Image via Marvel
Superhero comics haven’t always had the best track record when it comes to tackling serious issues. It’s usually well intentioned, but you only have to look at that time Lois Lane was turned into a black woman, or when The Punisher was turned into a black guy to see how they haven’t always succeeded. Or how about when Bruce Banner was assaulted in a YMCA shower, or when the Green Arrow’s sidekick became a heroin addict so that DC could “attack youth’s greatest problem…drugs!”. They’ve not always had their finger exactly on the pulse.
Marvel’s new Nighthawk series, which debuted last week, is the opposite of those, and you need to be reading it. There’s a good chance you’ve never heard of Nighthawk. He’s basically Marvel’s thinly veiled take on Batman, with two major differences: he’s African-American; and he’s a lot more violent than Bruce Wayne. He does also have a complicated alternate world origin story as well, but you can ignore that. All you need to know that businessman Raymond Kane spends his nights as a hi-tech costumed vigilante taking out criminals in Chicago, with his sidekick Tilda Johnson acting as a female Alfred the Butler. This first issue is mostly just set-up, introducing an evil property magnate and a serial killer antagonist, but if it stays at this level it’ll be one of the most important comics of the year.
The first few pages tell you everything you need to know about the book: while a TV news station reports on an unarmed young black man shot dead by police, Nighthawk kicks the crap out of some meth-dealing white supremacists whilst wearing some fresh Yeezys. It’s a rare mainstream superhero comic that seems perfectly politically and culturally aware, knowing what it wants to say without ever skimping on the action. Gun crime and gentrification are part of the story, and setting it in 2016 Chicago is clearly a very deliberate choice. It is tackling the issues related to Ferguson and Baltimore, and the troubles with gentrification, and race in America, head-on, and Marvel deserves big props for publishing it.
But it’s the little details that stop it from just being a sermon instead of a story. Writer David F. Walker (best known for the recent comic book rejuvenation on blaxploitation icon Shaft) makes Nighthawk a flawed, complicated character, and peppers the script with snappy dialogue (and also throws shade on the Oldboy remake). And artist Ramon Villalobos is one of the few in mainstream comics who actually seems to care about the clothes that real people wear. The Yeezys are clearly the centrepiece, but his art seems influenced by modern culture and the real world, instead of just older comic books. Overall, it is a comic book that feels completely in tune with the zeitgeist of 2016, and in an industry that increasingly trades on fanboy nostalgia, that’s vitally important.
The same week Nighthawk #1 dropped, the new Captain America series grabbed the headlines for revealing that Cap has been a sleeper Hydra agent since the 1940s. And while there’s a lot to say about that as well, it is kind of symbolic what most comic people are talking about is something that happened in the past. Nighthawk is a comic about right now, and we need to pay attention to it.
Nighthawk #1 is in comic book stores and available digitally on Comixology now.
