Derek's Continuity Corner:
"Shadow of the Hawk"

Before beginning the headache that will be this Continuity Corner, let me confess that a reader challenged me this afternoon:

"If you can make sense out of Hawkman's continuity by this afternoon than you are a better man than me."

That may still be true, but I couldn't get it done by this past afternoon as initiall promised. Life just gets too busy to delve into Hawkman.

So here goes...

In 1940, bored millionaire playboy (aren't they all?) Carter Hall gets plagued by dreams of ancient Egypt after picking up a ceremonial knife. He believes himself to be the reincarnation of Prince Khufu, a crusading hero of the Nile. Every prince must have his princess, and Khufu had Shiera. Naturally, Carter soon met Shiera Sanders.

The two had been murdered by the villainous Hath-Set, who conveniently had also been reincarnated as Anton Hastor. Arch-enemies throughout the ages, they battled with ancient weaponry.

Initially, the Hawkman feature was a rip-off of Flash Gordon, featuring beautifully detailed art lovingly stolen from Alex Raymond. Eventually artist Sheldon Moldoff found his own style, and then a young buck named Joe Kubert spent some time on the strip. This explains why the Golden Age Hawkman was often portrayed as a blond -- he was Flash. Not to be confused with THE Flash.

This Earth-2 Carter Hall's continuity pretty much makes sense, and if only we could have left it at that.

In the Silver Age, two Thanagarian lawmen came to Earth in search of a criminal from their homeworld, the shape-changer Byth. A husband and wife team, Katar and Shayera Hol (similar enough to Carter and Shiera) had advanced weaponry and spacecraft, but found themselves fascinated by ancient weaponry. Conveniently enough (and familiar if you've been watching JLU), the uniform of the Thanagarian police force, here presented as a benevolent organization, was that of Hawkmen.

Yes, that could be effective for fighting crime.

The authorities of Midway City welcomed them with open arms and helped them set up their identities as museum curators, where they could freely borrow weapons from the museum collection to beat up on various thugs and criminals like the Shadow Thief. Easily anglicizing their names to Carter and Shiera Hall, the Hawks became stalwart members of the Justice League, though it was many years before Hawkgirl became Hawkwoman.

All was well until that thing that I usually quote as screwing things up, Crisis on Infinite Earths. In the wake of that world-smooshing event, several characters got reboots and easily integrated into a new continuity. Apparently nobody had a problem with Hawkman, and since he didn't have an ongoing series anyway, nobody brought up any problems. Until Tim Truman had an idea...

Hawkworld.

A radical rethinking of the Hawkman mythos, the prestige format mini-series offered a far more barbaric yet still scientifically advanced Thanagar. Katar Hol had been happy as a member of the police, but realized that the price for his own people's advancement was the oppression of several conquered races, many of whom lived in ghettos in the depths of Thanagarian cities. Part of Katar's struggle for independence and a sense of justice included killing an alien that had befriended him in exile, so you can imagine that this was no longer a boy scout we were dealing with.

Eventually he and Shayera came to Earth, but not as a couple. They bickered but developed a mutual respect that became love and then it occurred to somebody that oh, crap, they'd never actually had Hawkman NOT exist in continuity.

So if this Hawkman was appearing on Earth for the very first time, who the hell had been the Hawkman in all those Justice League adventures and worse -- who had helped Animal Man fight off a Thanagarian suicide artist during the cross-over called Invasion?

Someone came up with the easy enough idea that the original Carter Hall had come out of retirement to help those whippersnappers in the Justice League, thus accounting for several early adventures. But what about the guy that knew something about Thanagarian culture? For a brief time, DC floated the idea that the Thanagarians had sent a spy to Earth who posed as the son of Carter and Shiera Hall. That spy played Hawkman for later space-faring Justice League adventures, during the time that the Golden Age Hawkman was stuck in Valhalla fighting Ragnarok over and over with the rest of the Justice Society.

Pretty quickly, they dumped that idea, because it had nowhere to go but a betrayal that happened off-camera in the past. Instead, the focus turned to this new Katar Hol flying around under the decent writing skills of John Ostrander, who tried everything he could think of to make this all make sense.

Under Ostrander, it turned out that Carter Hall had a friend in the forties named Perry Carter, a Thanagarian really named Paran Katar. See the connection? Perry gave Carter Hall the wings of ninth (now Nth) metal -- the element that the animated Hawkgirl uses for her all-purpose mace. That Thanagarian also dissuaded his people from invading Earth, married a Cherokee woman and took her with him to Thanagar. The connections got tighter. Maybe.

Or maybe things got more desperate, as Ostrander made Katar half-human -- his mother Naomi birthed him on Thanagar then returned to Earth. Bear in mind this is a good (or bad) six or seven years into the series when all this gets revealed. Katar became more feral, and then came the coup de grace -- the influence of an actual Hawk god that had been in touch with all the Hawkmen throughout history.

They all merged and withdrew from the universe, leaving Shayera without a mate and the Silver Scarab (Carter's real son) without a father. Though to be fair, I think Hector, the Silver Scarab, had already died at this point, years before Geoff Johns would resurrect him as Dr. Fate.

And there the character of Hawkman sat for years, defying anyone to explain just who had worn that avian helm when and why.

Geoff Johns and David S. Goyer decided to throw a little razzle-dazzle at us and use only the things that worked. Don't question too deeply. They'd thrown us off by introducing a new Hawkgirl, Kendra Saunders. With no memory or baggage attached to the Hawk legacy, she joined the JSA and fought valiantly until their trip to Thanagar.

Facing the Thanagarian devil Onimar Synn (currently causing trouble in the Rann-Thanagar War), the JSA pooled their memories around a ritual well of souls and brought out ...Hawkman. A healthy, early thirties brunett version of Carter Hall that retained the memories of his past lives, not one of which had been Thanagarian. He did, however, remember being with Katar Hol in their melding with the Hawk Avatar/God/Fiery Spiritual Thingie.

More importantly, he remembered being in love with Hawkgirl, who turned out to have possessed the body of Kendra when her original soul committed suicide. She still doesn't really think of herself as Shiera, though, and so the current Hawkman series has been rife with romantic conflict as the two eternal lovers struggle to alternately rekindle and shy away from their romance.

That romance could prove problematic, you see, as it also turns out that Hath-Set is fated to kill them in every incarnation once they fall in love.

Johns, by the way, also added that element of the Thanagarian ship crashing in Egypt. Thanagarian radiation partially explains why Prince Khufu, Shiera and Hath-Set are all stuck in an endless cycle of karma. The technology also explains how Carter Hall could use Nth metal.

With James Robinson, Johns also played up the reincarnation angle, exploring a few of the different incarnations of Hawkman that other writers had only hinted at.

This is where Hawkman stands today, and the JLU team's interpretation seems a pretty clean way of introducing the character into their universe, utilizing many of the elements from the comics without all that pesky confusion.

We hope.

Derek McCaw