Who's This? The son of a frontier hero.
The facts: When Tomahawk's sales made his series untenable in the early 70s, they put "Son of" in front of the title on covers and introduced his son Hawk, by way of a Native woman some years after his chronicles. Created by Robert Kanigher and Frank Thorne, he failed to save the series, only appearing in the last 10 issues (#131 to 140, December 1970 to June 1972) before cancellation. (Tomahawk still appeared as a back-up.) He then featured in Swamp Thing #85-86 (April-May 1985) during the monster's travels through time, and had a cameo in Infinite Crisis.
How you could have heard of him: Those Swamp Thing issues by Rick Veitch are still in the comic-reading public's consciousness.
Example story: Tomahawk #135 (August 1971) "Death on Ghost Mountain!" by Robert Kanigher and Frank Thorne
In this issue, Hawk chances upon a scene of Old West injustice... outlaws are trying to extort money from an old travelling salesman. And he jumps right in to save the old codger.
The old man has wares to sell, but hasn't yet, so he has no money. But he still wants to give Hawk a reward, and all our hero wants is the Peddler's Catalog, just so he can look at illustrations of people living large out East. Fine clothes, fancy bottles... Wouldn't it be cool if he could afford them? But for that, he needs to leave his parents' farm and move to the big city. His family is actually a pretty big part of the character's stories, and yes, that includes a wizened old Tomahawk.
In fact, Tomahawk is sometimes surprisingly more central than Hawk is in these stories, which is why I landed on this one after a couple of tries (not that I'm complaining about reading more Hawk stories). In the nearby town, Hawk catches up with his friend Jess who's also leaving town to make his fortune so he can marry the beautiful Tina. And so they leave together following a map to a secret gold lode on Ghost Mountain. Behind a waterfall is a tunnel, and beyond that a hidden ravine. But something's not right, and Hawk's Native senses are tingling.
DC has a lot of western characters straddling the Native-White divide - Firehair, Pow-Wow Smith, even Speedy and Arak would count - but I think Hawk, with parents from both sides, plays this a better than most. In this case, he starts digging for gold with his pal, ignoring what his Native side is telling him. Seven days and nights of digging later, they do strike gold, and Hawk is soon satisfied. They have "enough" and can stop "tearin' the heart" out of the mountain. Jess thinks he's crazy. And even if they're alone there, he keeps watch, paranoid even of his friend. Yes, folks, this is "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre". At dawn the next day, a Native funeral party shows up to bury one of their own. Jess freaks out. Hawk sides with them, of course.
As the two friends start to fight, the ground gives way as if to prove how sacred a site this is.
And the curse is made manifest:
And so Hawk returns the gold to the land and rides home without a penny more. Oop! No, there's a small nugget stuck in his boot. But Hawk has learned his lesson about greed and gives it to his little brother to play with, just a yellow pebble. As his mother says: "When he seeks true values, he learns to be a man!" And that's one to grow on.
From other tales I've read, it seems that Hawk's hook is to contrast White and Native values through his twin heritage, but also plays like a coming of age story. He doesn't look that young, but he lives at home (and in the shadow of his heroic father) and is still learning. Between that story potential and Frank Thorne's art, it's a shame his strip couldn't have gone on longer. But that's true of a number of western strips as the genre lost its appeal in the 70s, save for Jonah Hex.
Who's Next? Diametrically-opposed brothers.
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