Gunhawk
34 years ago - Liam Hawkleigh is born.
28 years ago - 6-year-old Liam begins learning to shoot for distance.
16 years ago - 18-year-old Liam enlists in the marines.
15 years ago - 19-year-old Liam goes to scout sniper school.
12 years ago - 22-year-old Liam's kill count is officially recognized as the highest in the history of the marine corp.
10 year ago - 24-year-old Liam kills his spotter for threatening to expose his history of unauthorized kills.
9 years ago - 25-year-old Liam is selected to test the Gunbunny, an augmented reality AI sniper spotter. Seeing the potential, he fakes his death and steals the prototype, becoming an elite assassin.
8 years ago - 26-year-old Liam kills four corporate targets in Star City, and is only stopped by Black Canary.
There are so many generic assassin characters. It's a regular occurrence in comics to just hand a bad guy a gun or sword, put them in a costume, and call them a finished villain. Always with a name that sounds like an early 2000's nu metal band; Killshot, Deadline, Razorburn, Fyrewyre, Headhunter, Gunfire, Wardog.... and that's just the ones off the top of my head.
Gunhawk is absolutely, 100% one of these. I'm not even going to pretend he isn't. But he also happens to be just the right type of generic assassin to fufill a particular role for us, and has enough going on that we can try to make him at least passingly interesting.
Gunhawk is absolutely, 100% one of these. I'm not even going to pretend he isn't. But he also happens to be just the right type of generic assassin to fufill a particular role for us, and has enough going on that we can try to make him at least passingly interesting.
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Gunhawk's Comic HistoryGunhawk (and his partner, Gunbunny) appeared for the first time in Detective Comics # 674 in the middle of the Knightquest story arc, which means that they actually threatened Jean Paul Valley's armored version of Batman. They're not particularly complex characters; basically little more than a pair of gun-wielding assassins whose whole schtick was that they were a partnered man and woman with weird names.
They've had a tiny handful of appearances since then, eventually having a falling out. Gunhawk barely ever appeared again, while Gunbunny would change her name to 'Pistolera' and make her appearances as part of Cheshire's all-female assassin team 'the Ravens', before being killed by Deadshot in the Secret Six series. |
Our Gunhawk StorySo if these characters are so generic, why bother including them? If you ARE including them, why only include Gunhawk and not Gunbunny?
In this case, we need to be clear about our goals; what we wanted here is a sniper character to include in our version of the Ravens, but more specifically, a sniper that isn't Deadshot, since the rivalry between Deadshot and Deathstroke should really be a thing. There are plenty of gun-based generic baddies out there, but Gunhawk is actually one of the most sniper-specific characters. He just fits the role we wanted to fill. Of course, there's also the fact that his partner Gunbunny went on to become a member of the actual Ravens when they showed up in the pages of Birds of Prey. There's an argument to be made that Gunbunny, or Pistolera as she would later be called, is actually the better character, and you're not wrong. It's not a hard bar to clear; Gunhawk really isn't much of a character at all. But the Ravens as they appear in the comic really aren't much better. They're little more than an excuse for Greg Land to fill the comic page with the attractive women he got into comics to draw. So if we were going to use either Gunhawk or Gunbunny, it came down to whether we could come up with a way to make either character at all interesting. |
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With that in mind, we wound up seeing an opportunity with Gunhawk, although we should specify that this isn't derived from anything in particular in the comics, other than this; while Gunbunny's schtick is "girl with guns", Gunhawk's is more like "Guy with guns and a relationship with a girl with guns" . He is defined by the fact that he has a partner.
In real life, anyone who has seen Jarhead can tell you that snipers actually work with a spotter. It occurred to us that this generic one-off villain might actually get a little bit interesting if his partner, Gunbunny, was actually an augmented reality AI that only he could see? The more we dug into this idea, the more it felt like it had legs. We were already imagining Gunhawk as a very coarse, unpleasant character entirely motivated by money (which isn't far off from how he's depicted in the comics). If he was a rogue sniper, and he had the opportunity to customize this augmented reality character that would work as his spotter.... wouldn't he come up with something crass and sexualized? If we establish him as this boorish misogynist, won't it be that much more fun to watch Cheshire kill him? Sometimes the goal isn't to make a character cool, or to deserve their own series or anything. In this case, we just want to set him up with his own gimmick that works on the team being built by Deathstroke, long enough to watch him get his just deserts. |