Manhunter (Paul Kirk)

Paul Kirk was originally depicted as a non-costumed independent investigator, who helped police solve crimes during the early 1940s.[1] Though the series was titled "Paul Kirk, Manhunter", Kirk didn't use the Manhunter name as an alias. He appeared in Adventure Comics #58–72 (Jan. 1941 – March 1942).[2][3]

Beginning with Adventure Comics #73, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby established a new Manhunter,[4] Rick Nelson, big game hunter turned crimefighter. Though he was obviously a different character than the first DC Manhunter, the name Rick Nelson was quickly changed to Paul Kirk in Adventure Comics #74 by an unknown editor.[5] The Simon/Kirby team left the feature after #80, November 1942, although Kirby wrote a few more scripts. The Paul Kirk Manhunter appeared in Adventure Comics until #92 in June 1944, when wartime paper shortages caused DC to drop page counts and thus his strip.[6] This version of the character reappeared as reprint in back-up stories of New Gods, a series also penciled by Kirby.

Kirk decides to become a crimefighter when his friend, Empire City police inspector Donovan, was murdered by the supervillain known as the Buzzard. He wore a superhero-like red costume with a blue mask. While he had no superpowers, he was an above average athlete and possessed superior tracking skills. Besides the Buzzard, he also fights "the twerpy crime lord Mr. Meek (who has a petrifying ray), the Rajah (who hypnotizes victims with the Burma Emerald), and the murderous gang leader the Tiger".[7]

Although Dan Richards and Paul Kirk never met in Golden Age stories, because they were published by different companies, they have been retconned in DC continuity as having met, and arguing over who should get the Manhunter name.[8] They resolved the dilemma by joining different teams: Dan Richards became a member of the Freedom Fighters, while Paul Kirk stayed as a member of the All-Star Squadron.

Cover art of Golden Age Manhunter as depicted in Adventure Comics #79

Many years later, in 1973, the names of Manhunter and Paul Kirk were resurrected in a story by Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson in Detective Comics #437[9][10] Simonson noted that:

He [Archie Goodwin] had this idea for doing a back-up story for Detective Comics which he was editing. He was going to do a lead Batman story and then have an eight-page short story in the back. He thought he would try to invent a character and do him in a way that contrasted with Batman. While Batman was dark and grim and very urban, this would be a guy in brighter colors and the whole world would be his stage. Where Batman was more or less an empty hand combatant, this guy would carry weaponry.[11]

Contrary to popular belief, although the name was chosen as an acknowledgement of the 1940s character, it was not the original intent of the creators for this to be the same character. This link was later established within the series to quickly provide backstory within the limited eight-page structure.[11]

Kirk carried and used primarily three weapons: a Bolo Mauser, a Katar (कटार), and two shuriken "throwing stars". These are carried by Kirk as part of his costume, on the chest. Simonson said about of his costume design: "I did a bunch of preliminary designs and I think Archie thought my first costume was a little complex, but then I did a bunch of variations. They were just simpler and not as good, so we went with the original design. The only difference was originally I’d given him nine throwing stars. Archie wanted to include martial arts in the strip and I came across something that said nine was a mystical number in some of the martial arts cultures. But somewhere along the way I realized that drawing nine throwing stars in every damn panel was going to be a big problem. So we fixed that!"[11]

Paul Kirk was killed by an elephant on safari in the 1940s, but his body was cryogenically preserved and eventually resurrected by the Council, a secret society dedicated to saving the human race from dangers such as nuclear war, pollution and overpopulation. After his return from death, Kirk is given a healing factor devised by a geneticist-member of the Council[12] (it was later retconned that the healing factor is due to nanobots injected into him and he is trained extensively in the martial arts by Asano Nitobe). He was also the genetic source for many clones, which the Council intends to use as their paramilitary arm, with the original Paul Kirk as their leader.

To test Kirk's loyalty, the Council assigns him to kill an Interpol official while refusing to explain how this mission advances their stated goal of helping mankind. When Kirk tries to warn the agent instead, a group of clones attempts to kill him. Realizing that the Council have been corrupted by power, gradually warped from idealists into ruthless fanatics, Kirk begins to hunt down them and their agents.[13]

Manhunter kills all nine members of the Council, deliberately sacrificing his life to do so.[14] Interpol agent Christine St. Clair and Nitobe hunt down his remaining clones.[15]

The 1970s Paul Kirk/Manhunter stories appeared primarily as 8-page backups in Batman's Detective Comics, at the time going through an incarnation as a "100-Page Super Spectacular" featuring mostly reprints of non-Batman stories. Only with the last episode of the series did Manhunter move to the front of the book, in a full-length team-up with Batman.[16] The stories were all written by Goodwin, and were the breakout work for future fan favorite artist Simonson. Simonson later said that the distinctively dense layouts and breakdowns for many of the early Manhunter stories were done by Goodwin.[17] Goodwin's work on Manhunter, in which he both updated an obscure Golden Age hero, and, in the series' last episode, took the daring approach of killing him off (one of the few comic book deaths that has actually "taken" and not been reversed or retconned away in the decades since it occurred) is very well regarded by both fans and other comics professionals, winning a number of Shazam Awards. Goodwin himself has cited the series as one of the three "best things I've done in comics".[18] When the team was approached in the early 1990s to create a new story with the Paul Kirk character, Goodwin and Simonson together wrote a two-page plot, but Simonson, busy with a monthly series, failed to produce the layouts for Goodwin to script. Years later, after Goodwin's death, Walt Simonson acted on his wife Louise's suggestion that the story be completed without dialogue as a "silent" story.[19]

In 1975 DC published a second, completely independent Manhunter revival in 1st Issue Special #5, written and pencilled by Kirby. In this story an elder Manhunter retires and passes on the mantle to Mark Shaw. Though it is usually presumed that Kirby meant the elder Manhunter to be Paul Kirk, the character is never explicitly identified, allowing the reader to suppose him to be someone other than Kirk and thus avoid the resulting contradiction (in the Goodwin/Simonson revival, Kirk retired so that he could serve in World War II, i.e. during the 1940s).[20]

• The Paul Kirk version of Manhunter appears in the Beware the Batman episode "Unique", voiced by Xander Berkeley. Kirk is established as an old friend of Thomas Wayne that was secretly Manhunter. He was wounded and left for dead during one of his missions behind enemy lines. The Council found him and their leader, Anatol Mykros, put him in suspended animation for twenty years, hoping to create an army of robot clones from him. Dr. Spangle, one of the scientists working for the Council, found out Mykros' real plan: overthrowing the world's governments. He broke Kirk free and gave him a weapon. Kirk then set out to take down the clones. When Mykros and the clones kidnap his daughter, Ava, in Gotham City, he ends up teaming up with Batman, Katana and Alfred Pennyworth to rescue her. The heroes defeat Mykros, but Kirk leaves Ava behind in order to continue taking down the Council and the remaining clones.