A Man Called Hawken

“A new western from Tim Truman with text on the back promising a horror-filled take on the genre?  SOLD!”

That’s what I thought when I picked up this at Comic-Con, as the idea that Truman was going in for another take on the kind of material that made “Jonah Hex:  Two-Gun Mojo” one of my all time favorites was too strong to resist.  Yes, this story was written by Truman’s son Ben as opposed to Joe Lansdale, but at the price I was getting it for that turned out to be a fairly low barrier to entry.  What I found inside was a character who had nastiness to spare pitted against some real villains who were even worse than him.  In short, the faint of heart need not apply here.

Kitchell Hawen is introduced to us as a man who had done “Many, many bad things,” in the course of his life and is about to do even more to settle old scores.  Egged on by the ghosts of the people he has killed over the years, Hawken is out to take out The Ring.  The man used to work for this group of organized criminals years ago until they had a falling out and he was left tortured and scalped for the buzzards to find and do away with.  However, he was far too nasty a person to simply die like that and now Hawken is leaving a trail of bodies in his wake as he comes for John Gallis, respectable businessman, collector of natural oddities, and leader of The Ring.

We’re introduced to the character as he intercedes on a church raid and kills off the raiders, taking his time with one, and then killing the padre as part of his business.  The next chapter has Hawken pissing on a man he has tied upside-down to a cactus to rouse him for torturing.  Later, he has one of The Ring’s members lick up broken shards of glass off of the floor.  There’s more to his exploits to be sure, but Ben is keen on establishing his protagonist as someone other than your typical “cynical hero with a heart of gold.”  Hawken is someone who does not act out of altruism or a buried desire to do the right thing.  He’s on this quest purely for his own self-interest, even that is only to get the many ghosts following him to stop their nagging.  Those of you who prefer their main characters to have some shred of decency or likeability to them will not be impressed by what they find here.  Of course, if you’re like me and a likeable protagonist is not a prerequisite to enjoying a work, then Hawken’s relentless drive to destroy his enemies and the creativity he displays in that pursuit will likely keep you entertained.

It also helps that he’s pitted against some real bastards.  Gallis is a self-absorbed schemer who prefers delegating the duty of killing Hawken to his many lackeys, whose morals are as low as their intelligence.  One exception to this rule is Sombre, a man we’re introduced to as he’s about to be hung for raping, killing, and eating (at least I think that was the order) the wife and daughter of the town pastor.  Sombre even spits on the man’s bible after telling them he still had a little bit of them in his teeth and wanted to give the pastor something to remember them by.  We’re not dealing with simple antagonism here, though he and Hawken are linked by the fact that the latter trained the former, this is outright villainy as Sombre exists as nothing more than a monster to be destroyed.  An intimidating one, to be sure, but a monster nonetheless.

In fact, the entire story is pretty straightforward and simple as a lot of the events can be summed up as “Hawken shows up, shoots and stabs a lot of guys, then leaves.”  There is a fair amount of variety to the proceedings, and the main female character is larger and more Chinese than is traditionally seen in the genre, but there’s precious little new here.  Even the weird parts feel comfortable here given what we see of Gallis’ collection.  Yes, the overall meanness in the tone and the violence help distinguish it, but as someone familiar with westerns in comics through “Jonah Hex” and the works of Garth Ennis, this never quite rises to their level.

Even if the overall story is familiar, it’s still an impressive sight to behold thanks to Truman’s fantastic art.  The title character is someone who demands to be drawn as ornery and craggy as possible and the artist completely obliges, giving us an older protagonist who still comes off as being utterly capable of kicking the ass of anyone he comes across.  Sombre also gets a fittingly menacing appearance, yet the real star of this collection are the many western locales on display as Truman is relentless in the amount of detail he provides in order to make them appear as convincing as possible.  You also get the feeling he’s having fun with all this, given the many wounded ghosts he has pop in at the most interesting and unconventional places during the narrative.  There’s also the part at the end of the first issue where he takes three panels to show us Hawken’s mule taking a dump, so there’s a little self-indulgence going on here too.

Though the specter of “Jonah Hex” may have been hanging over this work, “Hawken’s” familiar tale of western vengeance is at least distinguished through its nasty and unsympathetic main character and the tone he sets in the narrative.  This isn’t for everyone, but this kind of storytelling can be refreshing in small doses.  I’ll also take “Hawken” over the conventional take on Hex served up by DC over the past several years.  His journey isn’t done yet, and I’m willing to keep following it for a little while at least.  (Assuming the follow-up miniseries hinted at by Ben eventually materializes.)