Only she knows that Hawkins secretly possesses more power than a 15-year-old can handle. His best friend is Frieda Goren, the hottest babe in school, and a classmate at Ernest Hemingway High. With his superhero schedule and classes, he can’t even keep the most menial part-time job. He’s not in the grip of poverty but he’s never far out of its reach. He dons a costume and adopts the name Static when he uses his superpowers.īut even superpowers can’t solve all Hawkins’ problems. Hawkins finds himself capable of controlling force fields, taser punches, flying around on metal garbage can lids, and even hurling bolts of lightning. The gas kills some of the gang members but leaves Hawkins and a handful of other survivors with assorted superpowers. Just as Hawkins finds he can’t bring himself to pull the trigger, the area is doused with a mysterious gas by unknown forces. In the comic book, Hawkins is a bright but geeky teenager who is drawn to a gang hangout to get revenge from a bully who humiliated him in front of his girlfriend. The real-life Hawkins and his comic book alter-ego are both flawed characters. At the time the company had some 1,500 characters in its collection, including Superman and Batman, and had more than 150 minority characters - but no monthly comics starring black superheroes. The first issue of Static appeared in 1993, created and written by McDuffie, who was an editor at DC Comics in New York.

“He is in the classic Superman, Spiderman vein, fighting for good,” Brown said. Static/Virgil Hawkins was one of the very first in a new wave of black superheroes of the 90s, Brown said. But they generally were featured speaking street slang and tackling villainous drug dealers in an urban ghetto setting. He said the first wave of black comic book characters first began arriving in the 1970s and 1980s - John Stewart, the first black Green Lantern, and Luke Cage, a street-smart former convict were among the pioneers. Static, he said, is among the first to change that image and present a positive black superhero. “Historically, comic book superheroes are as white and WASPish as you can get,” said Brown. The character of Static/Virgil Hawkins fits the classic superhero mold, said Jeffery Brown, a popular culture professor at bowling Green State University in Kentucky and the author of a new book on black superheroes in comics. “It is appropriate he would be fighting evil,” said Herman. Herman said he was delighted to learn of the comic book tribute, which will introduce Virgil Hawkins to a new generation. Herman, who convinced The Florida Bar to posthumously reinstate Hawkins, said it is wrong to ignore the great good Hawkins accomplished because of a misstep late in life.

Rebirth of the Cool by Dwayne McDuffie