New Warriors Dot Com

[Gunna Siasl]

Not sure if there's many here who recieve Ellis's Bad Signal e-mails, but he has mentioned Darkhawk a couple of times recently.

bad signal
WARREN

I am alone and slightly pissed off and having a few drinks and looking through the Marvel research stuff I mentioned earlier, and I found this.. thing. That apparently supported its own title at some point.

It is called DARKHAWK.

According to this character bio I found, Darkhawk is some American kid who, through use of a special amulet...

...turns into a robot.

And, even better, somewhere down the storyline, he discovered that his mind was simply transferred into the robot, which swapped places with him teleportationally from its storage unit in subspace, MIRACLEMAN-stylee (kinda).

But seriously. Magic amulet turns kid into robot.

I swear to you, I'm not so drunk that I'm making this up.

(Bad Signal pal Danny Fingeroth was the writer, apparently, working from a concept developed by Tom DeFalco.)

Stop me from pitching this as some appalling blood-and-guts Marvel MAX adult project.

PLEASE.

bad signal
ME

As I said to Danny Fingeroth, writer of the original DARKHAWK comics, last night: the one thing that's really missing from my oeuvre to date is taking a beloved children's comics character and pointlessly ruining it for tens of thousands of people by twisting it against its will into an indulgently unpleasant piece of adult fiction.

Which is to say: I'm not unaware of the stupid, wasteful ugliness of taking something like DARKHAWK and turning it into a Marvel MAX mature-readers book. But I'm still kind of amused by the notion. And I never did do the full-bore Post-Modern Superhero Thing, and maybe I should have one in the bibliography. After all, we're either in the peak condition of the
postmodern situation or in its dying days as things fracture into Something Else, depending on your position.

It has interesting parallels with MIRACLEMAN and WATCHMEN - yeah, hold on -- insofar as it's a derivative work at two removes. The WATCHMEN characters were inspired by the Charlton superheroes who were created as competition to the Marvel/DC characters. And MIRACLEMAN/MARVELMAN is of course a revision of the 50s MARVELMAN comic which was a knock-off of Captain Marvel who was created in competition to Superman. DARKHAWK has elements of MIRACLEMAN, GUYVER and a bunch of other things.

So...yeah. Trying to stop myself from thinking about this anymore. I'm getting NEWUNIVERSAL up on its feet right now -- which, like MISTER
SLEEPLESS, is turning out to be more complex than I expected -- and am
also thinking about reconfiguring IGNITION CITY as a "pilot" novella
for this year, rather than as the 12-part serial I had in mind for next
year.

Anyway, it was an interesting thought experiment. Sometimes they're worth doing just to get the little grey cells sparking, creating electricity you can then apply to something else. So, a couple of hours with a bottle of
whisky, actually trying to imagine what it'd be like to be a human
consciousness inside a robot -- no tactile sense, having to learn
how to pick things up without feedback, unable to feel gravity, seeing in high definition, perhaps seeing information (something I toyed with in PLANETARY, which, after this, I'm now going to use in a more detailed way in NU)...gets
you thinking.
_________________
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
Emo Philips



Waffle

[thepowell]

Huh?

Who is this, what's the mailing list?

And is he aware of the MAX Darkhawk already in existence? (And already dead?)

I didn't like MAX Darkhawk's design, but I'll give Austen props for making him a total fanboy character. Consider: he was a psychopath who lived in a VR mission which was actually DH's old stories, including this surreal moment where Jim Rhodes steps into Earth-616 AWC #93-95, when War Machine and Darkhawk joined the team.
_________________
"We saved the world. We undid this great wrong.. We did that--the unknowns, the sideliners, the rejects.. The thing that's bugging me.. is nobody will ever know we did it." - Speedball
"But don't you see? That's what makes us heroes." - Darkhawk

[Gunna Siasl]

First off, the who is this question is answered by saying it's Warren Ellis, writer of to many comics to mention, but off the top of my head he did the following.
Created 'The Authority'
Created 'Planetary'
Created 'Pete Wisdom'
Wrote 'Transmetropolitan', 'Excalibur', Three Ultimate Universe limiteds etc, etc. His thoughts can be found at 'The Pulse' periodically.

As for the mailing list, it can be found at http://www.flirble.org/mailman/listinfo/badsignal

As for his thoughts on Darkhawk, I am neither one way or the other in regards to what's been done before. Although it can only be good for the character if some one like Ellis is mentioning him on a mailing list where over 5,000 people hang on his every word.
_________________
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
Emo Philips



Waffle

[Crashpad]

I had no idea what he said in most of that...

[Gunna Siasl]

Having met Ellis a few times and seen in action, I'm quite sure he isn't to sure of what he said either
_________________
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
Emo Philips



Waffle

[thepowell]

Oh good...

I often check this late at night, so I thought I didn't understand it because I was tired.
_________________
"We saved the world. We undid this great wrong.. We did that--the unknowns, the sideliners, the rejects.. The thing that's bugging me.. is nobody will ever know we did it." - Speedball
"But don't you see? That's what makes us heroes." - Darkhawk

[Crashpad]

I think Ellis drinks a tad too much...