In the early 1990s, during the time I was reading comics, Marvel launched a title featuring a new superhero named Darkhawk.
He's really Chris Powell, a teenage kid who finds a mysterious amulet in an abandoned amusement park. Just by holding the amulet and wishing, he can transform into Darkhawk, a powerful being with all kinds of super abilities. With another wish, he can transform back into his teenage self. I bought a few of the early issues at the time and really liked it. Due to my meager funds, however, I couldn't afford to continue buying it, so I gradually lost interest in the hero. But I always remembered how great those few issues were, and how cool Darkhawk was.
A few years ago, Marvel announced a new Marvel Unlimited service. For $70 a year, you can read digital versions of over 17,000 Marvel titles using their mobile app. I signed up, and reading Marvel comics quickly became the main reason I used my tablet. (A 10" tablet is roughly the same size as a comic book.) One of the first things I looked for was Darkhawk, but it was not available. 17,000 titles is a lot, but it's nowhere near the number of comics Marvel has published in its long history. I easily found other exciting comics to read, though, so the service was (and still is) a great value.
Once again, time passed, and all thoughts of Darkhawk subsided. But that all changed late last year, on the night of November 7th. That night I had a dream I went to a comic book store and found nearly every issue of Darkhawk, including the annuals. I bought them all. The total was $39, and I had $40 in my dream wallet. I was stoked!
When I woke up the next morning, I checked Marvel Unlimited first thing, to see if Darkhawk was available (they add a few dozen comics to it every week; some new issues, some old issues), but it wasn't. So I searched the internet for any Darkhawk news, and I almost couldn't believe it, but I found some! A couple of days before my dream, Marvel issued a press release and buried at the very bottom was a note that Darkhawk would be added to the Marvel Unlimited library later that very month! Just like in the dream, I was stoked.
I didn't have to wait long. About a week later, on November 13th, Darkhawk was added. I eagerly jumped in and read them, and they were just as good as I remembered. But soon I discovered a problem: only the first 9 issues had been added, and the Darkhawk series ran for 50! This was a bummer. It had taken several years for the first 9 issues to make their way to Marvel Unlimited. I had a feeling it would be several more years for the remaining issues to do the same.
I felt defeated, but still somehow stubbornly attached to the idea of reading every issue of Darkhawk. So I traveled to a local comic book store and combed through their entire back issue selection: the high-value back issue bin, the one-dollar back issue bin, even the fifty-cent back issue bin. When I left the store, I had five new Darkhawk issues. My entire set of Darkhawk comics, including the ones I bought in the '90s, now included these:
- 3, 5, 6, 7, 10, 12, 25, 34, 36, 44
At this point I realized how futile it would be to track down all the Darkhawk issues at comic book stores. It would take forever! But how else could it be done? I visited a few internet-based comic book stores, and saw that I could search for each issue, select what condition I wanted it in (mint, near mint, very fine, fine, etc), add it to my cart, and repeat for the next issue, but for some reason that didn't feel like the best solution. So for a few days, I was stumped.
Finally, the light bulb turned on inside my head.
The answer was ebay!!
I searched through ebay's listings and discovered the mother lode: someone was selling the entire run of Darkhawk: issues 1-50 plus all 3 annuals, just like in my dream. It was not $39 like my dream, but it was just slightly over $1 per issue, which seemed quite reasonable. I bought it, and 3 days later a big box of comics was delivered to our front porch.
Over the next couple of weeks, I read the entire series. It had obviously been canceled after issue 50, so I was expecting the writing to get really bad in the latter half of the series, thus leading to the cancellation. It really didn't, though. The entire series was written by the same writer, Danny Fingeroth, and while he made some changes to the character in the latter half that I didn't like, the issues were always surprisingly well written. Sometimes when the writing in comics is bad, it feels like a chore to keep reading, but that never happened with Darkhawk. It always kept me engaged and interested in what happened next.
What I really enjoyed about the series was how much Chris Powell struggled both in his personal life and as a superhero. His father, a police officer, disappears after taking bribes from a mobster. His mother, a lawyer, is prosecuting the same mobster, and dealing with threats and assassination attempts. Chris tries to use his Darkhawk identity as "an edge against crime" to try to find his father and protect his mother, all while keeping his identity secret and trying to help raise his younger twin brothers.
His attempts at being a superhero are extremely amateurish. In one of my favorite scenes, he fights a group of villains when Daredevil shows up to help him out. Darkhawk yells "Daredevil! Wow!", which prompts Daredevil to think to himself: "Wow? This Darkhawk character is new!" Over the course of the series, Chris' increasingly erratic schedule gets him kicked out of his house and suspended from school, so he has to find a cheap apartment and get a job with flexible hours. Throughout the series he often wonders if he's doing the right thing.
I'd never heard of the writer, Danny Fingeroth, before, so after I finished the series, I looked him up. He was a long-time writer and editor for the various Spider-Man comics, which made sense, since Darkhawk always seemed to fight a Spider-Man villain.
In the past decade or so, instead of writing comics he's been analyzing comics, such as his book, Superman on the Couch: What Superheroes Really Tell Us about Ourselves and Our Society, and this 2004 article in the L.A. Times about Spider-Man (the "regular-guy superhero").
He was even featured in a 2009 article in the Philosophy Now magazine:
I was pleased to see several references to Darkhawk in the article, including one about how he "agonizes about the rightness of his decisions". It refers to issue #18, where a group of villains is trying to kidnap a Russian scientist. Darkhawk, trying to protect him, takes action that accidentally causes the scientist's death. On the last page, Darkhawk thinks:
This all stems from Fingeroth's training as a comics writer, in which "every physical conflict had to have some parallel philosophical conflict."All I've ever wanted to do with the [amulet's] power was the right thing... That all I had to do was want to do the right thing -- and the right thing would get done. With no harm to anyone but the bad guys... Am I -- despite my good intentions -- a worse menace than those I fight?!
I'm sure this is all much more than you ever wanted to know about a superhero you didn't even know existed in the first place. So, in honor of Stan Lee, and without further ado:
'Nuff said!