i think i may have mentioned this before: shadowhawk, by jim valintino. number 17 or thereabouts. it’s a 1963 crossover, so presumably comes with some kind of approval from mr. moore himself.
Some background: so shadowhawk is an early image comic, but valentino is supposedly a step-up the critical ladder from liefeld. lee. portacio et al. but really, he just gets forgotten because it’s so damn easy to slag those others. His art and writing is easily in the same embarrassingly-bad league. shadowhawk is his image hi-concept – basically a character who’s a cross between batman, the punisher, and marvel’s dark age badboi darkhawk. Shadowhawk is different to those luminaries for the following reasons:
1. He’s black. (maybe darkhawk was black too I dunno. I dunno if valentino’s black fro that matter, nor do I give one)
2. He has an almost sexual fetish for breaking spines – seriously, lots of first person captions describing in loving detail which vertebrae he’s crushing. Slowly. With my knuckles. It’s good to hear them scream etc.
3. He’s HIV+ , so mind you don’t stab him and lick the blade, slimeball.
So the avengers-alikes (tomorrow syndicate maybe?) from moore’s 1963 universe take a trip to the image universe. They meet shadowhawk and much is made of their contrasting approaches to costumed neighbourhood watch schemes. There’s a baddie. he’s an evil biologist. With a time machine. What’s he working on?
Basically, shadowhawk and the avengers win, but the biologist escapes. To avoid it all being destroyed, he injects himself with a sample of his own deadly virus (see where we’re going yet?) Where does he escape? To 1963: a small village in Africa. The final panels are him eyeing up the local ladies, smiling as he plots his revenge against shadowhawk: oh yes - he’s gonna AIDS them all right up and allow history to take its course.
That’s right. The baddie invents human immuno-deficiency virus and starts spreading it around the world to get back at shadowhawk, an imaginary spine-snappin armoured vigilante. I think this is in pretty bad taste, and the script pencils etc is as bad as anything you might imagine. I may have some of the above details wrong (I haven’t been able to read the issue a second time), but I swear that’s the gist, and has my vote as the most poorly-written comic I’ve ever read. |
