Grant Morrison's Batman Annotations: Batman #656

 

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See the index for all entries in these Batman annotations here 

 

Batman & Son Part 1: 'Man-Bats of London'

 

 

The title of the issue is a play on the (excellent) song by Warren Zevon, Werewolves of London. 

An action packed issue, where both the bigger messages and subtle hints of Morrison's work take a back seat to a lengthy fight scene mean there's not much to annotate here - but what there is, is pretty fun!  We rejoin Bruce at the fundraiser for Africa at a modern art gallery, where he flirts with potential new love interest Jezebel Jet.  The event is crashed by commando/ninja man-bats, who fight with Batman and ultimately defeat him.  He regains consciousness in the underground lair of the mastermind behind the attack - Talia al-Ghul.  But the surprises don't end there, as Talia introduces Bruce to his own son!

 

Page 1

Panel 1 - The bombshell introduction of Jezebel Jet.  This is her first appearance.  She is the leader of the fictional African country of Mtamba, taking over from her adoptive father (who had 'won' her in a wager) after he was killed in an uprising.  Aside from the classic super-hero love interest trait of alliteration, her name gives clues to her real agenda and the story to come.  According to the bible, Jezebel was the wife of Ahab, King of Israel, and she replaced worship of Yahweh with that of other gods (Yahweh would develop into the monotheistic God of the Abrahamic religions).  The key plot of much of Morrison's Batman is the ultimate embodiment of evil - in the form of Dr Hurt/Thomas Wayne/Darksied/The Devil - opposing and trying to destroy Batman, and there are God and Jesus allusions to Batman throughout the story.  In fact, many fans referred (usually pejoratively) to Morrison's depiction of Batman as 'Batgod' due to him displaying abilities far above his supposedly 'normal human' capabilities.  We will later discover that Jezebel is part of the Black Glove, the criminal organisation headed by Dr Hurt, so the idea of her opposing 'God' seems very much appropriate.  According to the Bible, when Jezebel purged the royal court of the Yahwists, the survivors were hidden and protected in a cave, and the Batcave plays a significant role in this Batman run.  Jezebel's biblical end sees her devoured by a pack of dogs, which mirrors the fate of Morrison's Jezebel who dies at the hands of a pack of Man-Bats.

Jezebel is also stereotypical slang for a sexually voracious African-America woman who seduces men - with its origins in the American slave trade.  Her role in the Black Glove is indeed to seduce Bruce Wayne, and she makes a startling impact on him here.  

Finally, her surname of Jet relates to the shade of black (named for the gemstone jet), and the colours of black and red will become a motif throughout the Batman R.I.P. arc - and is already a nod to her true affiliation with the Black Glove. 

Also in the background there's a pop art painting with an appropriate 'wow! wording over Jezebel's head.  Throughout the issue, there are other such paintings uncannily placed to complement the action or dialogue in the scene.    

 

Page 2

Panel 1 - There's a lot to unpack in this panel.  Although the artist on display is not named, the artwork is clearly in the style of Roy Lichtenstein.  Best known for his blown up replications of comic book panels, Lichtenstein has been criticised for simply being a copycat or plagiarist and failing to credit the original comic book artists - though some have suggested that this itself was purposeful, and a reference to DC themselves failing to credit artists in the original comics.  He did use a lot of panels from DC, which begs the question whether he exists in the DC Universe, despite using that same fictional universe as the basis for his art?  It's a quintessentially Morrison meta-textual question that is thrown in here.

Bruce says that all the comic book stuff is 'way too highbrow for me', and there are multiple ways this can be taken.   Art critics have claimed that Lichtenstein elevated low art, comics, into high art by turning them into giant paintings.  It could be Morrison taking a dig at those that do indeed consider comics to be low art, or they could be suggesting that comics - and Morrison's particularly - are, or should be, considered highbrow.  Certainly, Morrison is one of the few comic writers whose work is often elevated by fans and critics to being 'highbrow'.

This is followed up by Bruce's claim that he collects 'tribal art, schizophrenic artists, "outsider" work'.  Usually any art on display at Wayne Manor is depicted as traditional portraiture, so it's not clear whether he's talking about actual art here.  More likely, this is a reference to his alter ego's regular run-ins with his rogue's gallery (literally, in this reference).  Though the mention of 'tribal' anticipates the events of The Return of Bruce Wayne, in which ancient tribes play a major role.  'Outsider' is also a nod to the superhero team of the same name, founded by Batman, who also make an appearance later on in Morrison's Batman.

 

Panel 2 - 'There's a message here somewhere.  I know if I just stare hard enough..'  Many people often criticise Morrison's comics as confusing, or not making sense, or missing important information.   Final Crisis, which plays a part in this Batman story, in particular has faced these criticisms.  Morrison's defence is that all the information is there on the page, you just need to apply more thought and attention to detail to it than you might other comics.

Panel 3 - More of the Lichtenstein-style pop art, including what looks like a panel from a Sgt. Rock comic.  Sgt. Rock, a US army officer who has starred in many DC comics, was co-created in 1959 by the legendary artist Joe Kubert - who just happens to be the father of the artist of this comic, Andy Kubert. 

The centrepiece of the exhibition is a giant Godzilla-type dinosaur in formaldehyde.  This is a nod to the star of the Young British Artist movement, Damien Hirst, who's most famous works were animals, sometimes cut in half, preserved in formaldehyde.   Of course, he's not the only Damien that pops up in this issue.  The dinosaur is also reminiscent of the giant T-Rex robot that is kept in the Batcave.  Morrison is tipping us off that Batman's life is about to be turned upside down.

The detailed figures in the foreground appear to be famous guests at the exhibition.  The arched eyebrows, receding hairline, and sunglasses, suggest Jack Nicholson at the front.  If anyone can identify the others, then please let me know.  Though, the short man with the gray hair does bring a young Jack Kirby to mind.

 

Page 3

Panel 1 - That appears to be Grant Morrison themselves, with the trademark bald head and sunglasses.  Morrison has a reputation for inserting themselves into their comics, most famously Animal Man.   The artwork of clowns may be a reference to the Joker, though it seems a bit on the nose.

 

Panel 2 - More famous people.  Jezebel refers to 'the Prime Minister's wife', and the woman here does indeed bear an uncanny resemblance to Cherie Blair, the wife of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair (he was still PM when this issue was published).  Though Jezebel also refers to 'Darius Cage, the film director', the man on the left with the wild hair looks an awful lot like a different film director, Michael Bay.  Again, if anyone can identify the others in this panel, please let me know!

Page 9

Panel 5 - When thinking of an 'Aunt' in Batman, I'm sure most of us would conjure up Aunt Harriet from the 60s TV show.  She was in fact originally from the comics, and was Dick Grayson's aunt rather than Bruce's.  Instead, here we have Aunt Agatha who is Bruce's Aunt, being his father's sister.  She made her debut in 1955's Batman #89.  Despite Batman R.I.P. revolving around an alleged Thomas Wayne back from the dead, she plays no part in the story other than this one panel - but she serves again as a reminder that in Morrison's Batman everything from past continuity is in play.

 

Page 19

Panel 4 - Batman and Talia have differing versions of what occurred when Damien was conceived - but there's also a big difference between Batman's version and the original story in Batman: Son of the Demon, see here for more details.

Page 20

Panel 4 - Talia departs with the promise that Batman will hear from her again soon, and that she intends to 'hold the world hostage to a new kind of terror'.  She is true to her word, and what she has planned is the basis of the last third of Morrison's run with Batman Incorporated. 

Page 21

Finally, we discover who the son in Batman and Son is.  Meet Damien Wayne.  A character devised by Morrison to originally be part of one story arc and then be killed off.  Despite initial hostility to the character from certain sections of the Batman fan base, he grew to become a fan favourite.  The initial plans for the character were scrapped, and Damien went on to play a major role in the entire Morrison Batman saga.  Despite death and continuity changes, he continues to be a major player in the Batman comics as another Robin.

Damien derives from the Greek 'Damianos', which means 'to conquer'.  And this Damien was raised by his mother to rule the world, so nothing could be more appropriate.  The other obvious connection is with Damien from The Omen.  In that film, Damien is the antichrist, the son of Satan, and seems destined to rule the world.  Not only does that connect with this Damien's al Ghul family line - their name translating to 'head of the demon' - and again connects with his mother's plan for world domination, but it also ties in with the biblical themes of the devil vs God, good vs evil, of Batman R.I.P.

 

 

Early Image: Youngblood Yearbook

The Give Me Comics or Give Me Death podcast is available from all your usual podcast providers, or see all episodes here

For Season Two of the podcast we've taken an in-depth look at the foundation and history of Image Comics.  To accompany that we've done a blog series on comics published by Image in their exciting and chaotic formative years - 'Early Image'.  

 

Youngblood Yearbook (1993)

Written by Eric Stephenson

Pencils by Chap Yeap

Inks by Norm Napmund 

Colours by Lovern Kindziersk

Lettering by Kurt Hathaway

Youngblood Yearbook is, even by Extreme Studio's low standards of the time, a bad comic.  Image's take on the traditional 'annual' format, it presents a feature-length self-contained story, and a bunch of pin-ups.  To round out the presentation of the comic as something special it features a 4-page fold-out, taking the ubiquitous Image splash page to new lengths (or widths!)

Starring the 'away team' of Youngblood, the US government operated superhero organisation that forms the core of Liefeld's Extreme universe, we march deep into the rich vein of Marvel rip-offs that epitomise early Image.  The team travels to Antarctica to investigate the lack of contact from CIA agents stationed at the base there.  After being attacked by mysterious assailants, they are drawn to a tunnel and down into 'Arcadia', a world populated by dinosaurs, 'barbarians', a villainous despot called Tyrax, and a rebel leader by the name of Kanan.  In case you were left in any doubt that the ideas had been lifted wholesale from Marvel's 'Savage Land' and it's hero, Kazar, the story is helpfully titled 'This Savage Land'.  The Youngblood team are captured and subjected to the villain's clunky exposition, before being freed by Kanan.  They then fail to pursue the fleeing Tyrax, and have to race through an intergalactic portal before they are trapped in the not-the-Savage Land.  Apologies if that last bit is confusing, but no-one noticed on the way in that the miles long tunnel they trudged through was actually an intergalactic portal.

For a story (and a studio) based around violence and conflict, it's oddly light on fight scenes and action.  There's a failure to use the 4-page fold-out to any meaningful effect, instead just rendering the team in a bunch of Liefeldesque cliché poses, when a mighty action packed fight scene was just begging to explode across the extra space.  Not that there's much going on in the action's absence - we get almost no idea of these characters personalities, their relationships, or even their superpowers.  The team leader is Sentinel, who appears in Iron-Man like armour - though it's drawn differently in almost every panel, sometimes it just looks like the traditional spandex of the rest of the team rather than armour - it doesn't display any powers or abilities (other than seemingly imbuing Sentinel with incredibly poor decision-making).  Any readers familiar with Photon would know he's an alien, but it's not actually mentioned here, and despite being an extraterrestrial being he utters phrases like 'let's get it to rock and roll!'  Riptide is a blatant rip-off of DC's Ice, complete with vague water/ice powers and revealing bodysuit.  Cougar is the obligatory Wolverine clone (I really should catalogue all of them one day).  Rounding out the team is apparent powerhouse Brahma, though he doesn't actually do any feats of strength here - however he does helpfully mention that they get paid 'big bucks', so we at least understand that they're employees and not your traditional do-gooder power-and-responsibility superheroes. 

  

To be fair to writer Eric Stephenson, he had only written a handful of comics prior to this and was still clearly learning his craft - he has the inexperienced comic book writer trademark of using way too many words that take over every panel and page.  Though he's best known for going on to become Image's Publisher in 2008 (a position he still holds), he did develop into a talented writer, particularly with standout series' Nowhere Men and They're Not Like Us.

Like Stephenson, artist Chap Yeap was also incredibly inexperienced.  Only 20 years old at the time, Youngblood Yearbook was just his 3rd published comic.  Really, much of the criticism of the art here is criticism of Rob Liefeld, as artists at Extreme were employed to crank out comics in his distinctive style.  All of Liefeld's tropes are here; characters almost always facing the reader, realistic scene arrangement sacrificed for group posing sessions, wild ruffled hair on every character, a lack of backgrounds, a lack of feet, and the odd round shiny ambiguous technology.  Without Liefeld's detailed hatching lines, many of the pages comes across as unfinished layouts casually inked by Norm Rapmund.  Yeap would only draw a few more comics - including the ill-fated 'Heroes Reborn' Avengers for Marvel - before leaving the industry to work in TV and games as a storyboarder and character designer.

Youngblood Yearbook feels exactly like what it is: a throwaway story.  Neither Kanan, Tyrax, nor the 'Savage Land' of Arcadia were ever revisited - and on the evidence of this comic, that's no bad thing.

Mike  

Early Image: Deathblow

The Give Me Comics or Give Me Death podcast is available from all your usual podcast providers, or see all episodes here

For Season Two of the podcast we've taken an in-depth look at the foundation and history of Image Comics.  To accompany that we've done a blog series on comics published by Image in their exciting and chaotic formative years - 'Early Image'.  

 

Deathblow #1-12 (1993-1995)

Written by Brandon Choi and Jim Lee

Art by Jim Lee (#1-2), Time Sale (#3-12)

Colours by various

Letters by various

 

If this series of blogs seems somewhat negative on those early days of Image Comics (come on, most were terrible), then we have a pleasant break here to consider Deathblow.  Re-reading this over 30 years later, it's clear that it stands head of shoulders above most of its Image contemporaries.  In short, is had solid foundations that were lacking in almost all the other titles; high quality art that focused as much on coherent storytelling as on illustrative style, concentration on a single character, and a complete well-told and thought-out story over a dozen issues.  The latter was in surprisingly short supply in Image's early days - even comics like Spawn and Savage Dragon were feeling their way around issue-by-issue rather than presenting a considered narrative.  That's not to say Deathblow isn't without its Image-isms; tied to a larger universe of connected characters, shadowy government agencies with nefarious agendas, the supernatural, and lots of guns.  The fact that Deathblow himself has kept popping up under various guises whilst the Wildstorm universe and imprint has undergone multiple transformations, is testament to the work done on this initial series.

 

Created by Jim Lee and Brandon Choi, Deathblow initially made his debut in March 1993's Darker Image.  That was an anthology series featuring different Image creators' characters that were, as the title helpfully points out, a bit darker than the usual superhero fare.  The title also featured Rob Liefeld's Bloodwulf (a Lobo knock-off), and Sam Keith's The Maxx (who would go on to have his own series).  In true early Image style, only one of the planned four issues were ever produced.  Deathblow #1 hit the stands just a month after Darker Image, written by Jim Lee and Brandon Choi with art by Jim Lee.  

 

Deathblow is the codename for Michael Cray, an agent for International Operations (IO), an American agency that's essentially a combination of the Navy SEALS, the CIA, and deep state conspiracy theories.  Cray is an elite level soldier, part of a crack team sent to deal with the most dangerous situations (which you'd think is a rare position, but in early Image most characters were part of some kind of similar team at some point!).   In one such operation, Deathblow and his team are sent to infiltrate a target in Iraq and gather intel.  In fact, the location is the centuries long prison for The Black Angel, a herald of Lucifer, who intends to rescue the dark lord from his imprisonment and launch a new war on heaven - destroying humanity in the process.  At the same time, Deathblow discovers he has terminal cancer and his death is imminent - and with the threat now facing the world, he sees an opportunity for the redemption of his blood soaked history.

 

What follows is an action packed roller-coaster of a ride that takes in demons, archangels, a 'chosen one' child, betrayals, revelations (appropriately enough), soul-searching, the horsemen of the apocalypse, and a hell of a lot of fighting.  The fantastical elements of the story are kept on a tight leash, and despite the apocalyptic consequences ratcheting up the tension, the story stays small and focused on Deathblow and his handful of allies.  Whilst the ending might be predictable - spoiler; the hero saves the day and even manages to survive his terminal cancer (which turns out to be something else entirely) - there's enough twists, turns, and setbacks on the way to keep the story and the characters interesting.

 

Jim Lee channels his inner Frank Miller

 

When Deathblow first arrived it immediately drew attention and controversy for Jim Lee's artistic approach.  Blending his bold detailed line work that made his name with chiaroscuro contrast of black and white, he stood accused of ripping-off Frank Miller's Sin City style that had made waves just a couple of years earlier.  Miller even publically called out Lee over the blatant appropriation - though they then collaborated years later on All-Star Batman and Robin, so he can't have held too much of a grudge.  Interestingly, at the same time Todd McFarlane and Jim Valentino were ripping off Miller's writing style in Spawn and Shadowhawk respectively, and that attracted little comment.  As it happens, Lee's art is great to look at, and a perfect change of style for the tone of Deathblow, but his thefts/homages from Miller are superficial, and it doesn't at all have the storytelling panache of Sin City.  However, the title was to take an unexpected shift after the first 2 issues.

 

Jim Lee had noticed that, unsurprisingly, the Wildstorm Studios titles he was drawing sold many more copies than those he wasn't.  So he came up with a cunning plan - he would draw the first handful of issues of a new title, before handing over to a new artist in the hope that the Jim Lee fans enjoyed the premise of the book enough to stick around after he had moved on.  With Deathblow he chose up-and-coming artist Tim Sale.  Sale had worked on Grendel and a handful of various Batman comics, so had experience of the dark and violent comic characters, and he proved to be an inspired choice.  The grey ink wash and limited colour pallet gave the comic the brooding, mysterious, and morally ambiguous atmosphere that Lee had been aiming for.  Bars cloud with smoke, battlefields reek of death, and the all pervasive blackness hints at the secrets and hidden agendas of the cast.  Sale's Deathblow is a hulk of a man, filling panels and pages even as he skulks around burnt out churches, yet he is also able to draw out the emotion of a man torn between his violent past and regret for his misdeeds.  The only time the art stumbles, is when - almost inevitably - the story brings in characters from the wider Wildstorm universe with Deathblow's former teammates (Grifter, Backlash, and Dane) whose 90s Image superhero outfits are just not suited to Sale's style or the feel of the book in general.  

 

Tim Sale's moody muscular Deathblow

 

It's no surprise that following this series Marvel and DC would recruit Tim Sale to work on prestige stories of key characters.  He is now best remembered for his series of modern Batman classics with Jeph Loeb; The Long Halloween, and Dark Victory.  He sadly passed away in 2022, aged 66, but it is testament to his ability that this early work on Deathblow can be talked about in the same breath as those classics.

 

Deathblow continued on until #29 with Brandon Choi and a variety of artists, but it never matched the heights of this story arc.  Shorn of the biblical elements, he became just another superpowered ex-military hero amongst many.  Despite dying at the end of his first series, he has been resurrected into various iterations over the years - some good, some less so - and at the time of writing is dead, yet again, following the conclusion of Warren Ellis' reboot of the Wildstorm characters in 2019.

 

 

 

 

 

Early Image: Images of Shadowhawk

The Give Me Comics or Give Me Death podcast is available from all your usual podcast providers, or see all episodes here

For Season Two of the podcast we've taken an in-depth look at the foundation and history of Image Comics.  To accompany that we've done a blog series on comics published by Image in their exciting and chaotic formative years - 'Early Image'.  

 

 

Images of Shadowhawk #1-3 (1993 - 1994) 

Writer and artist - Keith Giffen

Dialogue - Alan Grant

Colours - Clydene Nee & In-Color

Lettering - Ken Lopez

 

Shadowhawk was Image founder Vim Valentino's first venture for the fledgling company.  Following two miniseries written and drawn by Valentino himself, Images of Shadowhawk was launched as on ongoing series for the character, with a rotating creative team.  The first team to tackle the project was the duo of Keith Giffen and Alan Grant, and the story featured Giffen's own Image Comics character Trencher.  Shadowhawk is a mysterious masked vigilante who wears silver combat armour and has the particularly violent trademark of breaking the backs of the criminals he takes on.  Trencher is some kind of undead trash-talking mountain of a man, who's job is to 'repossess souls' at the direction of Phoebe - a voice in his head that is presumably an agent of whatever higher power is directing matters.  In this series there's almost no explanation about any of this, nor any kind of character arc or insight into their motivations and origins - but this was a feature, not a bug.

 

Getting in two comics veterans was a smart move by Valentino, as not only do they bring a technical ability over and above the other comics being published by Image at the time, they have a blast putting the boot in to those very same comics.  With Alan Grant - co-creator of Judge Dredd - on dialogue, and Giffen's history of irreverent comics, they play this firmly tongue in cheek.  The whole three issues are essentially one big fight scene, with the violence escalating to ever more ludicrous proportions.  It makes the likes of Youngblood, Bloodstrike, Cyber Force, etc, seem all the more absurd for doing the same - but with complete sincerity.   

The plot, such as it is, sees mob-boss turned informant, Carmen 'Blowhole' Oliveri, holed up in a hospital while Trencher attempts to kill him and Shadowhawk tries to protect him so he can live to testify.  Throw in a police SWAT team, rival mobsters, and hit-men who can jump from body to body, and you've got a recipe for complete chaos.

 

Keith Giffen's unique art style for Shadowhawk and Trencher

 

The real draw here though is Giffen's hyper-stylised artwork.  His impressionistic messy line-work fuels the chaotic nature of the story, and often characters are suggested through large blocks of colour with almost no details whatsoever.  It's a unique style and a real shame that we didn't get to see him use it on a more regular basis.  His work on the characters is a treat as well, Shadowhawk looks so much more interesting than when drawn by Valentino, and Trencher ticks all the boxes for this 90's Image pastiche; trench coat (hence the name), an unfeasibly large number of pouches and buckles, and stupidly large guns.  Fortunately, Giffen doesn't completely embrace that Image ethos, as his storytelling is clear and the page composition logical.

 

In true form for those early Image days, Images of Shadowhawk failed to live up to it's billing as an ongoing title. You can feel the endeavour slip away from Valentino in a series of editorial comments at the back of each issue.  In #1 he notes that they've already run into trouble with #4 (it will be delayed by at least a month and that they don't yet have a creative team for #7-9) in #2 he went further and said that there would be several months between #3 and #4, and by the time #3 was published he had no idea when #4 might see the light of day (the reason given was the unnamed artist falling behind).  No more issues of Images of Shadowhawk were ever published.  Speaking of which, in #3 Valentino announced he and Keith Giffen would be working on a new comic to be published in summer 1994 called The Galactic Legion.  This seemed to be a mix of their previous work on Guardians of the Galaxy (Valentino) and The Legion of Super Heroes (Giffen).  It was never published.  In 1995 Valentino put out three issues of a comic called The Alliance which, minus Keith Giffen, did seem to be based on The Galactic Legion concept.  Giffen for his part joined in the madness; Trencher #5 was advertised in the back of Images of Shadowhawk #1, but never saw print.  The character would be moved to short-lived British publisher Blackball Comics, popping up in a couple of comics before disappearing for good.

 

Mike 

 

 

Early Image: Shadowhawk

The Give Me Comics or Give Me Death podcast is available from all your usual podcast providers, or see all episodes here

For Season Two of the podcast we've taken an in-depth look at the foundation and history of Image Comics.  To accompany that we've done a blog series on comics published by Image in their exciting and chaotic formative years - 'Early Image'. 

 

Shadowhawk #1-4 (1992)

Written and illustrated by Jim Valentino

Inks by Chance Wolf #3, 4

Letters by Diane Valentino, Kurt Hathaway

Colours by Digital Chameleon, Eric Vincent

When Image launched, they faced a barrage of criticism from other comic book professionals, a lot of which was aimed at the low quality of the books that were being published.  Whilst some of this was clearly jealousy at the incredible success of the fledging publisher, there is absolutely no doubt that some - if not most - of their work being released in that first wave was subpar.  Characters were derivative of icons from Marvel and DC (usually the one's the Image founders had made their name on), stories were poorly written either by the artists themselves who had no real writing experience or by friends and family who clearly didn't have the chops.  But the worst of those early Image comics was, by some distance, Shadowhawk.

Upon embarking on this project, I had in my mind that I'd read the original Shadowhawk miniseries when it was released, but reading it now I'm pretty sure that was never the case.  I wonder what my opinion would have been in 1992, given I was a huge fan of other comics that really were quite bad, because I was quite shocked to learn how poor this comic actually is.  After years of making indie comics, Jim Valentino made his name writing and drawing Marvel's The Guardian's of the Galaxy - no, not that one.  Guardians was set in the 30th century and featured characters mostly unrelated to the regular Marvel Universe.  It was an action-packed, inventive sci-fi romp that owed much to silver age comics.  It didn't set the world on fire like the comics of his Image co-founders, but it was consistently decent.  With his indie background, and ability to both write and draw, he seemed like a perfect foil to the inexperienced one-trick ponies of his Image peers.  What could his imagination unleash without the creative restrictions of corporate superhero comics?

Shadowhawk is a nighttime vigilante, dressed in black and silver body armour.  He has no superpowers, but does have an array of weapons and gadgets to assist in his crime fighting.   So, yes, he's basically Batman.  However Shadowhawk does have one USP - he breaks the spines of his criminal victims (ironically Batman would have his back broken a year later in the infamous Knightfall storyline, which was in part an attempt by DC to claw back market share from Image Comics).  Why does he break their spines?  Who knows.  Definitely not the reader, who is given no motivation for such violence.  We aren't even really given any insight into why Shadowhawk roams the streets, attacking muggers and rapists dressed as a bat shadowhawk.  This is partly poor writing, but it's also a by-product of the 'mystery' of who Shadowhawk really is.  In an editorial at the back of #1, Valentino invites the readers to solve the mystery and write in with their guesses.  However, at no point are we ever given any in-story reason to want to know his secret identity.  It plays no real part in the plot, and he's such a walking talking cliché of a badass vigilante, that it's difficult to connect with even the parts of the character we do know about.  The mystery isn't helped by a ham-fisted attempt to make a police detective the obvious choice, to such an extent that he may as well be called Detective Red Herring.  

Spawn drops in for a chat

 

The four issues are loosely connected by the story of local crime boss, Max Boldd, who assembles a team of superpowered individuals and tries to add Shadowhawk to the mix.  Because this was early Image, and everyone was still best friends and excited at the new venture, we get other founders' characters popping up in each other's books - here we get Spawn dropping in to check Shadowhawk is one of the good guys, and Savage Dragon, who's brought in by the local police to help with their supervillain problems and, of course, ends up tussling with Shadowhawk as well. Funnily, one of these villains - Arson, because, well, he commits arson - starts off in a very 90s armour casing but transforms into a man on fire who looks just like Inferno, a character from Erik Larsen's first few Savage Dragon issues.

A superhero showdown between Savage Dragon and Shadowhawk

Unfortunately, the comic isn't much helped by Valentino's lacklustre art.  His illustrative style feels very much in that late-80s superhero style that seemed so flat that it drove people into the arms of the new and exciting styles of Rob Liefeld, Todd McFarlane, and the other Image founders.   In contrast to his stablemates, he does have storytelling that makes sense, his anatomy is fine, and he has people standing, sitting, and walking realistically (a low bar for sure, but one not passed by many other Image comics of the time).  However, he does have a tendency to go for 'interesting' page layouts and panel shapes that don't seem to be done for any reason other than being different.  Panels are layered over one another, dramatically curved or slanted, or zigzag down the page, but in ways that bear no relation to the content of the page/panel, the pacing of the action, the narrative, or the emotional state of the characters.  I'll always applaud attempts to move away from a strict grid format, but there just needed to be a bit more thought applied to his choices.  

I do have the two follow-up miniseries to read, so we'll see whether Valentino was able to take this idea somewhere more interesting, or stick with the one-note violent vigilante trope.  

Mike