SilverHawks #1 // Review
Back in 1986, Rankin/Bass Productions followed-up its successful Thundercats animated series franchise with a similar action fantasy adventure series set in space. It ran for only one season. Somewhere in 1989, Warner Brothers acquired the rights to the series, but they never realy got around to doing anything with it. Thanks to renewed interest in the childhood obscurities of Generation X, the short-lived series gets a new life as Dynamite Comics presents SilverHawks #1. Writer Ed Brisson and artist George Kambadais establish the new series with colorist Ellie Wright. It’s a fun expansion on the classic premise of the series that shows some promise.
Something like 40 years have passed since the franchise emerged for us. For the Silverhawks it’s been 100 years. The SIlverHawks project had been one that had been created to address rampant crime in Bedlama City. Now it’s 2839 and the evil Mon*Star has escaped from prison. He’s leaving a path of carnage all over the place. The original SilverHawks may not be as young as they were, but Commander Stargazer has been given some very important resources that just might give the old, experienced group a chance at bringing down Mon*Star one more time.
Brisson is doing some rather clever things with respect to the franchise. Those people who would be really into this particular series would feel very old. And rather than simply going back to the origins of it and trying to start again, the writer is acknowledging that time has passed for the fans. And as it's past for the fans, we can see that it is past for the heroes as well. It's kind of a fun approach which allows our relationship which may have started for decades ago, and then suddenly disappeared to reemerge once more for people who might remember. the toys and cel-animation on an old CRT TV over the airwaves of UHF in the mid-1980s.
Kambadais find the appealing heart of the Karic umlaut design and finds a way to make it work. Though the animated sequences that served as the basis for the series were well rendered by Japanese animator, the overall design was very silly. Kambadais manages to find a way to present it on the page that feels very appealing while being quite true to the original design of the characters. Action and drama hit the page in an interesting wave that feels striking and fresh.
SilverHawks always felt like something that probably could have done better if it had been introduced just a little bit earlier in the decade. Elements of the design are good. And there were aspects of the concept of cyborg police people in space that actually seems really cool in retrospect. It also opens up a lot of possibilities. Police forces in the future can be kind of a tricky concept to put to the page in a wave that embraces the complexity of crime and progressive technology. Theoretically, if he really wanted to, Brisson could get into some of that complexity in a way that also embraces the potential of the series.
