10 Best Batman Analogues
3. Shadowhawk
Sadly not all Batman analogues are based on exciting questions. In the case of Shadowhawk, Jim Valentino asked, "what's popular and sells books?". The answer at the time was Batman, Wolverine, brooding anti-heroes and violence. Putting all of these elements into a pot and stirring for twenty minutes, Valentino would end up with a snap-shot of the nineties comics zeitgeist.
A product of the early Image Comics era, this take on the troubled vigilante would get off to several false starts and even appear in the pages of Youngblood before getting his own title.
When a villain injects Paul Johnstone with HIV, he dedicates himself to fighting those who would harm the innocent. Carlton Sun had been developing an exoskeleton suit of armour that Johnstone would later don to fight crime. The book and the character would become Shadowhawk.
Fortunately, when Johnstone died, the character would undergo several massive changes, and most of the similarities between Shadowhawk and Batman would fade away.
Writers would later reveal that Shadowhawk was the "spirit of justice", a force that had inhabited people in the past, with only three of them being human.