#Thanagarians

[zal-cryptid]

DC characters - Hawkgirl

Character bio attempt #2

[chernobog13]

A page from Convergence: Hawkman #1 (June, 2015) featuring the Silver Age Hawkman and Hawkwoman battling Manhawks over Gotham City.

Written by Jeff Parker, art by Timothy Truman and Enrique Alcatena, colors by John Kalisz, and letters by Dave Sharpe.

I've always loved Truman's artwork, from way back in the day when he was doing Scout and Grimjack. Superheroes may not exactly be his forté, but his version of Hawkman is a personal favorite of mine.

[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.

[dcbinges]

Superman #26 (1988) by Roger Stern & Kerry Gammill

[corythesaxon]

So, I’m debating if I should resurrect Byth’s original children. Though, I’m not sure how I should integrate them if I did.

Due to how many times he’s been married I don’t think it’s impossible that he hasn’t gotten someone pregnant. But, and it’s probably rare for inter-species relationships to produce kids due to chromosome count and other influences.

Like, in actual DC comics lore Thanagarians can breed with humans. So yeah, but I wonder if they can breed with Rannians or Volkregians.

I think of this because his original kids were formed between him and a clone of an organic version of Aya. (Yeah I’m weird) and she’s a “mystery race” but I scrapped that idea and now I’m wondering what this new spouse will be. Probably a Rannian on some colony planet.

I still plan to incorporate his human daughter but she isn’t born until way later in the timeline. (I’m continuing my GLTAS fic in 2013 rather than current time.)

[evilhorse]

I’m impressed.

(Animal Man #6)

[blanddcheadcanons]

You don't talk about the Thanagarian Invasion on the Watchtower. Never, no matter what.

‎

[splooosh]

“Patient spiders”

Don Heck - Richard Howell

[fancyfade]

other takeaway from reading silver age hawkman

(should note: even with the treating your body to withstand the vacuum of space thing, you still can only last a few minutes)

[resurrectionsadamwarlock]

My Other Podcasts-L.E.G.I.O.N.P.O.D.Cast

L.E.G.I.O.N.P.O.D.Cast Episode 149 – What Happens in Vega

We’re looking at R.E.B.E.L.S. volume 2 # 17.  It’s the conclusion to “What Happens in Vega.”  Vril Dox is making plans with all kinds of folks now that he’s set up shop on New Rann in the Vega system.  He’s aligning himself with Thanagarian Hawk police and giving a home to the Tamaraneans and the Rannians.  What could possibly go wrong?

Find it HERE!

[shayera-the-magpie]

I've been thinking about how impractical Thanagarian armor is in the DCAU. Like, I know they'd want to protect their wings hence the armor at the base of their wings. But like the guys have their chests and stomachs exposed (bar Hro for the latter) and the women have their abdomens exposed. Like, those parts of the body are vulnerable to attack.

[bearforceone3]

playing with a bleez design

[chernobog13]

Hawkgirl by Joe Kubert.

[cantsayidont]

May–August 1985. Conceived before the Crisis on Infinite Earths but published concurrently, THE SHADOW WAR OF HAWKMAN was an ambitious attempt by writer Tony Isabella and editor Alan Gold to forge a new direction for Hawkman and Hawkwoman, who'd been stumbling along since the late 1960s in a series of backup features and guest spots. The story borrows a page or three from the lexicon of paranoid '70s conspiracy thrillers, revealing that agents of the Hawks' homeworld of Thanagar are now on Earth, working in secret to lay the groundwork for a military invasion by using the Absorbacon, a Gardner Fox gimmick capable of gathering all the knowledge of a particular world, to gather exploitable secrets from the minds of Earth people. Thanagarians are immune to the Absorbacon's mind-reading powers, but the Hawks are cut off from most of their friends and allies, fearing that any information they share with their JLA comrades might immediately fall into enemy hands. The infiltrators, meanwhile, target the Hawks in hopes of seizing their now rare and valuable Thanagarian technology.

In the Silver Age Hawkman stories, Thanagar had been presented as a typical scientifically advanced post-scarcity society, where crime is mostly limited to a handful of thrillseekers and alien invaders. However, it had suffered a series of major crises in the '70s, which the miniseries helpfully summarizes while filling in a few blanks:

(Inevitably, a few key points of the original stories have gotten lost in translation: In the original Equalizing Plague storyline in JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #117–119, Katar and Shayera are both infected, but Katar is able to cure himself and later Shayera, albeit not anyone else on Thanagar. The cure provided by Hyathis, an old JLA villain, is not part of that story, but is revealed in the 1978 Adam Strange/Hawkman crossover in SHOWCASE #101–103.)

The original Equalizing Plague storyline is a weirdly reactionary effort for the usually humanistic Elliot S! Maggin, about a silly-looking space villain (the dude with the red helmet and the mustache in the first page above) whose desire for universal equality destroys whole societies by transforming everyone into nebbishes. Even Gene Roddenberry might have balked at that one, and a central problem with Isabella's "Shadow War" storyline is that it requires readers to not only take that story seriously, but even empathize with how it has left Thanagarians susceptible to fascism. (The villains are never very sympathetic, but you're supposed to see where they're coming from, which would be a lot to ask even in less ridiculous circumstances.)

Despite that, the SHADOW WAR miniseries is a decent effort, with higher-than-usual stakes and an effective sense of menace. The scripts are a bit florid — albeit fairly restrained for Isabella — but the art suits them very well, with Rich Howell's Murphy Anderson-like pencils given moody atmosphere by Alfredo Alcala's inking. It sold well, leading to a 1986 HAWKMAN SPECIAL by Isabella and Howell with new inker Ron Randall. This has Katar agonizing over the Thanagarian agents he's killed, which is most interesting for Isabella's novel take on the Gentleman Ghost, an old Hawkman villain who unexpectedly becomes the Hawks' new ally.

Unfortunately, what Isabella and Gold had intended as a five-year saga quickly ran into trouble in the new post-Crisis HAWKMAN series that followed the SPECIAL. According to Isabella, the principal problem was that new editor Denny O'Neil, who took over soon after the launch of the new series, was annoyed that Isabella would attempt something so grandiose and demanded that the "Shadow War" be wrapped up quickly. Isabella soon bowed out, leaving Dan Mishkin and co-editor Barbara Randall to tie things up.

The dismaying resolution, in HAWKMAN #12, ends (temporarily) Thanagar's adventurism on Earth, but culminates in Katar deliberately choosing to leave the planet's new military government in power, with his father's old friend Rul Pintar taking the place of the previous ruling junta. Conceding that the Thanagarian people will be "helpless" without a dictatorship, Katar announces, "You lead them, Rul Pintar! Then at least their next dictator will be a benevolent one who remembers Thanagar's greatness--and can perhaps give a little bit of it back to them!" Thus, what had begun as a paranoid thriller about a secret alien invasion concludes with Hawkman's explicit endorsement of fascist dictatorship, after which he and Shayera fly back to Earth so it won't be their problem. Yikes!

Having lost any sense of narrative direction along with its moral compass, the book lasted only five more issues and was canceled in late 1987. Isabella says some of his original ideas were later recycled for "other company-wide crossovers," which I assume refers primarily to the 1988 INVASION! event, in which Thanagar was one of the invaders.

[dcbinges]

Superman #26 (1988) by Roger Stern & Kerry Gammill

[dreamingbee]