Death of Hawkman #1 Review and *SPOILERS*

Love Is A Zeta Beam

Written By: Marc Andreyko
Art By: Aaron Lopresti, Livesay, Blond, Josh Reed
Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: October 5, 2016

*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

Well, it's finally happened!  After begging for years to get another Hawkman series I've finally got it....... even though it's a Hawkman/Adam Strange series...... and also just a mini, but you know what?  After all this time, I'll take what I can get.  Really though, there's not a lot to say about this going in because there's nothing before hand that leads to this........ except for maybe Justice League United, where we saw Hawkman and Adam Strange working together, but even that feels strange with this book because while that seems to have happened in this continuity, Alanna has a more classic parentage here and no longer seems to be the grad student of Earth that she once was in the New 52....... or she was and learned that Sardath was her father somewhere off panel.  Either way, let's check out this mini and see if it truly is the Death of Hawkman.

Explain It!:

Our issue begins on the war torn world of Rann, where Hawkman and Adam Strange have apparently gotten the shit kicked out of them and immediately I get what I want from this series........ Hawkman being a bad ass, even though it's kind of short lived in this first issue.  That's right, Hawkman's full of arrows and he's taking it like a G and just ripping them out and doing what he can to get back out on the battlefield.  That's about as far as we get with that though because we go back in time with Adam Strange wondering how the hell things came to this........ and even though it looks great and there are some funny moments throughout, it seriously kills the momentum of the story.

 

So we see the duality of Adam Strange here and how he goes from the exciting life of a superhero on Rann to the mundane day to day life he lives on Earth and how he's really just waiting to get back to Rann whenever he's home.  Too bad that when he's all ready to zeta off to his lady love Alanna, something goes wrong with the beam, leaving him to his shitty Earth existence.  This leads to Adam trying to figure out what went wrong and him finding out that the Zeta Beam is misfiring to all over the county.  After this discovery, we see Adam travel to Gotham, Metropolis, Coast City and even to Belle Reve........ .which the last seems to be the only one that's really important.  You see, Adam is trying to find out if anything has been Zeta-ed away and while he's inspecting Belle Reve, we see Despero's cell in the facility and even though the warden assures us that everyone is where they're supposed to be............ We see the dude on the cover so things aren't exactly as they seem here.

In the end, we see how shit has gone wrong on Rann and while Sardath and Alanna were trying to Zeta Beam Adam to the planet, the Thanagarians began to attack and even pulled a kamikaze on their lab.  For whatever reason though, after Adam had given up his search for the rogue Zeta Beam, he's transported to Rann from his apartment and finds the planet in shambles when he finally arrives.

That's it for this issue of Death of Hawkman and even though it's a pretty cool title, this at least for this first issue seems purely like a Adam Strange title.  Yeah, I know we need some setup to get us to our classic Rann/Thanagarian war, but Adam's search for a Zeta Beam just went on for far too long and killed whatever momentum I had from when I first opened the book and saw our heroes in their battle ravaged fatigues.  With that though, I found myself enjoying this issue enough and it didn't hurt that the whole thing looked fantastic.  The art team really made a boring search for a Zeta Beam look great and even with the lost momentum, I can't wait to see what we get next issue........ Hopefully some Hawkman, but as of right now I have faith in Marc Andreyko to bring us something interesting.  I would just really like to know when Alanna became Sardath's daughter again because I don't remember getting any of that in the New 52.  Maybe this is just more "continuity is a pretzel" action.

Bits and Pieces:

While you might be picking this title up for some much needed Hawkman action, you won't get a lot of that here and instead get a Adam Strange backstory that led our heroes into this series.  With that though, this issue is still fun and looks great.  Hopefully things pick up in the next issue because even though this opener was slower than I thought it would be, it's got my full attention.

7/10