Rise of the Golden Eagle is the fourth and final volume of Hakwman v.4 before the changeover to Hawkgirl. It also represents the last significant chunk of this series I was missing from my collection. Now I am down to a handful of uncollected issues, which I will probably just order online at some point to finish the run off. I need to get back on track with my Hawkman reading, so this one will be a little ways off still but it's good to have it!
Image: Hawkman v.4: Rise of the Golden Eagle, 2006, Joe Bennet.
3 comments:
I have some mixed feelings about this volume.
Overall I enjoyed it and seeing the return of some classic villains (some of whom hadn't been seen since the 40s!) was really cool. The art tended to be top-notch as well.
However, at times I felt the violence was too much and too graphic. The issue where Hawkman got "killed" made me feel nauseated. I love sharing comic books and superheroes with my kids, but these Hawkman issues will be off limits for quite some time. The shoe-horning of Charley Parker into the new Hawkman mythos was a bit odd and it really upset some people how much his accounted for time-line made no sense (he would have been a baby at around the same time he was with the Titans), but time is always fluid when it comes to super hero comics and I never read any of his Titan appearances, so that blip didn't really bug me.
My biggest complaint though, is how long it was. There's a whole issue devoted to Charley recounting his fabricated backstory, that sort of thing is just unnecessary padding. I think the whole thing could have made for a much tighter story at something closer to 6 issues.
Still, it wasn't bad, it reintroduced Golden Eagle to the DCU as a villain/anti-hero type and brought back a bunch of neat old villains. It was better than most of the Hawkgirl stuff that followed shortly after.
I will keep your thoughts in mind when I get to reading the volume, and we can compare notes then. I did find it quite large for a Hawkman trade, especially considering that the first three volumes all contain multiple story arcs...
Hawkman almost seems synonymous with "graphic violence" sometimes in the modern DCU; being "Conan with wings" I guess makes it more prone. I typically don't mind it too much but it does make me wax poetic about how the Silver Age Hawkman used his head more than his fists.
One of my favorite stories.
I enjoyed - no loved - Johns' run, but Gray and Palmiotti elevated the book farther for me personally.
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