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.
