“This Is Bat Country!”
Creative Staff:
Story: Jadzia Axelrod
Art: Amancay Nahuelpan
Colors: Adriano Lucas
Letterer: Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou
What They Say:
It’s hawks versus owls as Kendra soars to Gotham! Batman may have discovered a clue about Hawkgirl’s new foe, and she’s brought Galaxy and Argus as backup. Hawkgirl will need all the help she can get as she tangles with the Croc Bloc street gang moments after arriving, only to rise to the skies and face the Court of Owls and a small army of Talons!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
With the Hawk-characters being favorites of mine going back to the 80s, we’ve certainly seen numerous resets, reboots, and various incarnations of them going back to the 1940s now. So when a new series comes along I try to at least check it out because I have such love for so many past works. This one has Jadzia Axelrod writing it and it comes after their work on a few other projects, including the Galaxy book that brings that title character into this series. They’re joined by artist Amancay Nahuelpan who has a few other DC books under their belt that I haven’t seen. With Adriano Lucas coloring, we get a pretty solid book all around with the look and feel of it as the layouts are solid and flow well, the designs are strong throughout, and the color work binds it all together in a good way. There’s plenty to like here in how the book looks as it sets the foundation for the run.
The third installment doesn’t improve much in some ways from the second issue and it again brings us back to one of the things that’s just exhausting with the Hawk characters. During the fight with the half-villain that we get here toward the end, we get a good sequence with Kendra lashing out about how she’s been beaten down and defined by others for so long and she ends up calling her opponent Carter. A Hawk-book can’t avoid dealing with past lives and all the variations over the years and it just becomes exhausting when it happens and it feels like they have no other stories to tell beyond that. Kendra’s struggling with how she’s been defined is certainly worth exploring but the way everything always comes back to this area keeps the characters from moving forward. Even if we went with all-new characters they’d still dip hard back into this well and it makes the whole thing frustrating.
The main thrust of this book has Kendra along with Galaxy and Argus in Gotham to track down Vulpecula and there are some interesting bits about how Kendra may be experiencing some timeline issues and her lashing out at Batman works well. Mostly, it’s about working to figure out Vulpecula and Batman has an angle through someone he worked with previously, Farlane, and that’s who Vulpecula is utilizing now after a deal decades ago. It doesn’t get us to any true reveals but it makes for a fun action sequence as he aligned with the Court of Owls and Galaxy’s fight against them – and interactions with Batman – are amusing. But mostly it comes down to Kendra facing off against Vulpecula’s latest pawn and hoping to get closer to some answers without doing so.
In Summary:
There are some fun bits along the way that touches on how Kendra’s forgotten or missed out on some of the right ways to be a superhero and that comes from interacting with the locals. The small sequence at the start when she deals with the Croc Bloc gang is light and fun and I appreciated the street-level element that we get. The stuff with Galaxy and Batman is fun and just acknowledging the Corgi delivers as it should. The book has all kinds of potential but it feels like it leans in an area that’s just tiring and that the execution is keeping it from achieving what it needs to.
Grade: C+
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: DC Comics
Release Date: September 19th, 2023
MSRP: $3.99
