The Four Color Media Monitor

Jim Starlin did some good writing and drawing years before, but now, he's really starting to go off the rails with his recent efforts like Death of the New Gods and even the current Hawkman Special #1. According to this review on The Savage Critics blog, he's messed up Hawkman's origin, surely the umpteenth time this has happened:

See, apparently Hawkman's origin has changed yet again, and no, he never was a reincarnated Egyptian through the ages, that was all a lie. He was... well the comic never explicitly tells you WHAT his new origin really is, but I think you're meant to infer that it has gone back to the Thanagarian one, but WHICH of those (Silver Age or HAWKWORLD) isn't at all laid out.

Just what we need, that after all the work that was done to fix the background for the Hawks as best as possible, now, they pull out the rug yet again and present another embarrassment. Considering how the Thanagarian connections to Hawkman were first screwed up in 1989, I don't see why they have to make things harder again to fix them, unless this special were to be ignored completely by the audience, which could help.

I think Jim Starlin is getting to be one of many once talented writers who're now wasting their potential on pointless books that have editorial mandates written all over them, or are just hack projects. He certainly isn't helping matters, or Hawkman's origin, by taking up assignments like this. This is another book besides Death of the New Gods that Starlin just shouldn't have bothered about, and if sales were any indication, not many people cared that he was the writer. If the story was only going to be about the deaths of a group of titanic beings no one even asked be killed off, it's no wonder that it'd find so little an audience.

Labels: dc comics