Comic Review #59: Secret Origins #43 (1989)

 

Ah yes the Secret Origin. The story of how whatever hero of heroes got their power. Some are great and some are terrible. They had a version of this magazine way back in the 1960s but that was just reprints of the original Secret Origin. You see by the time 1986 rolled around they had done a big old story that changed the DC Universe forever which was called Crisis on Infinite Earths. It pretty much got rid of all the alternative earths (which I think was a terrible idea but whatever) but they also got to recreate heroes and back story for newer stories and audiences which I don't think was a bad idea, but I'm pretty sure they brought back alternative earths since then and all is well. It gave DC a jolt in the arm it needed and a lot of pretty good stuff happened. 

This Secret Origins series that ran from 1986 to 1990 gave writers a chance to re-create some secret origins and even give characters an origin. It was a pretty good series honestly. It was usually like 40 pages long and later on you got several heroes in one book! Now that's a bang for your buck! Anyway I've decided that I want to talk about every Marvel and DC hero and this gives me a chance to write about a few in just one article! I mean I got a few trillion characters to write about so give me a break. I'm sure I'll write about them again in the future anyway because really what the hell else have I got to do? 

Okay that got a little depressing so let's get back on track. I think we have to go through the people who worked on this comic. We get Karl and his wife at the time Barbara Kesel. We've talked about them before. Good peeps who do good work. Now we get to Trevor Von Eeden. A great artist that makes me actually not completely hate one of these stories. The guy helped create Black Lightning in the 1970s when he was still a teenager (if I recall correctly). We get work from John Workman which I kinda like. Cartoony and simple. Maybe a bit too simple but I still like it. Joey "The Squid" Cavalieri is a kind of a middle of the road guy. Some of the stuff he wrote was pretty good and some of it was not.  Bob Wayne is a writer I've never heard of but Timothy Truman is someone I've heard of and he does some really great art in the second segment.

Alright now it's time to dive head first into this comic book. I'm going to let you in on a secret here which is that I picked this book because I wanted to talk about two of the four characters and wanted to get the other two out of the way right now and it felt like this was the best way to do it. The two characters I do not like at all are Hawk and Dove. Every story I've read with these two in it were just "OH MAN HAWK IS ANGRY BECAUSE GET IT HES A HAWK" and "DOVE IS A NICE GUY WHO DOESNT WANT TO HURT ANYONE". These two annoy the SHIT out of me. They have zero personality. Zero. I don't know if that changes during this era with the new lady Dove but I don't really want to find out. I think I liked these characters in one story which I might even review. I liked seeing them on the Justice League cartoon but that's only because the brothers from the Wonder Years Fred Savage and Jason Hervey were voicing them (and they switched voices too! wild!). It's always great to hear the angelic voice of Fred Savage.

So the story starts out with some guy wanting to find out about Hawk and Dove so he goes to his 1980s computer to print out some files. I like how Trevor Von Eeden tries to make them look Ditko-esque. That's the saving grace of this story. The art. Uh yeah he finds out that Hawk and Dove got their super powers for wishing for them. Yeah. Okay there's a bit more too it then that. He talks to some jerk who tried to kill Don Hall and Hank Hall's dad which caused them to wish for the super powers. They get them from Lord Chaos and Lord Order. This is different than the Pre-Crisis Hawk and Dove but I don't remember why because I've forced my self to forget everything about these boring ass annoying turds. So he wants to find out who gave Hawk and Dove their powers and some random dude gives him a weird monster that he touches and it gives him the powers. You can really tell how invested I am in this story. It's a shame because I would have been with this story if had any characters I liked in it. A weird-o creature that tells you the past. That's some trippy shit. Sadly it's wasted in a fucking Hawk and Dove story. He learns about Lord Order and Lord Chaos and I stopped caring. I'm sorry I just can't give a shit about these two in about 99% of their stories. I just find them lame as hell.

Our second adventure in this magazine involves a set of characters I'd love to delve deeper into but I've never been able to find any of the comics with them in it. They are rather obscure and most of their adventures happened 50 years ago. These are the adventures of Cave Carson and his crew. Cave Carson and his crew had a giant machine called the Mole that well would dig under the earth and get into wild adventures with monsters and apparently Nazis. The original stories were written by Bob Haney so they are insane. I can tell you this because every Bob Haney comic is fucking bonkers and I love them.  This story pretty much tells you all about the characters and mentions their first adventure which apparently involved time travel and Hitler. They beat Hitler and blow up some Nazis. This is clearly the best story because it involves dead Nazis. Fuck Nazis. The ending has one of the characters talking about how one of the characters went to Vietnam and maybe died. Also how something happened with Cave Carson and the lady of the group. It ends pretty depressingly but I would still say this was the best story of the three.

The last story is about Chris-KL99 which is a character I know absolutely nothing about. I thought this was gonna be about the guy and his sexy robot. That was apparently Star Hawkins. I wanted a weirdly erotic robot but this story wasn't too bad (although completely different than his original origin from the early 1950s). So this kid Chris becomes the most famous child in the world starting at his damn birth. You could win tickets to his birthdays for crying out loud. So when he's about 9 years old he is kidnapped by some aliens who can talk telepathically but only to a younger mind. He was being trained by these aliens to help them and became to care about them while his actual parents blew up the aliens ship! I would have read more stories involving this version of Chris-KL99 but they never made another appearance since. I think that's a great shame honestly.

FINAL VERDICT: This was a pretty good comic. I wish the two non-Hawk and Dove stories involving characters that aren't shitty had gotten longer stories. Or maybe a different character that wasn't Hawk or Dove. Or  Anything. Either way this is a pretty good comic that could have been so much better if they didn't do anything with Hawk and Dove. I just have to mention that I don't like Hawk or Dove. Fuck them.