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The Peculiar Resurrection of Nighthawk

Sometimes a character can arrive on the comics scene as little more than a caricature of what the competition sells across the street and nonetheless accumulate so much storytelling baggage that occasional infusions of the original source material have to prop up the original resemblance. In some ways, Nighthawk fits such a pattern.

However, the character enjoyed considerable drift from his origins as a caricature, combining attributes of other wealthy-playboy characters such as Green Arrow (having redeemed himself from a previous life as a wealthy and pampered thrill-seeker) and Tony Stark (as a technology guru) with a redemption theme (from his criminal past). Yet the character, in general, failed to compel, and this invites often-drastic experimentation. In more than one case, writers finding no particular way to use a character simply dispose of the unusable piece (so diagnosed fairly or unfairly), and this happened to Nighthawk.

Nothing, though, stays dead in comics forever. If we live long enough, and Marvel survives its current financial season of despair, we may even see the return of Bucky Barnes. So, then, after nearly twenty years in the Marvel graveyard, Nighthawk returned to the living.

A Convoluted History Fit to Cause Motion Sickness

Simply put, Nighthawk began, in two copies, as an analog of DC's Batman, in good and evil versions for the Squadron Sinister and the Squadron Supreme. Each of these teams, over the years, ended up rough housing with the Avengers and occasional other Marvel superheroes; and, in each case, by the mid-eighties, Nighthawk had died. The "evil" Nighthawk reformed in an early issue of Defenders and revised himself to become a sponsor of that team with a completely different image and concept; the good Nighthawk stayed on his analog-earth and ultimately became President of the United States and host for the mind control of the Overmind, leading to a global domination that almost ruined everything there. And, somewhere along the way, the two got switched, so after the "evil" Nighthawk died in Defenders, the "good" one played a kind of bait-and-switch and showed up in his place.

However, as previously mentioned, he got killed too. The "good" Nighthawk more or less remains dead and probably will continue to do so; Marvel had essentially dispensed with him after 1971 anyway, until his return at the dawn of the eighties in Defenders and the subsequent Squadron Supreme maxiseries.

However, at some point in the 1990s we should have expected that seventies nostalgia would set in, even in the general absence of anything much worth investing nostalgia in; thus, we see pieces like the Steve Englehart Hellcat series, and the Busiek - Larsen Defenders series. Before either, and as something of a necessary precondition for the latter, we encountered the Nighthawk miniseries in 1998.

Types of Cop-Outs

If you read a lot, you may have come across at least one story that resolves the action by having the protagonist wake up from his/her slumber, discovering all that had seemed to transpire actually only occurred in a dream. Sometimes, in this situation, a reader rightfully feels cheated. In a work of considerable charm and silliness like Alice in Wonderland, one can let such chestnuts slide; over a century later, however, such a resolution has had another hundred years to continue to wear thin and tends to reflect the laziness of a writer rather than his imagination or humor.

Then again, in a comics culture that increasingly views death as a trivial annoyance no longer worthy of a great deal of attention, the lack of importance of death dictates how much energy talent should dedicate to explanations for its revocation.

Thus, when DC "killed" Superman, they made a great deal of the death and thereby committed themselves to putting a great deal of effort into explaining how this death had become undone. Not every character or situation warrants the concern.

We have an encyclopedia of cancellations for starter deaths throughout the cultural lexicon. Bobby Ewing on "Dallas" reappeared in the shower, with the basic Alice in Wonderland copout as a rationale; someone had dreamed his death (or something like that, and I can aver proudly that I lack the curiosity to investigate the matter more fully). In other cases, the death of a proxy does the trick (as we see in conspiracy theories that claim a double occupies the coffin credited to John Dillinger). In the fantastical worlds of comics, clones and shapeshifters can impersonate the prospective cadaver and die in his place; and time travel and multidimensional excuses can help him escape his fate altogether.

Such things happen often enough that writers must rotate methods. Therefore, I suspect that Nighthawk's own return - by waking up from a coma - merely indicates that this particular chestnut came up in the 'A' list of allowable resurrections after a long season of more colorful and less plausible escapes from the clutches of Old Man Death.

Theological Window Dressing

One expected a number of developments from the passing of the millennium, including manifestations of both conventional and unconventional religion, and an increasing interest in the notion of angels began years before the years 2000 and 2001 (depending on where you choose to break the calendar) arrived and failed to usher in too many confirmations of prophesies of doom.

Nighthawk, dressed as Kyle Richmond (in baggy boxers), therefore awakened to a lesson from an angel (or something from a temp agency that looked like one) about his alleged death, his impending return to the world of light, some of the details of his life, and the specifics of what returning to life would involve.

This sequence somewhat attests to the advance of the post-ironical age in western culture in general; because a piece that began with a dead superhero talking to an angel in some suburb of heaven before said hero returned to the living would have appeared, in 1970, an unbearably corny holdover from the more innocent days of Golden Age comics, and the gnashing of fannish teeth would still make ears ring today.

However, the angel would become important later on.

Resurrection as Confidence Game

Although we encounter in Nighthawk's return another convergence of time-smoothed cliches, in another particular the whole matter reflects an uncommon approach to the superheroic resurrection.

Angelic powers previously mentioned in this discussion turn out little more than masks for the tiresome but ubiquitous Marvel Comics demon Mephisto, who used to know his place as a chronic irritant to the melodramatic Silver Surfer. Malicious Hollywood gossips used to claim that between the two of them, Joan Collins and Warren Beatty had made love to everyone in the entertainment industry. The truth of this barb deferred for someone more informed to confirm or deny, we can at least recognize that almost every Marvel hero gets to meet and confront Mephisto at some point during his career. Genre and relevance matter little; quality often seems like a red herring; and the cynical might suspect that Mephisto gets so much time on-panel because he has compromising photos of someone important in the Marvel editorial hierarchy.

Where Marvel Comics go, there also goes Mephisto. We should resolve ourselves to this as a law of nature. If Marvel had a wonder dog character, we could expect, at some point, for Mephisto to attempt to drag him into doggie hell.

Nonetheless, even recognizing that a story that contains Mephisto by definition partakes of some venerable redundancy, we may note with some fairness that his appearance here does make for a slightly different resurrection story, for Mephisto brought Nighthawk back - assuming we disregard the hair-splitting rationales claiming Nighthawk had not properly died at all - to entrap him and damn him more thoroughly.

The Devil and Billy Markham

Stepping outside the point (again) to material outside comics, let us consider an epic poem by Shel Silverstein (author of songs, children's books, and all kinds of stuff) called "The Devil and Billy Markham." In one episode (or canto) of this piece, the Devil toys with gambler Billy Markham who came to hell after gambling his soul on a loaded dice roll against Lucifer himself.

At one point, the Devil decides to release Billy Markham for twenty-four hours back among the living, with the power to make love to anyone or anything, as he sees fit - no man, nor woman, nor beast can say him nay under this arrangement. Lucifer has done this mainly so he can watch Billy's sexcapades on some widescreen television in the infernal regions, and then enjoy the spectacle of looking at Markham's face when he has to come back to hell at the end of the twenty-four hours. However, Markham turns the tables on the Devil at the last moment by demanding that the Devil himself become his next amorous conquest, arguing that the Devil qualifies as man and woman and beast. Billy insists that the Devil either release him or "lift his tail and hear all hell wail" and the enraged Satan allows him his freedom to escape the humiliation of having to turn a trick for a condemned soul of the incompatible sex.

Mephisto, in bringing Nighthawk back, has played just such a game. Evidently the soul of Kyle Richmond had some prospect of promotion to the better place after the finalization of his death, and a concerned demon must intervene in such situations to offer the necessary afterlife guidance to the occasional soul to redirect it to an enduring place in perdition. So, using the fine grasp of human psychology that devils must employ as their main tool in the campaign to ruin as many afterlives as they can, Mephisto sets Nighthawk up.

Mephisto has replaced Nighthawk's eyes with a pair that can see evil before it occurs, granting him another power. Thus equipped, Nighthawk waged a pre-emptive one-man war on crimes that hadn't happened yet, inviting the unwanted attentions of concerned persons like Daredevil over a superhero beating up persons evidently just going about their business.

Mephisto thereby tempts Nighthawk into acts of arrogance and anger under the pretext of crimefighting that cost Daredevil his life and thereby seal both their fates, casting the two heroes into the Miserable Fiery Place.

A Revolving Door Indeed

In trying to keep a scorecard, one could credibly mark Kyle Richmond "deceased" again at this point. Yet two issues of the Nighthawk miniseries that details these events remained, and therefore the comic-book version of Dante's Inferno proceeds.

Suspecting he may indeed have a way out - Nighthawk either has fine intuition or he knows comics far too well - he therefore drapes Daredevil's cadaver on his shoulders like a backpack and proceeds to cross hell on foot under the assumption that he might save himself by saving Daredevil. And, indeed, he does manage to cross a dubious comic-book hellscape towards an exit where he faces one last temptation to abandon Daredevil, but his altruism asserts itself, and he thereby helps Daredevil and himself escape from Mephisto's hell without fear that the Attorney General might send INS agents to return him there in the predawn hours.

This, in another way, makes this an exceptional tale. I don't recall encountering previously a superhero resurrection in which the hero returns from the dead only to have to return from the dead again. In the mad grasp for variants of the tiresome theme of rebirths of dead heroes, the occasional talent does find a polymorphous aspect to the theme.

Return to the Quarter Bin.
Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

Column 223. Completed 11-FEB-2001.