CACrown ArchivesThe cinema collection
Menu
Research dossier · Arts & Letters

Death Hawk

fictional American comic book character

Manuscripts, fine bindings, an engraving plate and preserved performance ephemera
Arts and lettersInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 27, 2025
Entity authorityQ5247137
Source-derived summary

Death Hawk is a fictional American comic book character, a self-styled salvage expert in the 25th century. The character starred in a namesake, three-issue series published by Adventure Publications from 1987 to 1988, created and written by Mark Ellis. He first appeared in a five-page back-up feature in Star Rangers #2–3, by the same writer.

Publication history

Death Hawk ran three issues cover-dated May to November 1988. The first issue was pencilled by artist Adam Hughes, succeeded with issue #2 by Rik Levins. The first two issues featured painted covers by Dave Dorman, the third by Steve Hickman.

Death Hawk was canceled after the third issue when the publisher went out of business. A fourth issue was completed but went unpublished at the time.

In September 2008, Ellis' Millennial Concepts (with Transfuzion Publishing) published a 128-page trade paperback, Death Hawk: The Soulworm Saga Volume One, that collected the published Death Hawk stories and the previously unpublished fourth issue. It included never-before seen incidental art by Darryl Banks, Jim Mooney and Robert Lewis.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Death Hawk” is fictional American comic book character. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Death, Hawk and fictional, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewBest approached as a cultural-object dossier: authorship and date matter, but circulation and reception often explain the wider significance. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1987, 1988, 2008—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, Death, Hawk and fictional is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “fictional American comic book character” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 27, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q5247137. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1987, 1988 and 2008.

Critical limits

Titles can refer to several editions, objects or performances, making precise identification essential before interpretation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.

Best used for
  • Identifying works and editions
  • Tracing reception history
  • Finding collection records
Verify next

The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Death Hawk”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Death Hawk primary sources, Death Hawk archive and Death research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Death Hawk”?
  2. Which edition, object, performance or recording is being described?
  3. Where is authorship, date or provenance documented?
Subject index

Search terms from this dossier

Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Death Hawk” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.