Welcome to the first, in what will become a recurring segment of WORLDOFHURTONLINE.COM, The Unsung Badmother******* Awards!

The Unsung Badmotherf****** Award recognizes Outstanding Achievements In The Field of Badassery Deserving Wider Recognition.  The Unsung Badmother****** is the guy who made a splash and kicked some ass, but remains largely forgotten by the masses.

The UBMF Award is named after the oft-quoted moment in the “Theme from Shaft” when Isaac Hayes is abruptly interrupted by his backup singers before he can fully extol the badass virtues of his man, Shaft.  If people remember nothing else about the movie “Shaft,” or Blaxploitation in general, they remember that line, and it immortalized Hayes and made John Shaft a cinematic icon.

Now, without further ado, I am proud to announce that the first recipient of the coveted Unsung BadMother****** Award is none other than…Avery Brooks as Hawk!  Take a bow, Mr. Brooks.

Um…actually, you don’t have to do anything you don’t wanna do.  We still cool?

Cool.

Anyway, for those who may not know, Hawk debuted as a literary character in 1976 in “Promised Land,” one of the series of detective novels in the “Spenser” series written by Robert B. Parker.  Spenser, a tough, but smart, Boston private investigator, described Hawk thusly in his first appearance:

Shepard appeared from the door past the stairs. With him was a tall black man with a bald head and high cheekbones.  He had on a powder blue leisure suit and a pink silk shirt with a big collar.  The shirt was unbuttoned to the waist and the chest and stomach that showed were as hard and unadorned as ebony.  He took a pair of wraparound sunglasses from the breast pocket of the jacket and as he put them on, he stared at me over their rims until very slowly the lenses covered his eyes and he stared at me through them.

I looked back.  ”Hawk,” I said.

“Spenser.”

That ensemble sounds atrocious, even by 1976 standards, but only “the toughest muscleman Boston’s big boys could hire” could pull off a pink and powder-blue outfit and STILL seem dangerous.  As the above pull quote from the back cover of the novel indicates, Hawk worked as a freelance enforcer for the mob, but he had a history with Spenser, and would often come over to the side of the angels to assist the private detective.

In 1985, the television network, ABC, brought the “Spenser” novels from the page to the small screen with the series, Spenser: For Hire, with Robert Urich as Spenser and Avery Brooks as Hawk, with a markedly improved sense of fashion.   In Brooks’ depiction of Hawk, he maintained the clean-shaven dome, but he paired it with a goatee, which gave him a sense of devilish menace.  Hawk rocked the Big, Bald, Black Man With A Goatee look long before it became fashionable.  I started shaving my head in ‘91 and I still remember getting strange looks when I walked into Frisch’s Big Boy Restaurant in Fairborn, Ohio.  Now the BBBMWAG look is the default style for every Black tough guy in fiction, particularly comic books.  Heck, even Luke Cage ditched his signature Afro for a BBBMWAG. 

Avery Brooks completely inhabited the role of Hawk.  The man has presence.  He controlled the screen, and politely, but forcefully, walked off with every scene he was in.  If you YouTube Spenser: For Hire, you’ll find a series of clips dedicated to the best moments from the show.  Every single one of them has Hawk.  Every.single.one.

Brooks' Hawk and Robert Urich as Spenser

Hawk was a man of few words, and Brooks’ delivery of those lines with his precise diction wrapped in a thundering baritone, sold the intensity and conviction behind everything Hawk had to say.  The only thing that boomed louder than Hawk’s voice was the long-barreled .357 Colt Python that Hawk carried with him everywhere he went.  Hawk also was a master of “The Batman Grin.”  

The Last Thing You'll Ever See

“The Batman Grin” is that brief flash of a smile displayed by an otherwise stoic character that lets his opponent know he is absolutely and irrevocably fucked.  Hawk was a predator, and his smile was rarely a sign of mirth.  He was baring his teeth.  

In 1989, ABC spun Hawk into his own series entitled A Man Called Hawk.  It fit the “One Man With A Mysterious Past and Even More Mysterious Connections, Out For Justice,” theme that I loved so well in my youth.  Some of my favorite shows from the 1980s, like The Equalizer, Airwolf and Street Hawk (No relation, but YEAH, I SAID STREET HAWK!) carried this theme, and I obviously revisited it with WORLD OF HURT.  

A Man Called Hawk relocated the character from Boston to Washington, D.C..  With the move, Hawk’s fashion sense became a little less “wiseguy legbreaker” and more urban as he transitioned from sharkskin three-piece suits and skinny ties to patterned kufi hats and leather pants.  Although Hawk still worked as a bodyguard from time to time, he mostly left the mob contracts behind to focus on helping the little guy.  Hawk also developed a slightly philosophical edge as evidenced by circuituous, metaphysical conversations with his new confidante “Old Man” played by Shaft and Shaft’s Big Score alum, Moses Gunn. 

The series began as a midseason replacement and only lasted 13 episodes, partly because ABC scheduled A Man Called Hawk on Thursdays opposite the unstoppable juggernaut that was The Cosby Show.  Nobody, not even Hawk, could withstand The Coz.  Hawk’s brief time on the TV landscape is kind of sad, because how many dramatic series featuring a Black male lead can you name in the history of television?  I’ll give you a minute…

OK, I got the Kojak reboot with Ving Rhames and Day Break with Taye Diggs.  Anything else?

However, TV One has snagged the rights to re-air A Man Called Hawk, and on a good day you can catch a Hawk mini-marathon , so make sure to set your DVRs. 

Fortunately, Avery Brooks returned to television in 1993 as Commander – later Captain - Benjamin Sisko in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.  Deep Space Nine featured an insane, only-in-science-fiction concept about a planet full of White folks who viewed a Black man as a savior, sent to restore hope and to deliver them from darkness and fear.  They believed his destiny was to return their people to greatness after years spent under the rule of an oppressive, secretive regime.

Sorry, wrong picture.

But, yeah, he’s a Bad Mother******, too.

- JEP

In last week’s “Unsung Mother****** Awards!” blog post, I ended with an image of President Barack Obama, and I wanted to make a brief statement regarding the use of President Obama’s image.  Like every African-American…

A page from"The Obama Story: The Boy With The Biggest Dream."

This:

"Army of Darkness?" Didn't Obama beat these guys last November?

And this:

"Barack The Barbarian?" Come on!

And especially this!  Most ESPECIALLY this:

Obama drawn by Rob Liefeld? Aw, HELL No! If you survived comic books in the '90s, you're probably breaking out in hives right now.

…Has GOT to stop!  ENOUGH!

- JEP

EDITOR’S NOTE:

Oh great, now they’re dragging Bo the Dog into this mess.  Leave the dog out of it, man!

Bo, too? At long last, sir, have you no decency?

As I’ve said before, despite the theme and subject matter of the webcomic, WORLD OF HURT, I try to keep my blog a fairly upbeat.  I talk about things I like and enjoy, because I want to share a more positive experience with my readers.  However, there occasionally comes a time when I must depart from my desired path and get a little critical.

Recently, I discovered Obama Action Comics!, a webcomic by Jason Buckley.  Buckley describes it as a “blaxploitation webcomic featuring an Obama action figure.”  Now anybody who knows me knows that I’m a bleeding heart liberal and two of my biggest passions are comic books and politics.  If you check my Facebook status from today, you’ll find me waxing on about creating a Thundarr, the Barbarian comic, and admonishing Sen. Harry Reid to pull the seniority and chairmanships of any Democrat that would support a Republican filibuster of the healthcare reform bill.  Now, it would seem that this would be the perfect webcomic for me, especially since Buckley is a fellow progressive.  Sadly, as promising as the idea is, the execution leaves a little to be desired.

Now this may seem like a bit of territorial pissing, since I have “The Internet’s #1 Blaxploitation Webcomic,” a tongue-in-cheek title I bestowed on WORLD OF HURTwhen I believed there were no other Blaxploitation-themed webcomics on the internet.  Since then, I have discovered John Aston’s gritty and innovative Rachel Rage, and Maurice Fontenot’s humorous Ghost Pimp.  I have corresponded with and befriended both creators and have actively supported and promoted their work.  Obama Action Comics’ creator, Jason Buckley also seems like a guy with whom I’d have a great time.  We seem to share the same liberal philosopy.  I even support Buckley’s outrage over President Obama’s frustratingly glacial progress, or outright reversal, on some of his campain promises, but in terms of “Blaxploitation” and “webcomics,”…Dude, you’re doing it wrong.

There’s nothing inherently “Blaxploitation,” or humorous, about a Black man cussing or threatening violence.  The best kind of celebrity satire plays off or, or exaggerates,  the audience’s established perceptions of that person, and Jason Buckley’s depiction of Barack Obama as a violent, angry Black man is merely a caricature of a stereotype.  This Barack Obama is every Samuel L. Jackson and Dave Chappelle soundbite wrapped up in a presidential seal.  Buckley himself states,  ”I doubt [Barack Obama] goes around pistol whipping right wing talk radio douchebags, let alone referring to them as douchebags. Even in private, he probably has a very clean mouth.”

The image of the first Black President of the United States threatening to “choke a bitch,” even presented satirically from a fellow progressive, just feeds into the paranoid fantasies from the conservatives about how threatening Black men are.  It is only because these fantasies are so powerful, insidious, and deeply rooted in the fabric of the American subconscious, that people could even entertain the notion that Barack Obama would want to kill their grandmothers via health insurance “death panels.”  The humor is occasionally short-circuited by Buckley’s use of conservative frames to portray his subjects, such as the impression of Vice-President Joe Biden as a man who must be muzzled.

In terms of the webcomic goes, it’s a fumetti.  Buckley admits that he is using borrowed images, which he reuses liberally (no pun intended) throughout the course of the strip.  That makes it basically the photographic equivalent of a sprite comic, which are generally held in lesser regard in the webcomics community, because a) you’re merely re-contextualizing images that someone else took the time to create, and b) the relatively low level of skill required to do so.

I honestly believe Jason Buckley has a solid premise here, and I cannot find any fault with his passion for his work or subject matter.  A serial editorial webcomic that speaks painful truth to power about a president you want to believe in would be a fresh and welcome voice in the webcomic community.  However, Obama Action Comics! seems a little obvious and facile in its humor, and when you have to read the author’s blog notes to divine whether his intent was to support or vilify his subject, it is questionable whether the jokes are hitting their target.

- JEP

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