#thanagar

[textsfromsuperheroes]

Texts From Superheroes

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[wwprice1]

Amazing Bruce Timm promo art for the canceled second season of Green Lantern The Animated Series!

[cantsayidont]

September 2010. As Bruce contemplates his very narrow escape from the Black Glove in BATMAN #701, he fields a call from Superman, who is always operating on a completely different wavelength. Morrison's observation here about Batman's relationship with his costumed colleagues isn't exactly new — witness the well-known scene in JUSTICE LEAGUE: TAS where he plunges from the sky while laconically reminding his comrades over the radio that he can't fly, at all — but it is succinct. The central theme of the "Batman: R.I.P." story of which this is part, and really Morrison's key insight into Batman as a character, is that being Batman is part of Bruce Wayne's determination to always control the narrative, no matter what. This brief scene is a reminder that however much love or respect Bruce may have for Clark, Superman's mere presence makes that control very difficult, because Superman by his very nature exists in a world of alien visitors, cosmic crises, and evil gods.

In the late '80s and throughout the '90s, it became very de mode to insist that Batman had a sort of Luthorian dread of super-people and was never more than one or two steps away from plotting their extermination, but Morrison's take is simpler than that: The core issue for Bruce is not necessarily that he mistrusts people with superhuman powers, but that when he's around them, they expect him to be a superhero, and not just a costumed mystery-man with a head full of esoteric knowledge and a belt full of Bat-gimmicks. It's true, too — I'm reminded of WORLD'S FINEST COMICS #278, back in 1982, where Katar Hol decides it's time for some regime change on his home planet Thanagar and recruits Superman and Batman to help him. What's most striking about the story is that neither Katar nor Superman even bothers to ask if Bruce might need to stop by the cave to pick up anything before they fly off to invade an alien world 400 light years away. They just expect him to roll with it, because after all, he's Batman, isn't he?

[milkydraws8]

ermm... hawkwarrrrd...

[earth-ai]

Carter Hall, famed egyptologist, discovered the nth metal he uses to fly among Egyptian artifacts and created his Hawkman identity in homage to the hawk god Horus. Later Carter Hall learned that nth metal was left on Earth AI by Thanagarians who visited Earth before the rise of the Egyptian kingdom. Their appearance inspired belief in the Egyptian hawk god Horus upon which the Egyptians built their entire pantheon of animal headed dieties.

[blanddcheadcanons]

(Silver/Bronze Age) When Shayera came to Earth from Thanagar initially she wasn't persuaded she needed to wear a variation on the standard hawkman uniform and was going to wear the same top Katar wore. She was finally convinced by how quickly and brightly Clark turned red when they met.

‎

[trioxina245]

Hawkworld, covers art by Tim Truman

[laultimacocacolaeneldesierto]

Hawkgirl by Paul Martin Smith

[evilhorse]

Perish the thought.

[flexingtyger99]

Hawkman

[eightam]

Hawkman (Vol. 5) #13

Art by Inhyuk Lee

[mysteryonearth52]

R.E.B.E.L.S. 17 (2010) by Tony Bedard & Sergio Ariño 

Cover: Kalman Andrasofszky

[cantsayidont]

August 1989. The first chapter of Tim Truman's three-issue HAWKWORLD miniseries wastes no time in presenting its thesis statement. On the planet Thanagar, a young aristocrat Katar Hol, just out of military academy and not yet Hawkman, joins his world's paramilitary police force, the Wingmen, and quickly learns what the Wingmen really do: brutal raids into the slums of Downside, Thanagar's overcrowded ghetto — ostensibly to prevent insurrection and root out caches of weapons and other contraband, but really to maintain a climate of terror for an already oppressed population of conquered beings from many worlds. As Katar is already beginning to suspect here, his cynical commander, Byth (the one speaking, above), is actually running guns and drugs to Downside, and takes advantage of these raids to rid himself of rivals and no-longer-useful accomplices, lining his own pockets while perpetuating the social inequity and exploitation on which Thanagarian society depends.

Many elements of this miniseries are drawn from the Gardner Fox Hawkman stories of the Silver Age: Byth was the the villain in the first Silver Age Hawkman story in THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #34, a statue of Kalmoran was seen briefly in BRAVE AND THE BOLD #43, and Illoral was a world the Hawks visited in HAWKMAN #6 in 1965. Truman (who originally intended HAWKWORLD to be a direct prequel to the Fox/Kubert stories) frames those elements in a new context, giving them much greater thematic weight.

HAWKWORLD sold well, thanks in no small part to the magnificently realized artwork, by Truman and Argentinian artist Quique Alcatena (with superb color by Sam Parsons), but it drew some criticism for the darkness of the story and its ugly portrayal of a militarized Thanagar. The reality is that Thanagar had been presented as a fascist dictatorship for about a decade by this point, something that the previous version of Katar Hol had eventually accepted and even endorsed so long as it didn't directly threaten Earth. What Truman did was to remove the pretense that Thanagar hadn't been that way to begin with, and thus reassess Katar's relationship with that brutal imperial state — whose resemblance to our world was in no way coincidental. The story (which puts Katar through the wringer in every respect) ends more or less where BRAVE AND THE BOLD #34 begins, so the full ramifications of Truman's reframing of Hawkman's origin would play out in the first 26 issues of the ongoing HAWKWORLD series by John Ostrander and Graham Nolan between 1990 and 1992.

[tuxedosaurus]

As someone who prefers to know what they’re taking about, and a person who likes Hawkman lore, I find folks spouting incorrect information about that part of DC real annoying.

Personally I would actually READ THE BOOKS before making any statements about the stories. But what do I know? 🙄

[milkydraws8]

invisible plane designs