Showcase Presents Hawkman Volume 1: written by Gardner Fox and Bob Haney; illustrated by Joe Kubert, Murphy Anderson, Gil Kane, and Carmine Infantino (Collected 2008): While he was never an A-List hero at any point in comic-book history, Hawkman nonetheless wears one of the five or six best-looking costumes a superhero ever put on.
Initially designed in the 1940's by Sheldon Moldoff doing a fair imitation of Flash Gordon writer-artist Alec Raymond, the costume would be tweaked a bit by the great Joe Kubert when Hawkman was rebooted in the early 1960's. Every re-design after Kubert has been a falling away from greatness.
DC Comics editor Julius Schwartz, the guiding light behind DC's 1950's and 1960's 'Silver Age' reboots of 1940's 'Golden Age' superheroes, does with the 'new' Hawkman something similar to what he had his writers and artists do with the reboot of Green Lantern: he switches the character's origins from magical to science-fictional. Instead of a reincarnated Egyptian hero, Hawkman is now a police officer from the planet Thanagar, which orbits the North Star.
He comes to Earth with his wife and police partner Shayera (then-Hawkgirl) in pursuit of a dangerous criminal and subsequently stays on Earth to study human police methods. Schwartz and company preserved some of the flavour of the Golden-Age Hawkman by having the new character's secret identity be a museum director, and by having Hawkman and Hawkgirl fight many criminals using ancient weapons rather than scientific ones, with the explanation being that the two police officers don't want to run the risk of having sophisticated Thanagarian technology fall into criminal hands.
So the Hawkman costume, once an emulation of the hawk-headed Egyptian god Horus, becomes the standard uniform of the Thanagarian police officer. Schwartz and Fox are to some extent borrowing from another of Schwartz's Silver-Age reboots, Green Lantern, whose one-off Golden-Age costume would be reimagined and redesigned to be the uniform of an entire galaxy-spanning Green Lantern Corps.
In several issues, they also borrow from the Silver-Age Flash's idiosyncratic method of costume storage, as Hawkman gains a ring from which can expand an entire uniform, wings and all. This last borrowing is one of those things that we should pretend never happened, and never speak of it again.
Fox's stories are his loopy brand of faux science-fiction that often works a lot more like fairy-tale magic. They're fun without being memorable for the most part. Kubert's art on the first ten appearances or so of the new Hawkman, though, is terrific -- he makes even fairly dopey concepts such as the Man-Hawks look believable and strangely menacing, and another Hawkman villain, the Shadow Thief, is a weird triumph of comic-book design and execution. Once Kubert leaves, the solid and dependable Murphy Anderson takes over. The flair is gone, and the series really becomes a fairly standard DC offering for the time.
One of Kubert's original designs -- that for Hawkgirl's costume -- is also quite striking, possibly because the eyes of her mask make the character look insane. It's a design that has persisted into modern-day comics and animated cartoons with fewer alterations than Hawkman's. Though she does wear more clothing on top than Hawkman's X-crossed, wing-bracing belts. Recommended.
Showcase Presents The Flash Volume 3: written by John Broome, Gardner Fox, and Robert Kanigher; illustrated by Carmine Infantino, Joe Giella, and Murphy Anderson (1963-66; collected 2011): The Flash was always the jauntiest of DC's Silver-Age reimaginings of Golden-Age characters, sleekly drawn by Carmine Infantino and written with a flair for the oddball, mostly by John Broome. As with other DC titles of the 1950's and 1960's, psychology is mostly absent and rapid-fire superheroics are the norm. Also, there are a lot of aliens.
There is some Marvel-Age influence here as the volume moves to the mid-1960's. A cover with the Flash abandoning his uniform and his superheroing seems pretty clearly inspired by a classic Spider-man cover of the same time period. Some personal angst slips into a couple of the stories -- being the Flash does occasionally play havoc with the Flash's relationship with reporter Iris West -- but the overall tone is usually light. One story has the Flash participating in bizarre, tearful conversations with his costume. The mental stability of superheroes often seems pretty precarious.
And then there's the Flash's host of supervillains. Captain Cold, the Trickster, Captain Boomerang, Heatwave, the Top, Abracadabra, the Reverse-Flash, and numerous others may be occasionally homicidal, but for the most part they're either trying to steal things or seemingly obsessed with playing tag with the Flash. And there are a lot of aliens from both space and other dimensions trying to destroy the Earth, or conquer it, or whatever.
The Flash's superspeed, so advanced as to give him complete control over every atom in his body, comes in handy. Occasional 'Flash Facts' explain why our hero can do certain things (like run straight through a brick wall) that one might think would kill him. Thankfully for Earth, relativity doesn't seem to apply to the Flash, as his jogs at the speed of light don't make him so massive as to destroy the Earth. Seminal Flash artist Carmine Infantino draws everything with an angular, lunging quality that highlights the speed of the Flash and the occasional slowness of everything around him. Phew! Recommended.
Crime Does Not Pay: Blackjacked and Pistolwhipped: A Crime Does Not Pay Primer: edited by Denis Kitchen, John Lind, and Philip Simon; written by Bob Wood; illustrated by Charles Biro, Jack Alderman, Dan Barry, George Tuska, Carmine Infantino, Dick Briefer, Bob Montana, Fred Guardineer (1943-49; collected 2011): Once upon a time, there were mass-market comic books that featured stories that didn't involve superheroes, and these comic books sold millions of copies a month. That is, each title sold that amount. It was the late 1940's and early 1950's. Superheroes were on their way out after World War Two. Crime, horror, and romance comics were on their way in.
A juvenile delinquency flap in the U.S. and Canada would ultimately do in comic books when they seemed poised on the brink of becoming, as they would in France and Japan, something with a much broader readership base than children. Superheroes would come back. And some of the finest American comic books ever created would die on the vine.
Crime Does Not Pay was the most popular comic book of the late 1940's, selling as many as five million copies a month (for the sake of comparison, the best-selling monthly American comic book now clocks in at around 125,000 copies a month). Its violence and its creepy narrator, Mr. Crime, looked forward to the violent, brilliant EC comics of the 1950's and the creepy narrators of EC's horror books, the Cryptkeeper being the one who remains in the popular consciousness thanks to HBO's Tales from the Crypt series of the 1980's and early 1990's.
These short tales, all 'based on a true story', still pack a kick today. Their graphic violence would get them targetted by censorship groups looking to protect children from violence in the media. And as a terrible bonus, the head writer of the series, Bob Wood, would himself be involved in a lurid murder trial for his killing of his lover with an iron and, once released from jail, would eventually be murdered himself. Wood's downfall occurred after Crime Does Not Pay had been forced off the market.
Anyone who thinks today's kids are exposed to an unprecedentedly violent media universe would do well to read this compilation. Heads are mashed into flames, brains are blown out, babies are killed in their cribs -- and at the end of each story, we're informed that crime doesn't pay because these criminals were finally caught and/or killed. But I don't think most readers were there for the moral uplift at the end. Boy, though. Boy, wow. Highly recommended.
Showcase Presents: The Trial of the Flash, written by Cary Bates and Joey Cavalieri, illustrated by Carmine Infantino, Dennis Jensen, Frank McLaughlin, Klaus Janson and others (1983-85; collected 2011): I can't think of a major superhero who became tragedy's punching bag more than DC's Flash did in the late 1970's and early 1980's. And I'm not sure why this was allowed to happen. But happen it did. His greatest villain killed his wife, and that was just the beginning. A couple of years later that same villain -- 25th-century speedster Professor Zoom, aka The Reverse-Flash -- tried to kill the Flash's fiancee on their wedding day. In the ensuing super-speed struggle, the Flash breaks Zoom's neck, killing him.
And so begins one of the longest storylines ever contained in a single DC title, The Trial of the Flash, which would ultimately span nearly three years and end with the cancellation of that title. It was a story so long that several peripheral issues of the title are omitted here to allow the collection (still the longest in the Showcase reprint series) to avoid requiring two volumes. It's still enough, and maybe too much.
By 1985, DC had decided to reboot its entire line of superheroes, beginning with a massive crossover event/line-wide reboot and purge called Crisis on Infinite Earths. The Flash would play a pivotal but heroically self-sacrificing role in that event. After the Crisis, his nephew Wally West would take over as the Flash in the brave new post-Crisis world. Ultimately, this is The Last Flash Story But One. Sort of. To paraphrase Algis Budrys, in comic books death is always conditional.
The Barry Allen version of the Flash helped usher in DC's Silver Age in the 1950's, as new characters were given the names of cancelled heroes of the 1940's, most prominently the Flash, Green Lantern, the Atom and Hawkman. They apparently lived on a different Earth than their 1940's forebears (in the first appearance of the Barry Allen Flash, Barry is seen reading a comic-book issue of the 1940's Flash from whom, after gaining his super-speed powers, Barry ultimately takes his superhero name).
Writer John Broome and penciller Carmine Infantino made the Flash a zippy, fun, quasi-super-scientific thrill ride over the character's first decade. (In-story 'Flash Facts' gave explanations of certain speed and scientific effects seen in the story, such as how a boomerang works). In The Trial of the Flash, Infantino has returned to the character after nearly 20 years away, staying with him to the end with pencils that are much more stylized and 'loose' than his Silver Age work, but still often possessed of a quality of speed and quickness and time-bending simultaneity that most other Flash artists have lacked.
Longtime Flash writer Cary Bates puts the Scarlet Speedster through quite a wringer here, as various parties try to wipe out the Flash's defense lawyers, kill him before the trial, or just do the usual super-villain thing of mayhem and thievery. It's a surprisingly harrowing and often downbeat ride, though it does have a conditional happy ending -- conditional because the Flash's fate in Crisis will supercede any ending in his own title and, indeed, that fate had already been published before the storyline herein ended.
It would take more than 20 years for the Barry Allen Flash to return from the dead -- several eternities in superhero comics -- and his history has recently been purged and restarted once again. There are some absurdities here, and one major annoyance (that would be the frankly ridiculous mental health issues of Flash's fiancee Fiona), but overall this is a lot of melodramatic fun. It would have been interesting to see what occasional cover inker Klaus Janson (so integral to Frank Miller's art on Daredevil and The Dark Knight Returns) could have done with Infantino's interior pencils -- the Infantino covers Janson inks are terrific -- but the interior art remains solid and sometimes startling. Recommended.
