Casualties of Retcon - Hawkman

In the age of revisionist comics, you can find good retcons (sometimes), indifferent retcons (more frequently), and bad retcons (too often). The art of revision approaches the heroic, however, when a retcon does such damage to the character that a company pulls him from continuity altogether and doesn't use him anymore.

Hawkman, originally created in the 1940s, has become the casualty of retcon and currently resides somewhere in the editorial Bermuda Triangle of concepts so knotted that no one, evidently, dare speak his name around DC.

The Golden Age Hawkman

Hawkman, back in the days when superheroes fought gangsters and kept villains from blowing up the city with big ray cannons, enjoyed an origin based in magic, like a number of his peers (Green Lantern; Dr. Fate; the Spectre). Carter Hall, a wealthy socialite, acquired an Egyptian knife; handling this artifact caused him to have a vision in which he realized that the Egyptian monarch Khufu had reincarnated in his person. Khufu, in this comic-book treatment, had lived as a crusader protecting the innocent (a peculiar trade indeed for a member of any of Egypt's aloof and despotic dynasties); Carter Hall continued this tradition as Hawkman, after creating a levitating belt of a special metal and a set of wings to direct his flight.

Hawkman did not catch on the same way that Superman, Batman, or Wonder Woman had, and shared the fate of most of the regular players who appeared in All-Star Comics; he vanished from printed titles around 1951. Nonetheless, even if the character did not whip fans into a froth of frenzy, nothing in the concept dated the character especially, except perhaps during the early Silver Age, when writers dispensed with magical explanations and replaced them with equally improbable science fiction explanations.

The Silver Age Hawkman

Hawkman had to wait in line a few years when DC began refurbishing lapsed Silver Age characters; the Flash, Green Lantern, and the Atom all found new, science-fiction heavy, versions in DC's comics first.

In the early sixties, a DC character almost could not walk in the door without carrying a certain minimum quantity of science fiction baggage. Although the original Hawkman's connection to ancient Egypt provided considerable potential for color, mood and tone (assuming that the right writer ever received an opportunity to work with the character), DC felt that assigning the character an extraterrestrial origin served its needs better. Therefore, DC created the planet Thanagar, the new Hawkman's birthplace; and made Hawkman a member of that planet's winged police, sent to earth to fight crime with a combination of advanced technology (his flight equipment) and archaic weapons.

This new description falls fairly flat. Hawkman lost almost all that had made the character interesting, had acquired a generic origin ("He came from another planet!"), and had gained little but a series of interesting medieval armaments of a narrow European origin (a reflection of the fact that America had yet to discover Asia more than any preference of Thanagarians for corrupt racial theory).

For a few years, thanks to a general renewed interest in superhero comics and to fine work by distinctive craftsmen like Murphy Anderson on his title, Hawkman managed to appear in his own title, but his book did not survive the 1960s. Hawkman managed to survive in print mainly by virtue of membership in the Justice League; but he failed to compel in that title and assumed an increasingly obscure role in his various versions after Crisis on Infinite Earths.

DC would subsequently explain this character away as an impostor named Fel Andar who claimed the name and duties of Katar Hol the Thanagarian. Perhaps, given enough time, fans and readers will forget this so that no one need repeat it.

The Post-Crisis Hawkman

Although Crisis, as planned, involved a reworking of the accumulated history of DC's vast superheroic properties, not all of these properties received their makeovers in a timely fashion. Superman, owing to his priority, received his in the immediate aftermath of the Crisis event; Batman received more of a cleaning than a makeover; others vanished or died and therefore ceased to present historical problems. In cases like Wonder Woman and Hawkman, however, the reworking would wait for years, and during those years these characters continued to accrue storyline histories that writers would somehow have to crowbar into a continuity explaining original and revised versions.

Hawkman reappeared, at the turn of the 1990s, in the Hawkworld books, which attempted to connect the magical Golden Age Hawkman and the technological Silver Age Hawkman. Thus, Thanagar became a planet stripped of its Silver Age utopian character and of its isolation from terrestrial affairs; Thanagarians had lived on earth and had even participated in an attempted invasion of the earth during one of DC's disposable mega-crossover events. DC, at this point, maintained that a version of the Golden Age Hawkman had existed in the thirties and forties, with an origin similar to the original one; that this figure had influenced Thanagarians living on earth; and that these Thanagarians had returned home, one with a wife from Earth, to create the hawk-themed police force known as the Wingmen.

This setting would provide a place for the birth of the third Hawkman, who would join the Wingmen.

Thanagar, by this time, ceased to reflect the fifties-sixties view of progress through technology and came to reflect more the concerns of a latter day, that saw science mainly as a purveyor of pollution and overpopulation. This Thanagar enjoyed no utopian characteristics. It contained drug-filled slums, gang violence, and an ugliness typical of cyberpunk science fiction.

This Hawkman involved himself deeply in the corrupt politics of Thanagar and would come to earth and America, there to discover democratic ideals in action and to understand the reality of the contrast between design and reality. However, his history already involved a drug addiction and several killings; fans complain about making Hawkman a "drug addicted killer" because DC had done precisely this.

This Hawkman also went through several hair color changes and costume changes, from a traditional costume to the short-lived red costume he wore at Superman's funeral, to a faddish black outfit.

While this Hawkman would enjoy some acclaim in spite of the more contraversial elements of his and Thanagar's makeover, the concept went into irreversable decline when John Ostrander left the title. After this, lesser writers chose to make the new Hawkwoman a villainess; chose to have the Hawkgod (the entity responsible for the magical original Hawkman) destroy the planet Thanagar; and chose to drive the title Hawkworld out of print.

The Avatar Hawkman

Some of Zero Hour seemed to involve change for its own sake, such as the questionable revision of Guy Gardner (detailed here). Hawkman received a rather incomprehensible revision in the process of scrambling a number of second-and-third-tier heroes (in hopes of rendering them able to carry titles or miniseries?), but his rankles particularly, since they so convoluted the character that no one knew what to do with him afterwards, and DC quietly withdrew him from the pages of all of its books.

DC decided to fuse the Golden Age Hawkman, the killer/addict Hawkman, the Golden Age Hawkgirl, and the "Hawkgod," together in an amalgamation that theoretically included all of the hawk-themed heroes throughout history as an avatar of the Hawkgod. This fusion mostly resembled the latest, black-clad Hawkman, with his body hair and codpiece. The avatar role would sometimes influence the short-lived portrayal of the Avatar Hawkman, but just as the talented Christopher Priest had nearly hammered the character back into a viable form, cancellation disposed of the book, which ended with the wizard Arion banishing Hawkman to the domain of the Hawkgod. The wizard Arion has proved useful before in corrupting characters suffering from poorly-considered retconning.

The Eco-Terrorist Hawkman

In Kingdom Come, DC reflected a disturbing trend in heroes in the nineties: They remade Hawkman as an eco-terrorist. If we visualize this figure as heroic, we may equally visualize the Unabomber as heroic.

If DC intends this for the Hawkman character's future, as it seems to in the case of all other Kingdom Come actors, it may well have killed the character in a way with which no death story could compete. With this change, after all, DC has taken the concept into a territory that lies outside of heroism or forces a redefinition of heroism that has little or nothing to do with helping people. The hero, in such a model, has become something that protects air, trees, water and animals from people, and "people" become, as a class, villainous things which, if we follow this logic to its inevitable conclusion, the hero must destroy. Such a "hero" has become inherently antihuman.

DC will have to reconcile the concept of the hero with figures like the ecoterrorist Hawkman. In earlier models, the hero attempted to help people, not contain them like an infestation of cockroaches. If heroism lacks a human face (and this Hawkman does, both physically and in the worldview implied by his actions), we can put aside the Stan Lee principle (paraphrasable as "It's the characters, stupid!") and dispose of human characters altogether.

If, after all, the Hawkman premise presumes that humanity "infests" rather than "inhabits" the planet, we should enjoy his absence from comic books and pray that he does not return.