#truman and editor mike gold thought that

[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.