comics here (although, in my defense, the superhero genre was founded, sustained and sold on the basis of hyperbole) and, yes, I know I’ve said other comics were the worst comics ever before, perhaps most notably Ultimates 3, which I devoted a week of blogging to covering.

But here’s the thing—as terrible a comic book series as Ultimates 3 was, I was able to at least read it. I could make it through every single panel of the thing, look at all the images and make sense of them, read every single word.

I just could not do that with this book. It wasn’t simply a lack of desire. I tried about a half-dozen times, and made it maybe 40 pages in. I would pick it up and read a panel or three at a time later. As I said before, I liked the characters, I had no specific objections to writers Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray, and the plot did seem sort of awesome—a mind-controlled and newly empowered Red Bee II is the main antagonist, there’s an empire of giant super space-bugs invading earth, Neon The Unknown’s in it…but, man, I could not make myself do it.

I know I had the ability to read the book, but it required a lot of willpower, a lot of effort and it was just incredibly unpleasant. See, artist Renato Arlem—who apparently did all of the art, as no one else gets an artist credit, not even a colorist—didn’t draw the comic so much as assemble it.

The background and props—every single one of them—looks like a photo ran through a filter to make it look slightly less photo-y. True, the characters look drawn, and are cut-and-pasted over the backgrounds, but Arlem doesn’t draw them very often, and uses the exact same drawings of the exact same characters over and over again.

I’ll get to some examples, but this series looks more like a work of photo collage than drawing. True, Arlem likely created the raw material for a great deal of that collage work, but I found it just this side of unreadable.

Let me show you what I mean.

Here’s the first panel of page 10 of the first issue:Happy Terrill, the Golden Age Ray, and Uncle Sam are talking in Arlington Cemetery. Since this panel contains the characters in the background, it seemed like a good example of how Arlem handles the settings in the book.

They all look like that.

Aside from the fact that this is the diametrically opposed to what I like to see in a comic book, it’s worth noting that it’s also not very good storytelling.

Note The Ray II in the right hand corner—he’s kind of hard to see as he’s wearing black and he’s posed over a black background—long-jumping in from off-panel. See also all the little white, abstracted bird shapes frozen in mid-flight. The image represents one single moment in time—the time between the flaps of a bird’s wings—and yet three different people speak a sentence of dialogue in it.

In short, the script and the image just don’t match up. This is a little like one of those long-winded speeches that Captain America would give while jumping up in the air and kicking two Hydra agents in the face simultaneously—only we’re 45 years on, comics aren’t just for kids any more (Biff! Bam! Pow!) and everybody presumably knows better.

It’s on page 12 where Arlem’s habit of recycling art on the same page and even in consecutive panels became apparent, and, once I noticed it, I couldn’t stop noticing it. Check out The Human Bomb in panels two and four. Dr. Mid-Nite in three and four. Blond guy in three, four and six.

Arlem does this throughout, and it’s crazy annoying.

In issue two, a guy who looks like Tony Stark meets with Stormy “Phantom Lady III” Knight, who is in this series portrayed as a Lindsay Lohan-like celebrity in downard spiral.Tony Stark appears on the page four times, but is only drawn twice. Stormy appears four times as well, and is likewise drawn twice—and one of those drawings slightly altered to give her a third pose. The first four panels aren’t drawn so much as cropped.

Two pages later, Tony Stark meets with the president on a five-panel page which opens with a Gary Trudeau-like shot of the White House with a dialogue bubble pointing to it (although here it’s a photo of the White House, not a drawing of it), and three of the four panels consist of differently cropped versions of the same image.

And one page after that, we get this, in which Stormy appears in five consecutive panels, but is only drawn twice.Notice the PR lady—who may actually be Miss America; Arlem doesn’t do so hot at distinguishing characters either—in the first few panels.

Her image was simply flip-flopped but, in addition to that, she apparently ran across the roof and re-folded her arms between the panels. That’s…kind of unnatural behavior for a conversation, right?

I could go on and on, as Arlem does this throughout the book, but I’ll stop with examples from the second issue of the series, as that’s as far as I could stand to read.

Near the climax of the issue, a quartet of super-people calling themselves The Futurist Militia is found posing in front of a photo of “CIA headquarters, Washington, D.C.” (Weird; Hollywood told me they were headquartered in Langley, Virginia).Again, the story telling is wonky. Between the first and second panel, the three characters not named Thunderer apparently run away real fast, Thunderer takes several steps back to be closer to the C.I.A. seal, all thos soldiers run in, and then he does the action we see in that second panel, before returning to the same pose he was in in the first panel (although now the building is a different building).

Also, TV news cameras are shooting bullets out of their lenses at him. Pwee! Pwee!

The reason I chose this page of the many other awful pages in the book is that it contains that lady in the weird bikini and veil combo, striking a rather odd, rather particular pose.

As we’ll soon learn, her name is Seducer and her superpower is a “seductive glare” which “none can escape.”

She only appears in this one seven page scene in which The Futurist Militia appears demanding to fight the Freedom Fighters, a fight that lasts until a drunk Phantom Lady shows up and cuts one of them in half.

Aside from her one-panel appearance on the page above, here is every single image of Seducer:

That's it. She was apparently drawn exactly once, and then ever so slightly modified from panel to panel—flip-flopped, one of her limbs moved a tiny bit.

It was at this point that I realized Arlem was basically ding something akin to what the old Space Ghost Coast to Coast show on Cartoon Network did, recycling the same three or four poses of a few different characters and occasionally slightly altering them.

That was done for comedic effect though, and the producers drew attention to it and played it up, packing in lots of awkward silences.

The comics equivalent is probably Ryan North’s Dinosaur Comics or David Rees’ Get Your War On and other clip art-derived comic strips.

Although, again, both of those use the obviously repeating, completely static images for comic effect; Arlem and DC seem to by trying to tell a serious (well, superhero serious) action adventure story using a similar application of the technique.

I found myself half-expecting Utahraptor to appear in a panel, or the Freedom Fighters to start swearing about the Iraq War and Bush Administration in red font.

If Palmiotti and Gray were filling Phantom Lady and Guy Who Looks Like Tony Stark’s mouths with North or Rees level jokers, then I suppose this way of building a comic book might actually work. Because those strips, and others that take similar approaches to their art work, have lasted because the writing is so good that it makes up for the fact that there’s very little to the art and the fact that it is quite clearly being lazily re-used on purpose.

But I don’t think Palmiotti and Gray told any jokes in this series…certainly not in the two issues I read all the way through. The plot seemed to involve the aforementioned alien bug army invasion, with spaced devoted to the FF wrestling with issues of superhero registration similar to those in Marvel’s Civil War and some exploration of the superhero-as-celebrity ideas explored in Marvel’s X-Force/X-Statix.

It looks like some potentially awesome stuff happens later in the book, but none of it actually looks awesome. It looks like Arlem moving his clip-art around photos, while the writing does all the story-telling.

And any comic book—but especially a superhero comic book full of primary colored, Golden Aged superheroes with fantastic powers—that leaves it to the dialogue to tell the story is pretty much a failure as a comic book.

Looking for a positive angle on the fact that DC apparently solicited, paid for, published and was proud enough to re-publish this as a trade paperback collection, the best I can do is think it was meant as an experiment, and DC, Arlem and all involved are proud of the fact that they tried a new and different way to tell a comic book story.

If that’s the case, well, the experiment was a complete and total failure. So there’s no need to ever try it again.


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Oh wait, I do have something positive to say about the book: Johnson’s covers are all fairly top-notch. Here’s his cover for the first issue—
—and you can see the rest here.