A hugely important character in the latter part of the Hawke series is the android Fortuna . I asked Sydney about her origins and what were his reasons for devising this character. Sydney said that his first motivation was to find a supporting character for Hawke. Unlike Mac and Laura who had emerged almost unbidden from the many”extras”in the strip to be Hawke’s sidekicks in the early days, Fortuna was a consciously crafted character and appeared fully formed at her first appearance. Her physical appearance actually reflects her inner personality in that she has the form of a beautiful and desirable woman, but is actually a silver-blue skinned construct of alien origin. This physical
paradox is reflected in her personality, for she is at one and the same time a super computer with access to a vast memory bank, with mental and psychic abilities far beyond the human,but is also an entity who is intrigued by and indeed who craves human emotion .She has nurtured this characteristic in herself by years of tending the old miner Otto on the asteroid where Hawke eventually finds her in ANGEL OF MERCY. Her aesthetic sensibilities and human empathy evolve as her strong relationship with Hawke develops throughout the strip. Indeed she seems to give paramount importance to emotions. Like the fairy folk of legend she is virtually immortal and for her,like them, nothing is new, and thus she envies humanity for whom the delight of newness and discovery still abounds .
As with many of the themes explored in the strip , Sydney says that the choice of an android was also influenced by the general interest in robotic intelligence in the early seventies when both science fiction and philosophy were asking questions about whether artificially created entities could think and be truly autonomous and if so whether they might deserve respect and rights in human society. A seminal work on this theme was Philip K Dick’s DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP ,published just seven years before Fortuna’s first appearance, a sci-ci classic which dealt with these difficult issues.This in turn spawned a popular interest which was taken up by the movie industry with such movies as WESTWORLD ( 1973) whose androids decided to take their fate into their own hands.
Fortuna has a number of anticidents in the way of female robots but Sydney expresses great admiration for Fritz Lang’s classic METROPOLIS, whose robot was certainly a subliminal influence on Fortuna’s evolution, but in that case involved a disastrous intermixing of a robotic female body with a human soul.
The physical appearance of Fortuna was based on a minor Italian actress of the sixties , of whom Sydney had obtained a set of portrait photos. He had first used her likeness in the Hawke strip in TIME OUT OF JOINT in 1971 for the character of Leila , the girl from the future who had been captured by the minions of the “All-mind” . Look closely and you will see a distinct likeness to her later incarnation as Fortuna.
In conclusion Fortuna’s complex and paradoxical character places her in the front rank of the dramatis personae of the Hawke universe. Skipper Prossitt
