Say it with me kiddies: FFFFFFFAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNWAAAAANNNNNNNNNK...

See, when I first thought of this "Young Justice 2.0" idea back during the summer, all I knew for a fact was that A} it would have the new Impulse, Iris West, as a member, and B} there would be a cat-girl wearing a pair of the old "Hawkworld" triangle-wings and calling herself "Kittyhawk" in it. Why? I dunno...just like I have no idea who she is, where she comes from, where she got the flight rig (and the late Pantha's oddly-matching mask), or why I felt the need to create ANOTHER cat-girl superhero when most superhero universes, the DCU included, tend to go through them like a fucking weed whacker. I mean, forget about Tasmanian Devil in "Cry For Justice," I'm betting there's a super-villain outlet store somewhere out there that specializes in catgirl-skin throw rugs and wall hangings...

...great. I just created a new furry fetish, didn't I?

At any rate, for her origin I could go with generic lab work (like Pantha or the ever popular Project Cadmus), pre-natal genetic manipulation (a'la the second Wildcat, also deceased...the old "Eclipso" series was like a death sentence for anyone who didn't headline their own series back in the 90s), but the old Thanagarian Wingman flight pack gave me a possible non-labwork origin, as well as an excuse to regale you with the tale of another forgotten element of DCU past, the red-headed stepchild of the post-Crisis reboots known as "Hawkworld"...

As you may recall, the DCU used the aftermath of "Crisis on Infinite Earths" as a convenient starting point to reboot (back before it was a dirty word) their continuity-bogged timeline with a series of high-profile reimaginings, such as "Man of Steel," "Batman: Year One," "Emerald Dawn," and the (then-)new Perez "Wonder Woman" series. The idea was to get it all re-rolling at once; the REALITY, though, was that the various restarts ended up taking the better part of the decade and typically resulted in even worse continuity snarls than the ones the "Crisis" was supposed to have fixed. Much as I almost hate to say it considering their "quality" work of late, John Byrne and Frank Miller had the right idea by having their stories be self-contained flashbacks to earlier in the characters' careers and then, later, have the creative crews of the regular books subtly work the new changes into the ongoing stories. As the 80's wound down and more reboots were STILL being done, this became the standard method, and it worked pretty well.

This was ALSO to be the intended method for the reboot of the venerable Hawkman franchise (as it was), the excellent if grim and dark (as opposed to just "grimdark") Tim Truman mini-series "Hawkworld," which reimagined Thanagar as an oppressive, racist (speciesist?) society that floated blissfully over the planetwide slums that housed the refuse of all the worlds the Thanagarians had conquered, and the Hawks reimagined as the Thanagarian Wingman Corps, more Judge Dredd than Green Lantern as they maintained a violent police state from their aerial vantage. It was brutal, it was political, it was intelligent, and, in the wake of the "dark deconstructionist phase" comics were in at the time, it sold buckets.

...so, almost naturally, DC had to fuck it up by deciding that, instead of it being a flashback like intended, it would instead lead straight into a new series that set things up so that the Silver-Age Hawkman and Hawkgirl, despite being long-standing members of the Justice League (having provided much of the team's tech, including the iconic JLA Satellite) and despite having the Thanagarians playing a major role in the then-recent "INVASION!" cross-over event, the "Hawkworld" ongoing comic would center around the newly arrived Hawkman and Hawkwoman (I still dig that name) as ambassadors of the supposedly never-before encountered Thanagar. The ensuing continuity snarls caused by outright ERASING such a fucking HUGE piece of DC lore without ANY attempt at retcon, as well as the hideous, contrived, ill-planned attempts at patching such a hole, resulted in the character of "Hawkman" being declared off-limits to all creators, including Grant Morrison during his legendary JLA run, until the new millennium and any mention of the early 90's Hawks and "Hawkworld" being all but purged from the collective DCU until the lead in to "Infinite Crisis" where they could just do whatever the fuck they wanted and blame it on Superboy-Prime's reality-altering temper tantrums.

This is a real shame, though. I read the "Hawkworld" series (and made a game effort at the absolutely TERRIBLE "Hawkman" follow-up after "Zero Hour"), and Truman really did his damnedest to carve a truly unique niche out of the DCU proper with his Hawks, Katar Hol and Shayera Thal, and their stomping grounds of choice, Chicago. That's right, unlike every other hero except the equally maligned (these days, especially) Wonder Woman, the Hawks set up shop in a real city...not that I could fucking tell, really, since I lived in the suburbs of San Diego, but it was a nice level of legitimacy to me.

My favorite part, however, was the Netherworld, a proto-"Hawkworld" neighborhood that was inhabited by the kind of societal dregs you'd EXPECT to find in a world full of magic and aliens: a street gang made of parasitic tattoos and their human host bodies; a mutant biker bar whose most famous patron was literally half woman, half Harley Davidson; a shape-shifting rules broker named "Knowbuddy" (because "It's all about who you know, buddy") who changed shape each panel because he long ago forgot what he actually looks like. The place was so fucked up, even the laws of nature seemed to be open to interpretation...which made the book's star kinda disappointing. Despite being the main character and, ultimately, the SOLE character of the books, though, Katar Hol was...lacking. He wasn't the "winged Conan the Barbarian" Hawkman is traditionally known as. He was a sensitive new-agey type of guy who was more likely to try and talk to the shape-changing face-eating aliens than do anything, which meant the bulk of the actual, y'know, heroing was done by Shayera instead. Of course, these were the days when the "Women in Fridges" phenomena was in its prime, and you can't have a Hawkman book where the lead had tits...still, Shay got her time in the limelight years later thanks to the Justice League cartoon series. Yep, that was pure "Hawkworld" Shayera up there macking on John Stewart and telling Wonder Woman to not knock men "until (she) tried them," which makes her JSA comic counterpart at the time, Kendra Saunders, and her resurrected post-"Blackest Night" replacement seem so pathetic. Those were HawkGIRLS...Shay was all HawkWOMAN.

Anyway, I decided that, as long as I was pulling all the other YJ2 characters out of the DC Fridge, I'd make a character that would pull the entire "Hawkworld" setting out of the crisper drawer as well. Kittyhawk (or "Bobbie" as I've taken to calling her due to her bobcat appearance) would have the Wingman Corps wings (which are a BITCH to draw right, BTW...even Truman and his regular series penciller, Graham Nolan, could never get them to look consistent from panel-to-panel, and for an artist of Truman's caliber that's saying something); her feline features are due to the old Netherworld drug Hairballz, which would induce lycanthropy and mutate the user permanently into a semi-feral state during withdrawal; and her personality is all Shayera...or at least how I can imagine she was back during puberty, anyway...which still fit the feline motif since, during the latter days of "hawk gods" and totem spirits in the book, it was revealed that Shay's totem WASN'T a hawk like Katar; she was a fucking JAGUAR with WINGS, baby.

The Pantha mask is strictly a holdover from her early designs, but I also kept it as a tribute to one of my favorite Titans who not only denied any character resolution but also given one of the most pathetic deaths ever, accidentally decapitated by a spazzing Superboy-Prime. It wasn't until last year in the pages of "Booster Gold" that she was finally given both an origin and a proper demise, or at least her cross-timestream counterpart was.

Besides, it looks damn good on her.

Also, I've decided that Kittyhawk's probably a lesbian...I mean, face it, anybody who read "Hawkworld" could NEVER buy the "destined lovers" crap they kept trying to force-feed us about Shay and Katar. One look at her and you knew that she not only stole her partner's would-be girlfriends on a regular basis, she'd then brag to him what good fucks they were the following morning (and, besides, Kittyhawk's looks just SCREAMS "baby dyke" to me for some reason...).