Back in 2018, DC Comics tapped prolific, phenomenal writer Robert Venditti to helm a new Hawkman series. In the comic, Venditti, accompanied by artist Bryan Hitch, took on the Herculean task of making sense of the hero’s vast, sometimes confusing and contradictory past and telling a cohesive story of the character. Venditti accomplished that task beautifully, producing a Hawkman who was accessible to new readers but also acknowledged his mammoth publication history.
In 2019, I spoke with Robert Venditti about the comic before the publication of issue nine, which focused on Hawkman contending with the chaotic Deathbringers. We also discussed his take on Hawkman and how experiencing multiple lifetimes impacted the hero.
Editor’s note: Due to technical difficulties, this interview was never published. Those difficulties have been rectified and the interview is being published here now, edited with considerations of the time that has passed between the interview and today.
FreakSugar: I am really liking what you’ve done with Hawkman. You’ve done a lot of heavy lifting and moved to make Hawkman a little bit more accessible, while doing things with the character we haven’t seen before. But before we get into that, who is Hawkman and Carter Hall to you?
Robert Venditti: To me, Carter Hall is a character that was sort of riddled with contradictions in a way. If you look at who Carter Hall has been historically as his archaeologist and the adventures he’s been on and–the ancient ruins and the caves and the underground and all that–it always struck me as kind of odd that a character who also had crafted wings for themselves and was so prone to flight would put themselves in those situations that would render flight either impossible or pointless. So I’m really thinking about the character and trying to understand what would drive them and why he would have this sort of compulsion to dig into the past and to always be exploring and to always trying to uncover mysteries.
I settled on the idea that all of this outward exploration that he was doing was about inward discovery. He realized that there were pieces about himself that he couldn’t quite grasp that were missing. And that’s, you know, sort of what has compelled him to behave this way throughout the character’s history. And I think that’s something that’s relatable to every reader.
All of us as we go through life are trying to discover who we are as individuals. And that’s certainly true for Carter Hall. And the discovery that he makes about himself in the first issue of our series is that all this time, he hasn’t just been reincarnated across time as he thought he was. He’s been reincarnated across time and space as well. So what we used to think of as different versions of the characters like Katar Hol, the Thanagarian space cop and so on, they’re all actually the same person, just different reincarnations. Katar Hol is a past life of Carter Hall and so on and so forth.
So that really opened the character up to so many possibilities within the DC universe, like having a past life of the Kryptonian. And it was an opportunity to take a character who’s always been about exploration and discovery and capturing the past and preserving history. Well, now he’s a living historical document of the DC Universe because he’s been everywhere and he’s seen everything. And he’s lived among all these different cultures and all these different worlds.
FS: It’s funny you’re talking about self-exploration because that’s one of the things that really struck me especially in issues seven and eight. And just like how we all contain multitudes, we have aspects of ourselves that we’re proud of and aspects of ourselves that we aren’t. Carter, as he’s doing this self-exploration has found out that there are aspects of his past and across time and space that he may not be exactly proud of. I was wondering when you’re digging into that angle, what’s it like when you re-approach that angle to him?
RV: And it’s something that we’ve touched on beyond even in issue seven, where we established the definitive origin for the character, what his first life was and where his reincarnation powers come from. And just to give you that very briefly, you find out that in his first life, he was the leader of this group called the Deathbringers that would travel from world to world and subjugate societies and capture people for, you know, sacrifice to this god they worshiped. And he finally died after so many years of doing this. He turned against them and died in the effort, but was given a chance to come back and live again and again until he saved as many lives as the Deathbringers took under his command.
And so I think if you think about what it would mean to reincarnate, I think a lot of people focus on the positives of that. You know, “I get to live forever. You know, I don’t ever have to worry about dying or any of those kinds of things.” But it’s exactly what you said, like every life has its share of regret. And if this man has lived all those many lives, he has all those many lives worth of regret. And that would be an incredible burden to shoulder. So, you know, not just his past as a Deathbringer, but even in issue four, when he visits Thanagar and interacts with the Katar Hol version of the character. He remembers that he, as Katar Hol, was tricked into killing his own father and, you know, the pain and the regret of something like that. So it’s a scene that we’ve played with throughout the series and that will continue to do so.
FS: You touched onthe Kryptonian aspect and history of his mythology. I had a couple of questions on that. One, how does it feel to kind of add to that tradition of Kryptonian mythology? But also, one of the things that whenever he’s seeing his Kryptonian counterpart, it was kind of equal parts melancholy but hopeful and moving. What was your headspace whenever you were approaching it?
RV: If you think about livin g all these many lives, the pain that would come with those lives, it wouldn’t all be pain. I mean, there’d be joy as well, but, you know, for him to encounter the past version of himself that was a Kryptonian and to be there and to have this conversation during Krypton’s dying moments when there’s nothing that can be done. The planet is dying. There’s just no saving that, you know. And all of that culture and all of that history that the Kryptonian version of him spent a life trying to preserve is not just going to, like, you know, go to the bottom of the sea in a sunken ship.
It’s going to be obliterated. It’s gone. And how crushing that would be. And for Carter Hall, witnessing it for the second time and remembering, you know, that pain and that loss, it’s just more motivation to make sure that it doesn’t happen again. Because as we know in the series, the Deathbringers are on their way to Earth searching for him, and they’re going to bring destruction with them.
So he now has that motivation to not let what happened to Krypton, although for very different reasons. I’m not saying the Deathbringers destroyed Krypton, but he can’t let Earth be destroyed in the way Krypton was. And as we leave issue eight and go into issue nine, you’ll see this almost desperation of, he has to find some way to stop this.
But how does one man stop, you know, this threat that destroys worlds? And that’s what’s going to propel us through the final act of this first long story that we’ve been doing.
FS: You mentioned the invasion and what they’re looking for. And I was wondering, is there anything you could tease about what we can expect to see next issue?
RV: In issue nine, he goes back to Earth because the Deathbringers have arrived. And we get the final confrontation between him and not just the physical confrontation of him and the Deathbringers, but it’s him confronting his own past as well. That’s going to bring us to a moment that we’ve been building towards since the very beginning of the series.
You know, Bryan [Hitch, the series artist] is turning in the pages and it’s astounding the number of figures that are on these pages for the battle that he’s drawing. He’s such a talented guy, not just in terms of being an artist, but as a storyteller, and the amount of visual information that he’s able to communicate, the amount of detail that he puts into it and how fluid it all is to do it month in and month out. He’s finishing up issue nine now. That’s nine issues in a row that he’s been drawing of what is a very complex series. We’ve been to Dinosaur Island, Krypton, Thanagar, Ruins of Gorilla City, Ancient Egypt, the Microverse, all these places that he’s established all these cultures on a monthly schedule.
