Jack Hawksmore is the worst Authority member, as even Jenny Sparks has self awareness about her soap box Sadie rantings and the plot point that she knows when to back down when her teammates start wigging out. Jack however is a true believer, is willing to let the world burn as payback for being lobotomized and tortured, repeatedly made excuses for the Doctor killing people when he loses control over his powers while on heroin, and pretty much being hyper extreme beyond what Sparks was willing to do.
I disagree, I liked Jack. He was certainly the worst leader they had but I don't know what else a writer was going to do with that character given what he was.
He's a guy that as a kid was abducted over and over and surgically altered into superhumanity by what he perceived as aliens (because 70s/80/90s is presumably when it was happening) in traumatic episodes where time would seemingly stop around him and he'd be taken into another place. He'd be cut up, have biotech shoved into him, forcibly healed and then he'd be deposited right back where time stopped. One moment he's playing basketball with the other neighborhood kids, the next he's on the ground covered in surgical scars and bruising, having just been pulled apart and forced back together. That's a truly horrific thing to experience
just for the people around him at the time, but he remembers the actual procedures as well. I would have to assume this would lead to some fucked up behavior and views.
During his time with Stormwatch Black, he was purely a detective with pacifist leanings; he studied crime scenes with his abilities and sometimes had to get into fights, but he didn't kill if he could avoid it. That shifted during the Changers arc, where he watched people he'd convinced to stop be executed by their own teammates in front of him. And it seems that with the dissolution of Stormwatch and the creation of The Authority, he kept on that track. A man who took care to only kill when he had to before then decided there's little wrong with being judge, jury and executioner by the time of the first Authority Arc. Not that I disagree; if you saw some kinda terrorist killing thousands in front of you AND you could punch his head into a crater, wouldn't you?
Once Jenny died, he somehow stepped into the leadership role (Swift wasn't interested, Midnighter and Apollo were busy killing monsters, Engineer was studying the Carrier, The Doctor was watching Horse Porn while on The Nod, and the Carrier just did as it was asked) and he was pretty much the same dipshit that he'd been before, just in a new direction he wasn't equipped for.
I kinda feel like that made sense. He wasn't a leader in Stormwatch (outside of that one alternate universe where the Kherans modified him instead of "Aliens" (people from an alternate future), and in that one he arguably saved the world at the expense of pretty much all the superhumans).
He went from Pacifist to Authoritarian relatively quickly, and I feel like most of us have seen that before in real life. And his capabilities were intentionally written as ridiculous, but they were pretty interesting in how they were interpreted. He wasn't just a flying brick or an energy projector or a healing brawler or teleporter. One writer would have him using windows to replay all the things that they could reflect as if they were screens, or moving from City to City at a speed based on their relative sizes, his durability and strength and relation to gravity changed based on how populous a City he was in was, and in the Nu53 iteration he could communicate with their avatars, which was strange.
