Mary Tyler MooreHawk opens, after a publisher’s note about a fictional other publisher, with an introduction from Dave Baker, ostensibly the artist behind this graphic novel, informing us that, no, he did not create this book. It was mailed to him from the future. 

We learn, eventually, that a different Dave Baker – TWO Dave Bakers, in fact – from the future – a future? – created the contents of Mary Tyler MooreHawk. Perhaps one of them is future him. Perhaps not. It’s unclear. That is fine. Clarity is the enemy in a work such as this¹. There is also an unnamed character writing footnotes. We shall ignore them for now².

The intro goes on to tell us how all he’s doing is providing an intro, then goes on to pontificate about comics, play footsie with Morrisonian ideas, and, about three-quarters of the way through, describe the book as “words and images presented in a fashion that will be equal parts harrowing, mind-numbingly frustrating, and, hopefully, profoundly moving.”

I certainly agree with the central description of that statement³.

To get to why, we first have to approach Mary Tyler MooreHawk as a work; to see its “whole” to, then, see its myriad holes⁴.

What is Mary Tyler MooreHawk? It’s a fairly recent graphic novel by Dave Baker. Nine chapters long – nine panel grids and all that – it’s supposed be about Mary Tyler MooreHawk⁵ and her sci-fi pulp adventure world. Think Tintin or Johnny Quest. We’re entering her tale late in the game, as if we picked up a random set of sequential issues that slowly reveal themselves to be the final, and possibly unfinished, few of a long-running series.  

Every issue contains a title page – complete with logo, credits, and issue subtitles – that doubles as a packed, two-page spread of the various characters within Mary’s world, with little editorial notes about their names and who they are; not quite a dramatis personae⁶ nor an Avengers-style headshot gallery of the characters contained within the individual issues, but instead a survey of the colorful secondary cast of “Mary Tyler MooreHawk.” A cast that includes…

Doctor Satanikill! Zenio Wolves-Head! Shark Man! Lord Sev-Dentallo, 7th Order Draculo Satanikill Magistrate! David “The Rock” Hellison! Dreeb Lazenby! Sin-Deaer Gucci-Hellvox! I could go on. These names are gold and their descriptions are very fun⁷.

It’s effective too, as if I’m reading a classic comic that’s been ongoing for years. One with a dense, semi-impenetrable lore, yet is Claremontian in its balance of one-and-dones and the ongoing soap, drip-feeding only the most necessary of details. Through Baker’s intro, these parts are also framed such that they don’t have to explain intricate details or backstories or even some fundamental tenets of the world. We are thus primed to be more accepting of the in-media-res nature of chapter one, with references and reveals and relationship dynamics long-established we are simply not privy to, trusting that we will pick up as the comic progresses.

I had a blast reading just the main comic. It’s a fascinating, fully realized world, brimming with untold stories we’re only partially exposed to and full of characters I could spend all day reading about. Mary more than earns her status as the lead of a self-titled book and it nails the adventure story, complete with the proper pseudo-science gobbledygook to big-laser-pew-pew action ratio, combined with a soapy, interpersonal drama. I was also quite moved by the ending of what we got⁸. 

By page count⁹, this is the bulk of the book, with chapters 1, 3, and 5 each being approximately a single issue’s worth of material; chapter 7 being about three. The other chapters, which are generally about half the length but take significantly longer to read, are issues of “Physicalist Today,” an illegal(?) underground magazine dedicated to all things physical in a world (our future) that banned physical ownership of items as a climate change mitigation tactic…I think¹⁰.

The backstory there doesn’t really matter. What matters is it’s framed as a series of articles looking back at the TV show Mary Tyler MooreHawk, a cult-classic sci-fi show ala Star Trek¹¹ that was canceled after only nine-episodes, and the writer’s search for its enigmatic creator¹². It’s a damn fine oral history of this fake future show, one that transforms when the writer goes from being an observer to being the subject. Throughout there is a creeping sense of dread, as if by getting closer to the source, we are uncovering some hidden, unspeakable truth and that, by revealing it, we are dooming the world. 

It’s laudable how solid this future feels and how grounded it seems in contrast to the bombast and spectacle of Mary’s world. In the world of “Physicalist Today,” TV only exists on dishwashers and everyone’s forgotten about the mass-mediums we currently love. It’s a world where the mere act of collecting turns one into a social outcast, and possibly a dissident.

How does this connect back to the “Mary Tyler MooreHawk” comic? At the start of chapter 9, it’s revealed that the “Mary Tyler MooreHawk” comics we’ve been reading, while never published, were the basis for the TV show. Baker had been drawing them since long before it aired and continued drawing them long after, amassing nearly 100 issues. A true, enviable comic run that, by virtue of being unpublished, remained a personal work of art for art’s sake alone.

On their own, these two pieces work well. If I were to have come across them separately, I would be satisfied having read them, though certainly not blown away¹³. However, in juxtaposing the two halves, and then constructing a tortured meta-textual narrative that links them and the various oddities¹⁴ of the book itself, Baker’s ambition outstrips his ability, and the work suffers tremendously for it.

In his intro, Baker poses a question that, as I read, I couldn’t quite dislodge: why do we never afford comics and comics creators the same leeway that we do for “low-budget” films or TV shows¹⁵? It got me wondering what kind of affordances I should allow for in Mary Tyler MooreHawk? How much of Baker’s admissions in his interview with Comicbook.com matter beyond an explanatory note? Sure, it helps to know that he was re-learning to draw for this¹⁶, and that does make what he did more impressive, but it doesn’t change the experience I had as a first-time reader of the book.

One could break down the literal meaning of “low-budget” or what it signifies in a work, but Baker’s not asking for that, not really. What he really wants is to invite the comparison between his work and those “low-budget” shows via an open-ended question that has the aesthetic qualities of something meaningful without anything substantial to back it up.

To wit: Mary Tyler MooreHawk never explores this idea anywhere in the book itself¹⁷. It appears and then disappears, like so many other ideas within. It’s an indication of the mismatch between Baker’s stated interests and his true preoccupations. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the primacy Baker gives the “Physicalist Today” segments, segments which slow the book down to a crawl.

Prose always does this – it simply takes longer to read a page of only words than the strange alchemy of words and pictures the graphic form takes. Lengthy prose in a comic, therefore, takes on greater importance simply by virtue of the extra time spent with it. What does Mary Tyler MooreHawk do with this added significance? Does it follow up on its postulations about comics in its intro, spending that extensive word count discussing comics, be it specifically “Mary Tyler MooreHawk” or generally?

No. It spends it on the history and impact of a fictional television show.

Half the book by chapter, a little under a third by page-count, is spent with “Physicalist Today.” All throughout, I kept expecting to turn a corner, to get to the part where the comics we were reading became important again. To get some sort of explanation for the lengthy, increasingly frustrating digressions into TV production minutia¹⁸, when all I wanted was insight into the far more compelling main narrative and Mary, its central character¹⁹, only to realize in slow dawning horror that the “Mary Tyler MooreHawk” comics were, for lack of a better term, disposable and, even more shockingly, not the main narrative.

One also gets the sense from Baker’s intro and the subsequent copious footnotes that he holds superhero comics, particularly those created in the mode of the Big 2, in contempt²⁰, as if it were a lesser form to work in. This, then, makes his choice to create in a comics mode that is the direct precursor to much of the superhero genre – pulp, science-adventure – all the more baffling.

Yes, those “Physicalist Today” segments ultimately reveal themselves to be an ode to comics as independent passion projects rather than work-for-hire IP-farm fodder; of artistic pursuits as personal and pure and painful rather than processed and pitched and perfunctory. Narratively, however, everything is in service of the magazine pieces, of the prose. That is ultimately the story being told, with the comic an artifact of that tale.

How else to explain the book ending on “Physicalist Today” and not the comics? How else to square a story that talks and talks and talks about a television show with nary a whiff of the comics we’ve been reading? How else to explain the complete lack of focus on comics as a medium in the prose? These are choices, indications of priorities.

And remember, this is a graphic novel. That is what should take primacy. One expects sequential art; that’s what readers are looking for. By making the comic a mere product of the prose, Baker is devaluing the comic’s importance, no matter how good it may be on its own. It’s like asking for a fish and being given a hamster. Sure, they’re both small, considered pets, and need water to live, but the hamster will drown if I place it in the tank I’ve already filled.

I can see the argument that I’m focusing on all the wrong things, straining and stretching for ever more tenuous gripes and grouses. I mean, come on? Chapter order as a central critique? Footnote usage²¹? Look at Mr. Nitpick over here. But here’s the thing: this is precisely the kind of approach the book invites. The inclusion of the cipher at the end, of the cryptic intro, of the conspiracy angles, of the kind of nerd culture that is built around close reading and extrapolation from minute sources, all of it encourages this kind of thinking, inviting us to dig deeper and read closer. Were it not baked into the text, I wouldn’t be so flustered and confused and frustrated at its thoughtlessness.

Sadly, it’s not just the prose segments that suffer. The “Mary Tyler MooreHawk” comics are riddled with typos and the dialog is stuffed to the gills with Whedonisms that grate to read. Sentences and segments often just…end, as if characters are constantly talking past each other rather than to each other²². The art oscillates between panels that are half drawn and the characters little more than sketches, to overstuffed pages full of viscera and science beams²³ and organic, vine armor²⁴.

I actually struggled to parse a decent number of the pages and panels in this work. The excessive use of details clutters the pages and the two-toned coloring²⁵ doesn’t provide enough contrast between objects and figures.

Take, for instance, those two-page spreads I mentioned earlier, the not-quite dramatis personae with numerous characters from Mary’s secondary cast. Depending on which one you look at, there are at least fifteen figures on the page at once. They often overlap with each other as they cascade down the page, meaning their silhouettes sit on top of one another and should, in a well-composed spread, be clearly and easily differentiable from one another. Put another way: I should know whose arm is covering whose shoulder and thus be able to make out the full figure.

Chapter three’s spread is particularly bad in this regard. One could stare at these pages for hours and still struggle to make out where one person’s arm ends and another’s lapel begins or if this particular line is the edge of someone’s hair, someone else’s arm, or the tassel of a third character’s jacket. Moreover, many of them are oozing or smoking, adding even more opportunities to obscure the other figures and clutter up the page. The figures labeled 12, 13, and 18²⁶ may as well be a singular mass of curved lines.

It’s the 90s all over again: more lines equals more detail equals more realism equals more depth equals the best art.

And that’s a page with no narrative or panels. On pages with those elements, everything is flattened into a singular plane where it becomes impossible to tell what’s part of the background, foreground, or the now eviscerated midground. The depth of field is eliminated and one underappreciated purpose depth of field provides is cues to which lines pertain to which objects/subjects. Without it, one is left unmoored on the page.

We see this in the cold open from chapter one. Mary Tyler MooreHawk and Roxy, her bodyguard, are doing their Indiana Jones, pulp adventurer thing. Over the course of a few pages, they take an amulet from a tomb and get chased by mummies and a revolutionary guard aka a second set of goons to be running from²⁷. Classic stuff. 

However, more than half the panels in this sequence are a soup of lines indistinguishable from each other. Is that squiggle on page five, panel three a mummy? A rifle? A guard’s hat? The stairs? Dust? Dirt? Who can tell²⁸? Could be any or all of them. Furthermore, there are no longer any focal points to guide one’s eye to the important sections of each panel and thus across the page. 

The flow is broken and, once broken, it is hard to recover.

Perhaps, one could argue, I’m still missing the forest for the trees. Mary Tyler MooreHawk is a story that is the sum of its parts; a dossier from another world meant to give us a glimpse into ours; an experiment in form and function. That sounds like the exact kind of weird, formalist nonsense I love.

Its frame – two related but disparate instances of a mass-market form (the magazine) from a niche community (comics and the (fictional) Physicalists) construct a picture of a fandom from a familiar yet distant time, with two parallel mysteries keeping one reading, with promises that the two will, by the end, reveal their connection to each other – has limitless potential²⁹. That Baker is employing pastiches to accomplish this goal makes it all the better. 

The power of pastiche is in creating something that could, at first blush, seamlessly integrate with the thing it is aping. The comics of “Mary Tyler MooreHawk” and the issues of “Physicalist Today³⁰,” work on their own as simulacra of their respective formats and genres. Next to each other, they have a cautious symbiosis that almost, almost, coheres, were it not for Baker’s inexplicable decision to complicate his narrative to oblivion and turn his focus on all the wrong things.

Let’s compare Mary Tyler MooreHawk to Watchmen³¹. Watchmen’s use of pastiche, both in the comic and via its backmatter, is legendary: the Under the Hood biography excerpts, magazine articles about pirate comics, and then the pirate comics themselves³². One feels compelled to read these pages, in spite of the change in medium and lack of direct connection to the respective issue’s events³³, because they promise, and deliver, on insights into the world of the comic, which is then used to illustrate how and why Watchmen diverged from ours and explores what that means for our world.

By increasing the verisimilitude of the comic, these backmatter pieces become far more engaging and fascinating than they otherwise would be and the feeling of “wasted time” spent away from the central narrative, and the comics, is diminished or eliminated altogether.

With Mary Tyler MooreHawk, the two halves of the story rarely, if ever, inform on the other, so the reading experience is that of starts and stops and huhs and whats and why-are-we-even-botherings and is-this-going-anywheres. Had, for instance, the comics been representations of the episodes or the articles been about a cult comic series, I could see this structure working. Or if the meta-angle was dropped altogether and we were presented with a more disjointed puzzle – random pages, half an article, an in-world ad.

Alas, it doesn’t.

Then there are the footnotes³⁴. Oh the footnotes. Mary Tyler MooreHawk is awash in footnotes; some hand-drawn onto the page, some typed in after; some with philosophical asides, some with conspiratorial musings, and some with necessary (or extraneous) external context. They end up serving two purposes: to provide context to their respective parts and to further the grand conspiracy angle³⁵. In theory, then, these footnotes should bolster the multiple layers of the narrative and increase the work’s verisimilitude – this is, after all, supposedly compiled by Dave Bakers all the way down, and commentary is the purview of that compiler – but in practice ends up muddling it even further.

The inconsistencies between and within each set of footnotes, once noticed, claw at the back of one’s mind. Why are they rendered in two different styles: hand-lettered for comics and typed in everywhere else? Who’s writing them? Are they all the same person? If the magazine article’s numbering starts at nine, were those done at the same time as the intro? If so, why does the voice and perspective seem to change? Why do the footnote numbers climb across each “issue” but start at 1, when this is implied to be issues #95 through 99? Who are these notes even for? One question begets two which begets four, then eight, the sixteen and…you see where this is going.

It appears pedantic to do this but, as I said earlier, this is the kind of close reading the narrative invites us to ask. Who is doing the storytelling, and how it is being presented, matters when crafting a work that expressly uses said elements to create additional meaning. Pastiche requires care and attention to all aspects of the process, lest the illusion be broken, as it is here.

Putting aside provenance and the various meta-textual concerns, the footnotes also do little to improve the reading experience, particularly in the comics sections. They neither tell a parallel story in and of themselves – a commentary by the artist or another external source – nor are they of-the-text ala editorial captions³⁶. Instead, they’re Wikipedia summaries, pumped full of biographical information about characters and events from past “Mary Tyler MooreHawk” adventures, dumped there to distract and give the illusion of depth.

It’s a classic case of telling, telling, telling rather than showing. How much better it would have been to experience these adventures, or, more daringly, simply not be told anything and dropped in with no framing? Instead, these incessant, dense, indigestible footnotes belie a lack of confidence in Baker’s own storytelling abilities and make it seem like he wants everyone to point and say “look how clever it is,” instead of just being clever³⁷.

I must also ask: what does Mary Tyler MooreHawk gain from shoehorning in a sci-fi, paranoid thriller into its exploration of art, commercialization, and commodification?

Baker teases throughout the book a grander story at play, one operating behind the scenes. The publisher’s note does this. The intro does this. The “Physicalist Today” articles even transition from being an oral history with a normal, pseudo-mystery at the center – whatever happened to Mary Tyler MooreHawk showrunner Dave Baker – to a glimpse at a wacked-out conspiracy that derails the story for the last 10 or so pages³⁸, as if Baker had no idea how to end it while also keeping up the conceit that this book is real and true and from our actual, literal future.

There’s a even a cipher³⁹ in the back of the book which, when decoded using the key on the publisher’s note page, implies an additional extra layer of conspiracy: Physicalist Dave Baker is lying about everything. For what purpose, it remains unclear, and the primary narrative is uninterested in seeding such answers⁴⁰.

What does the story gain from this? Why does this help Baker explore his idea of lost media and telling a complete, incomplete story that we’re picking up mid-stream? It adds little texture and even less context. More damningly, even with all this, he never fully commits to any of his conceits, instead throwing in one new twist after another, baiting the hook and then revealing that the worm was never there to begin with and, in fact, we were looking at the wrong damn fishing pole.

Ultimately, the things Mary Tyler MooreHawk is praised for are, to me, its weakest aspects. It is a pretentious work⁴¹ that pretends it is above its influences, ashamed, as it were, to be making this particular kind of comics despite clearly loving comics writ large. It is not nearly as clever as it thinks it is, it is not nearly as coherent as it wants to be, and it is not even close to being a compelling narrative because it bogs itself down with dull, extraneous nonsense.

To be sure, I can point to comics on the shelves far more uninspired and bereft of ambition⁴². That is not its cardinal sin. No. Mary Tyler MooreHawk suffers not from lack of ambition, but an inability to manifest it onto the page. This is a comic that so badly wants to be Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt or Miracleman but can barely muster a Doomsday Clock.

1. As I started writing this article, I structured it such that all my vitriol and digressions were shunted to these footnotes. You can imagine my (lack of) surprise when I failed at this task in paragraph one.
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2. Mostly because Baker does much the same by the book’s end.
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3. There I go again. ↩︎
4. And oh are they gaping and endless.
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5. Or, as everyone insists on calling her, MTMH, as if MTMH is somehow an easier thing to read or parse or say than Mary Tyler or MooreHawk or even her full name, a name treated as taboo, like the tetragrammaton, as if saying the full name would invoke an otherworldly force of power to strike down the speaker in a flash of divine rage.
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6. Because we rarely, if ever, see anyone from these group shots appear in their associated chapters, besides the main three – Mary, Roxy, and Cutie Boy – of course. Maybe, MAYBE, two of them show up outside of an Avengers: Endgame style team-up moment near the end.
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7. Annoying at times too. ↩︎
8. Or I would have been if I hadn’t been ready to throw the book across a room after trudging through all the other pieces of it.
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9. I have to guess because none of the comics pages have numbering, which is very annoying since numbering every page was still in fashion for the comics style he’s evoking. It’s likely he did this because all the comics were done traditionally with hand lettering and he didn’t know where in the book they’d end up sitting. I do appreciate the lettering. Could’ve used a copy-edit or two or ten, though. And there are two credited copy editors!
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10. I tried finding the passage with the exact reason but I couldn’t stomach reading those damn magazine articles again. There’s something about the format that fills me with dread and unending bile. I blame New York’s terrible editing standards. ↩︎
11. Show’s how much of a fake sci-fi fan I am if I can’t even think up one niche, short-lived but beloved TV show. Maybe Crusade? Firefly? Revolution? Does anyone even like Revolution? ↩︎
12. Both named Dave Baker. Duh.
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13.  I certainly would prefer reading this book, with its risks and passion, to another dull, overwritten, underdrawn, cookie-cutter mini, but that’s not saying too much. ↩︎
14. Don’t even fucking get me started on that bullshit he pulls with the cipher in the back. ↩︎
15. Is this an example of Baker asking about indie comics as analogs for “low budget” TV? Or perhaps he’s asking us to consider, and judge less harshly, the work-for-hire creators having to pump out monthly issues for corporations that care little for them beyond what value can be extracted. Or perhaps he’s asking after the webcomic’s creators who have to put out daily or weekly pages for little to no compensation? ↩︎
16. Compositionally, you couldn’t tell but yeah, the inconsistent figurework and variable levels of detail makes more sense now. ↩︎
17. The counterpoint to this is that this is true of many book introductions, as the questions may not have been in the mind of the writer, only in the mind of the one providing the intro. Assuming they’re different people, of course. ↩︎
18. It’s possible Baker was trying to draw parallels between the mediums and their inextricable link in the modern pop culture ecosystem, making the TV angle a useful, distant proxy.
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19. Of course, the Mary of the TV show shares enough DNA with the Mary of the comics to justify a comparison and use that information to bolster what we know about the Mary of the comics ↩︎
20. A fair critique of the business end of the medium is leveled throughout the book, laundered instead through TV, which honestly wasn’t necessary as the two mediums have very similar issues of corporate abuse.
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21.  I figure one temporally dislocated critique reference is allowed. ↩︎
22. This said, it is, on the whole, coherent and evocative of a specific cadence of sci-fi pulp dialog. ↩︎
23. Satanikill’s two-page bat spread is sick. ↩︎
24. Perhaps, one might argue, this was intentional. Baker is clearly constructing these sections as a low-budget comic. No one ever accused the low-budget, cult classics of having the strongest writing or acting or set design or… ↩︎
25. The choice to use pink as the only color, rather than doing it in shades of grey, adds to the fantastical feel of the comic and sets it apart visually from many of the other two-toned comics out there. It keeps it more firmly in the realm of a Saturday morning cartoon, blunting (in a good way) and lightening up what would otherwise be a quite dour storyline.
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26. Gator-Croc 7, Xin-Xon Xinzar, and Night Warrior Sister Valor ↩︎
27. As a Macgyver fan, I found myself completely at home with this approach. Pitch perfect way to start.
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28. The one panel I’m referencing, on what I believe is page five, also has Mary Tyler MooreHawk jumping to grab a torch off the wall off to the side, a great use of misdirection to keep the focus off her while still allowing us to follow her actions.
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29. A potential that’s seemingly realized through Baker using the end of Chapter 9 to refute and recast the bitter ending of Chapter 7, the final surviving comic page, into one with hope for the future. ↩︎
30. Shout out to Mike Lopez for the book’s fantastic design and David Catalano for the eerie, off-beat photographs. ↩︎
31. I know. I know. Bear with me. There’s a reason everyone talks about Watchmen. ↩︎
32. Comics that aren’t strictly backmatter – they happen during the issues – but which serve the same diversionary purpose and hold the same in-text status. ↩︎
33. One of the reasons reading the collected version of Watchmen, or any originally serialized Moore work, can be tedious is this density of information and use of extra prose.
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34. See ya in a bit folks. ↩︎
35. More on that later. Or will there be????? ↩︎
36. This could be how Cartoonist Baker did editorial captions, seeing as he had no editors and never intended to publish. ↩︎
37.  And the tragedy is that Mary Tyler MooreHawk is so close to being that clever!
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38. Prompting most reviewers to compare this to House of Leaves, an apt stylistic comparison, but perhaps little more than that. I say perhaps because I did not have nearly enough time to trudge through 709 pages of experimental mind-fuckery for this review. Alas.
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39.  I TOLD you not to get me started on this. What a waste of time decoding this was.
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40. The most charitable reading I have is the cipher is the piece that is supposed to explain away all the inconsistencies because it is a fabrication on future Baker’s part.
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41. What is this review if not pretentious as well, the exact thing Baker mocks (or pastiches) in his “Physicalist Today” segments. Swap out Bakerian for Claremontinan or Morrisonian and we could be one and the same. What does that make me then? Am I only frustrated because I’m seeing myself in the mirror of Mary Tyler MooreHawk? Considering this footnote is near-identical to one in Baker’s work, sources say: Outcome Cloudy. Try Again Later.
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42.  Catch me at 2 am and I’ll yell about them at you.
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