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When I found this issue of Hawkgirl 62, my initial reaction was, “who the hell is Hawkgirl?”. Well, it turns out Hawkgirl has been around a long time, but I should have guessed that considering this is issue 62, and unusual sounding characters usually don’t last that long.
Hawkgirl 62 is about some “gizmoid” attacking the city, and Female Furies are trying to stop it. But that is not what is interesting about this comic. I noticed something strange about the artwork. The shading looks like it was done in tight cross-hatched pencils, which would be impossible to ink. I also noticed the backgrounds were really good… too good, in fact. And then it hit me: the backgrounds are photographs!! Both the backgrounds and the characters in the foreground have been put through some sort of filter to make them look more sketchy. I am guessing everything, hand-drawn or not, were put through the same filter to make it all look consistent. The art was done by Renato Arlem, who apparently not only doesn’t want to draw backgrounds, but doesn’t always want to draw foregrounds neither, because some characters in the panels are copied and pasted. This is something I’ve been seeing more and more with these newer comics, this one published in 2007.
Now let me tell you a little about the advertisements in Hawkgirl 62. First of all: 10 ads in 32 pages! That’s a lot of ads, and that isn’t even including the back cover and both inside covers. One of the advertisements if for the Spider-Man 2 movie on dvd. Now remember, Spider-man is Marvel, and Hawkgirl is DC, so that’s kind of strange that DC would allow a competitor’s product to advertise. A couple of anti-drug ads are also present, including one that is so cryptic to me, an adult, that I cannot imagine why they thought it would be an effective deterrent for children. It’s so dumb you have to see it for yourself (Affiliate Link) if you can.