Hawkman #4 Review

Wing Envy

Written By: Robert Venditti

Art By: Bryan Hitch, Andrew Currie, Andy Owens, Daniel Henriques, Jeremiah Skipper, Starkings & Comicraft

Cover Price: $3.99

Release Date: September 12, 2018

It's time to go and look at the many lives of Carter Hall and see what about them holds the secret to some doom bringing vision that our hero is having.  Previously, we saw our hero go back in time to fight his former self, Prince Kufu to get to the bottom of what's going on with him and now it's off to Thanagar, a different place and a different time to continue his search.  Let's jump into this issue of Hawkman and see what a book where Carter Hall fighting Katar Hol looks like.  Let's check it out.

While I still love that we're dealing with a book that is trying to integrate the many lives of Hawkman into one cohesive thing, what we have here is a story that doesn't do all that much in the way of getting us there.  I mean, I think by this point we've all discovered the formula to Hawkman and somehow after four issues it's getting kind of stale.  

Hawkman goes to a place, battles something, someone who's family owes Hawkman from one of his former lives helps him and then he moves on to a new place to continue to hunt down clues.  Now mix however you like and repeat.  It's not a bad formula, you get some really solid aspects out of it, like who doesn't want to see Carter Hall take on Katar-Hol?  It just takes way too much time in the book to deal with it, while not giving a decent resolution to why our hero is there in the first place.  "I need something.  Thankfully, it was right here" and that's about all we get here and that's a bit disappointing for a book that was on track to becoming something of a must read in my mind.

Overall though, if things pick up from where we leave Carter at the end of this issue and changes the formula that we've been dealing with so far, this could continue to be a really terrific book, it's just slowly sliding into boring and mundane and for a character that has always struggled to keep a book going, he certainly doesn't need that.  The art in this book continues to impress me, even if some aspects here seem rushed at times, but it's the repetitive nature of the story and the fact that we're not really sure what we're dealing with as a threat beyond "Death Dealers" that brings this issue down a bit for me.  Sadly, I think this will just end up being another "Broken Source Wall" book and that story telling device is already getting a bit old.  

Bits and Pieces:

While I'm still on board with this book, it really needs to change some things up because its way of telling the story at hand is becoming repetitive and because of that, a bit boring.  Hopefully this changes as the series goes on and the art remains strong because this should be an important book for all it's trying to do to the character.  

6.5/10