Thinking about Hawkgirl

In my last post, I mentioned that I'm not terribly fond of Kendra Saunders/Hawkgirl. Since I need a blog post for today anyway, I figured I'd go with that.

I don't hate Kendra as a character but I do rather dislike her right now and I really have a lot of trouble articulating why.

In very early issues of JSA, Kendra really interested me. For all my play-griping about Hawkman, I really do like the Hawks in general. They have wings. They hit people with maces. They're blunt and straightforward. They look cool. Their backstory is incomprehensible, but that's half the fun.

Kendra appealed to me. I liked her design and her forceful personality. I liked that she was hot-tempered and a bit reluctant for the hero role. Most of the other JSA members initially were either old hats or enthusiastic newcomers, so she made for a different perspective. I also liked the way she interacted with Courtney, Dinah and Kara.

I liked the relationship with Sand and the early relationship with Carter as well. I found her situation terribly sympathetic. She was confused, Carter was attractive, there was all the past life baggage. Perfectly understandable. I also liked how she kissed Sand for all the wrong reasons. (I'm not as fond of the hitting him thing, but...)

I suppose it was little things that started getting to me, really early on. As much as I liked the early Kendra/Carter stuff, the period in the comics right before he came back was one in which I started to find her very trying. It's not her fault, really, her characterization was perfectly understandable. But the storyline seemed to drag. It felt like Kendra-tantrum, Kendra-angst, Kendra-tantrum, Kendra-angst, hit-Sand, rinse repeat.

And this is a very personal thing, but the suicide thing also pushed a few of my buttons. I have...issues about suicide in general that I'd really rather not get into. I'm not adverse to a good story about attempted or actual suicide either in the present or having happened in the past to a character, but this didn't really work for me.

It doesn't make sense, I know, but I'd have much preferred it if she had *attempted* suicide in the past but actually died in some freak car accident or something. I have no idea why this is, but I'll chalk it up to personal issues and leave it at that

Those problems are small though, by the Roulette arc at least I was still enjoying and sympathizing with Kendra a lot.

I don't know, I guess I felt somewhere along the line Carter was becoming more developed and three dimensional and Kendra was becoming a caricature of herself. She went from being a conflicted, troubled girl trying to cling to her identity in the face of a very overwhelming past, to just being...angry. So much so that on the rare occasions where she's not angry, I can't really get a sense of who she IS or what makes her tick anymore.

And to be honest, while I really liked the early Carter/Kendra stuff, after a few years the on-again, off-again, will-they, won't-they was really really tiresome. Just do it already! Christ! At least when Sand was in the picture there was an added, unpredictable element.

I don't know. It probably wouldn't take much for me to like her again (My irrational love for my irrational hatred of Nightwing aside, I much prefer liking characters to disliking them and really only tend to need a way to "touch base" with what about the character works for me) and I do find her, like Carter or Batman, interesting in a group setting. I just currently have absolutely no interest in reading her in a solo comic right now.