The Second Hawkman Story

So continuing our look at the second storys featuring noteworthy characters who would last the test of time, here is the second outing from the Winged Wonder, Hawkman. In the early days of FLASH COMICS, it was clear that the staff weren’t quite sure which feature was going to click with readers, and so they rotated their way through a bunch of them as the cover feature for the initial few issues. Eventually, this settled down to just being a back-and-forth between the Flash and Hawkman as the anthology’s two big draws. So Hawkman gets the cover spot here, an image enlarged and cleaned up from the first page of his interior strip. Cost-saving measure? Who knows.

As you can see, writer Gardner Fox has the essence of teh series boiled down into a handy phrase by this second outing. The line “He fights the evil of the present with the weapons of the past” would be used consistently even into the Silver Age revival.

The artist on this story was Dennis Neville, who had also illustrated Carter Hall’s initial adventure. He’s clearly trying to channel the work of FLASH GORDON artist Alex Raymond (this is why the Hawkman’s headgear shifts back and forth between being a mask and just head ornamentation. Raymond had used a race of hawkmen in his strip, and Neville and others were swiping his figures routinely.) Like Flash artist Harry Lampert, however, Neville wasn’t especially adept at heroic adventure, and so he too would be replaced by issue #4 by the much more adept Sheldon Moldoff.

In these early days, most creators hadn’t entirely worked out what the appeal of the whole super hero thing was. They emulated Superman but didn’t give much thought to Clark Kent as a contributor to the ongoing appeal of the Man of Steel. Accordingly, for many of their earliest adventures, the DC heroes didn’t much bother with having secret identities. Here, Hawkman’s girlfriend Shiera has already revealed to their new foe Alexander that Carter is Hawkman and wrangled a dinner invitation for the pair as a result. This isn’t how Clark Kent was doing it. Within a couple of issues, the Hawkman’s secret identity would become the typical closely-guarded secret.

I love “It’s courteous to warn our enemies!” That’s such a 1930s Nick and Nora sort of a sensibility, I find it charming.