Did Swamp Thing and Hawkman Almost Have a Team-Up Series?

CBR

By Brian Cronin

Published Jan 26, 2020

In the latest Comic Book Legends Revealed, learn whether DC nearly turned Swamp Thing's series into a Swamp Thing/Hawkman team-up book!

Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the seven hundred and sixty-sixth installment where we examine three comic book legends and determine whether they are true or false.

As usual, there will be three posts, one for each of the three legends. Click here for Part 1 of this week's installment.

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COMIC LEGEND:

Swamp Thing and Hawkman nearly had their own team-up series.

STATUS:

True

In the world of comic books, there are often stories of comic books that just never got published for one reason or another, almost always because the title was canceled before the book could be released.

John Boylan, at his awesome Roots of the Swamp Thing website, collected a good deal of the unpublished 25th issue of Swamp Thing's original series, which was written by David Kraft and was in the midst of being drawn by Ernie Chan and Fred Carillo.

Here's the cover...

And here are some of the unpublished pages, where Hawkman is manipulated into having an all out brawl with Swamp Thing...

Good stuff, but it sure just seems like a typical issue of a book with a guest star, right?

Well, as it turned out, this was actually going to be the start of a whole other new deal!

In an article about the unpublished story in TwoMorrows' Back Issue #66 by Jim Arnold, David Kraft reveals that this was surprisingly going to be the start of a series of team-ups between these two unlikely partners! Kraft noted that then-publisher Carmine Infantino let him know about the plans, but the book was canceled before they could be implemented.

Kraft's plan, as he didn't know how else to achieve a realistic Swamp Thing/Hawkman series, was to take Swamp Thing to Thanagar in future issues!

Amusingly, years later, Alan Moore wrote an epic battle between Swamp Thing and other Thanagarian "Hawkpeople" in outer space...