"Eyes of the Hawk, Prologue: Old Scores"
Cover Date: October 1994
Writer: William Messner-Loebs
Artist: Steve Lieber (Pencils), Curt Schoultz (Inker)
Previously...
Okay, let's try and keep this manageable. But in the '40s, DC published some stories about Hawkman, who was really Carter Hall, an archaeologist who was really the reincarnation of an Egyptian prine. Now, admittedly, the Egyptians' actual religious beliefs were about as far from reincarnation as you can get, but sure. Now, flashfoward to the Silver Age, where DC retcons the original Hawkman to Earth-2, and introduces a new Hawkman on Earth-1, where he's Katar Hol, an alien police officer who's hanging on Earth for a variety of reasons. Okay, the Crisis hits, and Earth-2 and Earth-1 get merged. The Golden Age Hawkman then gets (effectively) killed off to make things a bit simpler. The Silver Age Hawkman is still around, though, and even gets another (short-lived) ongoing. A couple of years after that, DC decides to retcon Katar Hol's origin. Now, this version of Hawkman is already appearing in other DC books at the time, so the revised origin, told in the Hawkworld mini-series, has to take place in the past, since it ends with him arriving on Earth for the first time. Except DC decided that, no, from now on, Katar Hol had only just arrived on Earth.
Now, that was a problem, since that meant that literally hundreds of stories now needed to be patched, since Katar Hol had appeared in them, but, per his new origin, he should not be there. So DC decided that all of Hawkman's appearances up to the first Crisis were really the Golden Age Hawkman, and all of the subsequent appearances had been a new character that was really a Thanagarian spy, who was then gotten rid of as quickly as possible.
At this point, things were already a bit complicated, and then the Golden Age Hawkman and Hawkgirl returned to the main DC continuity, making things even harder to follow. DC then decided to use the Zero Hour event to consolidate the conflicting origins of Hawkman by...literally consolidating the Golden Age Hawkman, the Golden Age Hawkgirl, and the current Hawkman into one body, which seems to be the least helpful solution you could think of, but that's where this issue begins...
Plot
The issue starts with a monologue by Hawkman that includes gems like 'Good and evil...madness and sanity...life and death...they seem like two sides of the same coin to me now.' So, at the very least, it appears that this incarnation of Hawkman has the combined pretentiousness of his predecessors.
Anyway, he decides to fly back to his apartment and hang out with his supporting cast. We've got a Native American mechanic, Hawkman's Native American mother, a dude with three arms, some crippled former villain from Thanagar, and Hawkwoman. The agree that he's still basically the same old Hawkman, except bigger, has hawk eyes, and real wings growing out of his back. Oh, and he's got the minds of all of the other Hawkmen floating around in his mind.
At that exact moment, a guy named Badblood burst into the room with a gang of heavily armed mutants to kill Hawkman. I then check to see if that really happened, or I was just being unnecessarily snide....okay, no, it actually happened.
Katar heads off into the city, and does a little more philosophizing before fighting off some more mutants. He notes, "I can barely remember the names of the groundlings beneath me." Please stop talking, Katar. He then finds Badblood and precedes to start beating the fuck out of him. Badblood tries to use his blood as a weapon, but Hawkman just keeps slashing at him until Badblood's bad blood somehow turns on the villain and kills him. Well, either that or the fact that Hawkman just slashed him with his punch dagger about a hundred times.
Elsewhere, Vandal Savage observes the fight from a close-circuit monitor and muses about how Hawkman's changed.
Commentary
Here's is an incontrovertible truth: Hawkman sucks. Hawkman has always sucked. Hawkman will always suck. No good has ever come from using Hawkman in a story.
I mean, here's the thing, his main power is that he can fly. That's...a tad underwhelming, especially since he's always been portrayed as a dude with a mace or some other close-combat weapon, which would seem to negate his one tactical advantage. So, that's a problem.
In fact, let's summarize the different takes that writers have had on Hawkman:
1940s: Hawkman is the reincarnation of an Egyptian prince who also has some magical metal that he turns into wings that let him fly. He then decides to be a super-hero, on the premise of 'might as well.'
1950s-1980s: Hawkman is an alien policeman come to Earth from the utopian world of Thanagar. His wings come from alien technology. He's also the conservative counterweight to Green Arrow in the Justice League, a fact that every subsequent writer of Hawkman or Green Arrow will be contractually obligated to acknowledge should the both of them appear in the same story.
late 1980s-mid 1990s: Hawkman is an alien policeman come to Earth from the dystopian world of Thanagar. Otherwise, he's basically the same, except he's got a different costume.
mid 1990s: Hawkman is a merged being consisting of a handful of former Hawkmen and some sort of Hawk God. This proves to be such a miscalculation that DC throws the character into limbo for the better part of a decade.
2000s: Hawkman is back to being a reincarnated Egyptian prince, but now he's lived through bunches of past lives, which makes him a great warrior or something. This typically translates to him being an ersatz Conan the Barbarian with wings.
2010s: Hawkman gets a new ongoing, under the theory that, "Fifth time's the charm!"
Damage Stars: ****
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