Now you know what the sound of a back cracking looks and sounds like.

I remember enjoying ShadowHawk when it first came out twenty five years ago. It wasn't my favorite series from Image, but I enjoyed the mystery of who it was behind the mask and the moral questions a spine breaker had for crime fighting.

I had a bunch of letters printed in the series at the time. I haven't looked back at those, though, because I know they'd make me cringe.

I re-read the opening four issue "ShadowHawk" mini-series recently and had a new reaction to it.

In the years post-ShadowHawk, I've read lots of Jim Valentino's other works, including books like the great "A Touch of Silver" and "Normalman." Those smaller, more autobiographical or satirical books feel right to me.

ShadowHawk doesn't feel right.

The series really is a challenge to the prevailing wisdom of hyper aggressive and violent comics of the day.

Picture in your mind what a superhero comic was in the early 90s and you're likely to come up with something ugly and ultra-violent and -- dare I say it? -- grim and gritty. Not all comics were like that at all, but in the wake of books like "The Dark Knight Returns" and "Watchmen," a new field of comics opened up to challenge every convention of the content a comic could contain.

Heck, part of the reason Todd McFarlane left Marvel was over editorial disagreements on what could be shown on the page.

Valentino's book dives deep into those gutters immediately. It's so grotesque and at times over the top -- like the remaining body left when the acidic creature digests a passer-by -- that it almost can't be taken seriously. And yet it's ultra-dark and intensely serious.

And the funnier thing is, it pales by comparison to what happens in an average issue of "Invincible" today, or in every other issue of "The Walking Dead."

We got broken in by that material 25 years ago when so many "mainstream" comics readers bought their first "independent" comics in the form of Image. This was their first introduction to non-Comics Code approved comic books.

Yes, it follows trends in society and entertainment as a whole, also, but I think the comics medium operates on its own level for such things.

What Set ShadowHawk Apart

It had a story.

OK, that's not entirely fair. But ShadowHawk did start with a strong mystery -- who is ShadowHawk? -- and immediately started planting clues to help open-eyed readers make their guesses.

Little tid-bits like scraps of dialogue and sudden character appearances were all grist for the mill. Some clues seemed too obvious, and often were. But not all of them.

Valentino was playing with the readers as a writer in this book, teasing and taunting them while delivering a blood and guts violent story that would keep them entertained/distracted. There was a plan behind all of it, even if sometimes it seemed to be to set characters up for a spin-off book.

The skills of a mystery writer come into play here, which is never easy. In fact, it's some of the toughest writing you can do, balancing clues with red herrings in the right combination to be fair. Can you surprise most of the readers who didn't solve the mystery without frustrating them that you didn't give them a fair chance to figure it out for themselves?

Valentino pulled that off with this mystery, and then still had enough interesting story material to keep the series going after that. That's impressive, in and of itself.

Fitting In With Image

Valentino was setting up his own suite of comics right from the start. An ad in the back of the fourth issue previews six different series in the ShadowHawk universe: "Rayn," "The New Alliance," "The Pact," "Slaughter," and "The Others."

I don't remember how many of those books saw the light of day. Two issues of "The Pact" made it out at the time, and a more successful "The Pact" mini-series saw the light of day a decade later, featured a new creative team each issue with names like Jason Howard, Phil Hester, and Jay Faerber.

Of the initial four covers, three had fancy schemes. The first (inked by Rob Liefeld) had a metallic foil cover. The second had a fifth color silver ink on it. The third was glow in the dark, down to a back cover featuring a glow in the dark Image "i" logo. The fourth featured a cover drawn with Erik Larsen, but not additional materials.

The trade paperback collecting this series even featured red foil on the cover.

Things only got crazier from there, with amazing and complicated die-cut covers and fold-out covers and foil embossing and -- again, it was so over the top and so crazy that it became a running gag all its own.

Still, those were fun times. Valentino wasn't content with just your average fancy covers. He really did try to make it part of the character, and then pushed it super hard. That goes for the interiors, also. When ShadowHawk revealed himself, it was part of a triple fold-out centerfold that worked on both sides of the page.

Nowadays, a wraparound cover impresses us. We've shielded ourselves so well...

The biggest problem for me with these bright foily covers is just that they're impossible to get a good scan of for this column...

The Morality Play

The strongest part of "ShadowHawk" was the morality play at the center of it all. Is a character who breaks the backs of vicious thugs he discovers committing violent crime really such a bad thing? Is the corrupt judicial system bad enough to warrant overriding it?

Everything else is just set dressing. All those random characters and the action sequences and the guest appearances from other Image characters are just there to facilitate asking the question of whether this extreme form of vigilante-ism is unwarranted or wrong.

It's something ShadowHawk is confronted with directly in the fourth issue of the original mini-series when Savage Dragon comes to town to bring him down. The two exchange words and, of course, have fisticuffs in the midst of a debate between law and order, and vigilante justice. Then ShadowHawk is offered a deal from the bad guys and has another seemingly-tough choice to make.

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