One of the striking things reading the post-Crisis Blackhawk comics has been that, to be honest... I don't think they all hang together.
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| from Blackhawk vol. 2 #1 (script & art by Howard Chaykin) |
At first they do. Howard Chaykin's 1987 miniseries (see #10 in the list below) didn't give a new origin story for the Blackhawks, but it did create a new history for them. Blackhawk himself was now Janos Prohaska; most of the Blackhawk line-up we knew from the pre-Crisis comics was largely maintained, but Stanislaus died during the course of the miniseries, and Natalie Reed claimed the identity of "Lady Blackhawk" for herself, so no Zinda Blake (though Zinda didn't join the squadron until after the war in any case). The character formerly known as "Chop-Chop" was now Weng Chan.
Eventually, the continuing exploits of this version of the team would be chronicled in Action Comics Weekly (see #10 again) and then in a 1989-90 ongoing (see #11). All of these stories were period stories, set during or shortly after World War II. Pre-Crisis, after WWII the Blackhawks had fought dictators all over the world (see #2), then supercriminals and such (see #3-4), then aliens (see #5), until finally becoming superheroes themselves once the Justice League of America arrived on the scene (see #6). But post-Crisis, the Blackhawks rebranded themselves as mercenaries and a shipping concern after the war, secretly funded by (and, later, manipulated by) the CIA. The stories were kept more grounded, so (largely) no supercriminals or aliens, more complex thriller plots instead.
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from Action Comics Weekly #635
(script by Mark Verheiden, art by Eduardo Barreto & John Nyberg) |
So what was going on with the Blackhawks in the then-present day of the DC universe? We just got glimpses of this: a Blackhawk story in Action Comics Weekly established that by 1988, Weng Chan was in charge of Blackhawk Industries, and a couple other flash-forward stories in the Blackhawk ongoing followed up on this; there were no appearances by any of the other Blackhawks in these stories, presumably to keep things open for the ongoing. In other stories around this same time, this was maintained; Weng Chan was a recurring character in the 1990-93 Hawkworld ongoing, for example.
The pre-Crisis history of the Blackhawks seemed to be entirely eradicated. This was not an unusual move at the time; in 1989, the original Hawkworld erased the pre-Crisis Hawkman, for example, or there was the notorious post-Crisis reboot of Wonder Woman. The history seemed pretty stable, and to be honest, removing the Blackhawks from continuity causes a lot less headaches than removing Wonder Woman or even Hawkman, since their adventures were largely self-contained. (The 1989 Blackhawk ongoing even established that the Quality Comics adventures from Military Comics were in-universe comic books, fictionalized and sanitized versions of real adventures, albeit published postwar.)
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from Guy Gardner: Warrior #24 (script by Beau Smith, art by Mitch Byrd,
Phil Jimenez, Howard Porter, Mike Parobeck, Jackson Guice, & Dan Davis) |
Once the Blackhawk ongoing came to an end, and once Mike Gold (editor of both Blackhawk and Hawkworld) moved on, things get a lot muddier. The first sign of this, I think, is in Guy Gardner: Warrior (see # 12), where during the Crisis in Time, Guy meets up with Zinda "Lady Blackhawk" Blake—a character who, as far as we knew up until that point, did not exist post-Crisis. Her original appearance is a one-off, so you could blame it on Extant-induced timeline fluctuations, but then in a later issue, she materializes in the present day outside Guy's bar, and takes a job there. Is she a refugee from the past? Or from an entirely nonexistent timeline? We don't really know, because the stories don't go into it at all; she's just a bit of set dressing, basically.
Possibly you might posit that—and this is what the DC wiki does—that Blackhawk continuity was changed again by the events of the Crisis in Time itself. This is backed up by JLA: Year One (see #13)... kind of. This story shows that the Blackhawks are active at the time of the JLA's founding, and in a form much closer to their pre-Crisis history. They are wearing the red-and-green uniforms they got during their time working for the UN, and the line-up includes several characters who had died in the post-Crisis, pre-Zero Hour Blackhawk stories, like Stanislaus. This would mean, though, that the Blackhawks had continually operated without aging from World War II up to the almost-present-day of the DC universe! (I think JLA: Year One is set ten years prior to the "present," so around 1988.) Not impossible, I suppose; these are comics. But there is no hint of the way the Blackhawks were depicted in the present-day stories of the Blackhawk ongoing. Indeed, this story even reintroduces the Blackhawks' brief stint as superheroes, though under different circumstances than in the original "Junk-Heap Heroes" storyline.
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from JLA: Year One #2
(script by Mark Waid & Brian Augustyn, art by Barry Kitson) |
The wrinkle in all of this is that Lady Blackhawk is in
JLA: Year One. But how could she be if she had been plucked out of time and brought to the present? Was she plucked out of time
after the events of
JLA: Year One? Well, then she would have been six years out of time at the most, which hardly seems significant (as far as being plucked out of time in superhero comics goes, anyway, I'm sure it would be much more significant if
I was dumped in the year 2031 by a timeline fluctuation). So I don't think we can say the Crisis in Time changed the Blackhawks' history, because it seemingly did so in two contradictory ways: the Blackhawks, including Zinda, lasted all the way up to the founding of the JLA
and Zinda was pulled out of time to the present at some unspecified point in the past.
Basically, after Zero Hour, elements of both the pre- and post-Crisis Blackhawks were maintained. When Blackhawk guest-starred in a Sandman Mystery Theatre story arc published in 1996, it was the post-Crisis Howard Chaykin version. But when Zinda joins the line-up of Birds of Prey in 2004, it's the same seemingly pre-Crisis version that appeared in Guy Gardner... and she says she's the last surviving Blackhawk. So what happened to all the other Blackhawks who were alive just over a decade ago in JLA: Year One? And what happened to Weng Chan?
It all doesn't matter, of course. Continuity is a game we play when it supports storytelling. I enjoy playing the game (hence this post, and hence my previous one about the pre-Crisis continuity), but I don't let it detract from my enjoyment of the stories themselves. When reading Sandman Mystery Theatre, you're not thinking about Guy Gardner: Warrior, and when reading Guy Gardner: Warrior, you're not thinking about Sandman Mystery Theatre. It especially doesn't matter, because from this point on, DC mostly treated the Blackhawks as a retro property; they would pop up in WWII-set stories (for example, in a time travel storyline in The Brave and the Bold), but that's it. So whether Lady Blackhawk was Zinda Blake or Natalie Reed was largely immaterial. (That said, it's been a while since I read them, but I'm pretty sure some of Zinda's Birds of Prey appearances eventually claim she was a member of the Blackhawk's during the war, as opposed to after it.)
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from Batman Confidential #38
(script by Royal McGraw, art by Marcos Marz & Luciana Del Negro) |
I did appreciate that in the otherwise terrible
Blackhawk Down arc (see #15), it was basically treated as
all true. Zinda is Lady Blackhawk, but knows the Janos version of Blackhawk (I don't think the two had ever been in a story together before), and this version of the team had been through adventures that originally took place on the pre-Crisis Earth-One
and the pre-Crisis Earth-Thirty-Two
and in the post-Crisis timeline, even if none of those things actually fit together.
Fundamentally, the problem is that the Blackhawks are largely a concept rooted to a particular time and environment. Take them out of that time and environment, and there's a limited number of things you can actually do with them, so you're constantly going to be reinventing them, whether it makes sense or not.
This is the last in a series of posts about the Blackhawks. Previous installments are listed below:
- The Blackhawk Archives, Volume 1 (1941-42)
- Military Comics #18-43 / Modern Comics #44-46 / Blackhawk #9 & 50 (1943-52)
- Showcase Presents Blackhawk, Volume One (1957-58)
- Blackhawk vol. 1 #151-95 (1960-64)
- Blackhawk vol. 1 #196-227 (1964-66)
- Blackhawk vol. 1 #228-43 (1967-68)
- Blackhawk vol. 1 #244-50 / The Brave and the Bold #167 (1976-80)
- Blackhawk (1982)
- Blackhawk vol. 1 #251-73 / DC Comics Presents #69 (1982-84)
- Blackhawk: Blood & Iron (1987-89)
- Blackhawk vol. 3 (1989-92)
- Guy Gardner: Warrior #24, 29, 36, 38-43 / Annual #1 (1994-96)
- JLA: Year One (1998-99)
- Guns of the Dragon (1998-99)
- Batman Confidential: Blackhawk Down (2010)
