What could you expect to find on an ice giant planet like Neptune? Well, extraterrestrial giants, of course.
Even by Hawkman’s flexible standards, his adventure in Flash Comics 21 was a weird one.
Written by 30-year-old Gardner Fox and drawn by 20-year-old Sheldon Moldoff, the story starts as a strange pastiche of Superman’s origin.
The Winged Wonder is flapping along over a mountainous region one day in 1941 when he spots a spaceship crashing. Inside it, he finds male and female giants, dead, and a huge egg.
Later, at the “Scientist Society Ball,” Carter Hall and his girlfriend, Shiera Sanders, run into biologist Noel Ratchford, who hates Carter because he’s in love with Shiera.
Later, while Carter is fixing those drinks, Shiera behaves like a character in the screwball comedy films that were popular at the time. She steals the egg from Carter’s hothouse as a prank.
Because she makes the mistake of telling Ratchford about the egg the next day over lunch, he steals it himself.
A month later, Ratchford sees a huge, chalk-white child hatch out of it. Like all Neptunians, the boy is telepathic and possesses the inherited memories of his parents. He also possesses heat vision, which he says is “…our only weapon on Neptune, our eyes.”
Oddly enough, Superman, at that time, did not.
The Man of Tomorrow would not use hisX-rayy vision to generate heat until Superman 59 (July-Aug. 1949).
Ratchford has neither the ethics nor the compassion of Ma and Pa Kent, however. In an act of revenge, he convinces the alien boy to rain destruction on humanity in the name of Carter Hall.
Hawkman flies forth to confront the gigantic, purple-robed alien, and — after nearly being incinerated by the Neptunian’s heat vision — reacts in a much more sensible way than superheroes usually do.
“I’ve got to get out of here as fast as I can!” the Winged Wonder thinks. “I don’t think I’ve ever traveled as fast as this!”
Arming himself with a ninth metal shield that can resist the alien’s energy, Hawkman returns to do battle. Gruesomely and tragically, the superhero uses a lance to blind the giant in one eye, and then to kill him by running it through his spine at the back of his neck.
Later, on a trip in Hall’s convertible, Shiera confesses, “I’m awfully sorry I stole that egg, Carter.”
“Pardon granted,” Hall replies. “But from now on, behave yourself.”
Sure, honey, no problem. Your practical joke just got a bunch of people burned alive. No biggie.
But if the story was a little crazy, the art was still enjoyable.
The comics blogger Piperson noted that Moldoff’s “…big claim to fame was Flash Comics’ Hawkman feature, in which he used his ability to ‘swipe’ Alex Raymond from his Flash Gordon to great effect.”
In TwoMorrows Hawkman Companion, Doug Zawiska observed, “Moldoff brought a new dimension to the Winged Wonder’s adventure, dropping in a level of detail heretofore not used in comic book art. A great amount of the detail was used as embellishment to make the drawings distinctively Shelly’s and to separate them from the obvious Flash Gordon influence.”
And in his book The Great Comic Book Heroes, Jules Feiffer recalled, “Hawkman, a special favorite of mine, gave an aged and blended look to its swipes— a sheen so formidable, I often preferred the swipe to the original, defended the artist on economic grounds (not everybody was rich enough to hire models like those big newspaper guys), and paid his swipes the final compliment of clipping and swiping them.”
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