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The Confusing Return of Hawkman

Superhero resurrections can sometimes blunt the senses with their dumbed-down silliness. One may find more than one surly complaint within these pages about the notion of Marvel Comics' Hawkeye playing the role of Harrower of Hell to bring back the bizarre seventies superheroine Hellcat. Other times these returns from the dead do much to undermine previous stories that drove its point home through the death of a character, as in the return of Jean Grey. In one recent case, however, the problem centers not on the cheesiness of the event, nor in some suggestion that writers and editors have reneged on commitments to significant events, but in the nearly-incomprehensible tangle of events which the resurrection event intends to decipher.

We have such a case in the recent, somewhat confusing return of Hawkman, a piece in which a talented writer defies the burdens of inherited backstory to render a sorely-treated concept usable - and comprehensible - again. In this piece, we see the great ambition not in the rescuing of a dead character from a doom which normal human beings do not escape, but in hacking a workable character out from a thorny tangle of previous stories that became such a choking obstruction to using that concept that writers and editors effectively euthanized it.

This makes the departure of Hawkman from comics a different matter from a number of other superheroic deaths. In other cases, some superheroes walked the road into the other world to fulfill some storytelling purpose (as in the case of Adam Warlock and Jean Grey); in other cases, because the lack of commercial viability of the character combined with the temptation to create impact in a story through that character's death (as in the cases of Wonder Man, Nighthawk, Hellcat, and probably many others); as a means of shaking up a stagnating title (as in the case of Charles Xavier); or as part of an overarching plan to explore a story that showed the effect of a character's death on the world (as in the case of Superman). But Hawkman left the living environs of the DC universe based on a convoluted concept that writers could no longer make work without running afoul of previous, sometimes ill-considered, elements grafted onto him over the years. He enjoyed a unique kind of demise that merits a unique kind of rebirth and rehabilitation.

The Series of Events

Some mysteries have evoked questions pertaining to the Hawks, as common parlance frequently labels Hawkman and Hawkwoman. A new Hawkgirl, of a generation more likely to paint its hair green and put rings through anything with skin on it than to take up a superheroic mantle, appeared at the beginning of the series JSA, involving herself in the rebirth of Dr. Fate through the person of Hector Hall, a hero with deep connections to a number of seats in the original Justice Society.

Justice Society activity has, in recent months, placed events on both poles of the Hawkman concept. One one hand, the Flash returned to ancient Egypt and there encountered Theth-Adam (once known as Black Adam) in a revised version prior to the insanity his modern version uses to explain his career as a villain. On the other hand, events have taken members of the Society to places connected with Thanagar to undermine a coup by a necromancer commanding an army of zombie hawkmen called "dark wingmen."

Hawkman, it seems, occupies a key role in these events; indeed, perhaps an (unfortunately) messianic one. This came to light as Kendra, the new Hawkgirl, explored certain ugly aspects of her personal history she wanted to forget; and as Flash traveled to ancient Egypt, encountering an earlier host for Hawkman's soul (and, in the process, a younger version of Captain Marvel nemesis Black Adam). While I'll leave to the consumer some of the revelations involved, the exploration turned up a Thanagarian spaceship in Egypt, and pointed the Justice Society to the environs of Thanagar itself, where a demented, yet sensitive, necromancer sought to impose his vision of universal control by means of a mixture of genocide and control of an army of zombie hawkmen. The surviving remnants of a resistance movement, possessing a magical gauntlet and reassuring prophesies, managed to summon Carter Hall from whatever oblivion DC had chosen to cast him.

To see him thus brought back from the next world invites a question I do not expect to find answered easily: When did Hawkman die? That no clear answer comes forth here suggests the fundamental problem which caused DC to give this Golden Age and Silver Age stalwart his walking papers in the first place.

When Did He Actually Die?

A resurrection / reincarnation story can lose some of the punch of the concept for a number of reasons. First, comics readers have figured out that the death thing doesn't play fair in comics: Writers make stories that suggest death means something when a hero dies, but later turn around and bring the characters back with increasingly hollow explanations of how one does this.

For Hawkman, DC did not trifle with a cheap resurrection (such as, say, some story where a non-powered superhero ventures into hell and carries out the condemned soul of a dead superhero in his arms). They spent upwards of a year preparing to handle his return.

For some fans, nonetheless, one confusing element hangs over the entire matter. The question arises, and will not sit down again: Exactly when did Hawkman die? For my part, I understood DC to have quietly abandoned the character after rendering him incomprehensible and unusable in the wake of the developments of Zero Hour: Crisis in Time. These events occurred on the tail-end of a string of ill-fated refurbishments of the character, including one which cast him as a drug addict. Yet one scene in Zero Hour attempted to clean up the mess by visually syncretizing the character from existing and new interpretations of All Possible Hawkmen; suddenly we encounter a modified Katar Hol, including the Justice Society's Carter Hall in his persona, but made modern by virtue of five-o'clock shadow and a black pair of pants. This Hawkman somehow personified and embodied a Hawk God or Hawk Force or something of the sort, and, shortly thereafter, no one saw him any more.

Somewhere, evidently, Hawkman died. We do not know where; perhaps this happened between panels in Zero Hour or somewhere on the new, uninteresting timeline at the end of that work. We do not know which Hawkman died, since Carter Hall transformed into some version of Katar Hol and then we never saw either again except in flashbacks and revisionist sequences, leaving open the question How many, and which, Hawkmen walked the earth, and when, and with whom.

Revision, Confusion, and the Medung

A previous column (here), in the Opinions section, details how general mismanagement rendered the Hawkman character so tainted and confusing that it became generally unusable for future writers, pending a rehabilitation currently in progress in the pages of JSA.

DC began with one Hawkman, named Carter Hall, who had a reincarnative relation to an Egyptian prince, wore a belt of Nth metal, and flew around in a ridiculous mask with a pair of wings strapped to his back. When retrofitting Golden Age concepts for a new generation of comics readers, DC reinvented the character, retaining the visual aspect essentially verbatim. Now, however, since science fiction provided explanations for superheroes, we had a Hawkman named Katar Hol who used "Carter Hall" as a false name to conceal his origins as a policeman from the planet Thanagar. DC used the conceit of parallel dimensions to explain the existence of a thematically-unconnected Hawkman from the forties.

Post-Crisis, DC sought to reinvent a number of its core concepts, and began this process fairly early with Wonder Woman and Superman, evidently intending to refurbish its important properties as the opportunity occurred. This left less-commercial figures waiting some time for their reworking (meanwhile accumulating years of history that would require more and more effort to explain and integrate). Hawkman got a late reworking, which had problems, and before anyone could sort the whole business out, Zero Hour showed up on the doorstep to attempt to clean up, in the collective, what DC's various interconnected titles had failed to revise in the specific over the nine years following Crisis.

Through a coordinated and sincere effort, DC's writers collaborate even as you read this to iron out the convoluted details that once embedded a seemingly-simple character in webs of incomprehensibility. In JLA: Incarnations, DC will answer the question of which Hawkman, if any, occupied a seat in which versions of the Justice League; so far, the argument seems to suggest that DC has put the Golden Age Hawkman in the Silver Age Justice League as a kind of bridge between the teams after a period of petulant rivalry between them.

DC tried to reinvent the character in about two pages of Zero Hour, and, naturally enough, it didn't work. The character therefore quietly went into the garage until someone had time, opportunity, ability, and enthusiasm to work out the kinks. And, remarkably, it would take until the calendar year 2001.

Conceptual Justifications for Transcending Death

To return to the Golden Age version of the character, we encounter a kernel that has some conceptual justification for bridging the wall between life and death. Sometimes when writers attempt to reinvent a character that has somehow gone wrong they choose to go back to his very earliest, clearest concept, unmuddied by developments that can accumulate through decades of stories in a continuity model of comics.

Hawkman first appeared as Carter Hall, an archaeologist who hosted the soul of a reincarnated Egyptian prince (if of an unlikely Teutonic cast for Egypt). The name "Carter" much suggested the Carter who unearthed the tomb of Tutankhamen. Animal avatars abounded in Egyptian religious portraiture, and a Hawk-headed man (such as the image Hawkman presented in costume) did not differ to much in some particulars from Horus, the hawk-god. With a pair of cotton circus tights to establish his kinship with superheroes, a pair of wings to provide motion, a belt of BH metal to provide lift, and a few archaic weapons for busting heads, Hawkman had elements that gave him credibility both in the superheroic and in the pulp style.

From here, we have not only a clear idea, we also have a kind of broom for sweeping away unfortunate baggage, including the drug-addled and homicidal version of Katar Hol that did so much to create the situation where DC had to attempt to reinvent, and then tactfully ignore, the character for a few years. Reincarnation belonged in his earliest concept; it also provided a means to ignore the worst entanglements inflicted upon the character in the 1990s.

Indeed, from the core of a reincarnated prince, Geoff Johns has found a thread to unify various concepts of Hawkman. A reincarnated soul need know no particular boundaries of geography or astronomy, and could bounce as well from Africa to America as from Thanagar to Earth. And, having a connection between both worlds, such a figure might have some kind of importance that would do a great deal to explain why all of us don't similarly host the recycled souls of important people from earlier stages of human history.

From there, we need not step very far to the messianic construct in evidence in the current Hawkman arc in JSA. Furthermore, this provides an opportunity to explore the themes of divinity and metempsychosis in a superhero without beginning with one of DC's patently overpowered characters; a man with wings on his back and a mace in his hand has a long distance to travel before becoming as excessive as a flying man with a cape who can, on a whim, change the orbits of planets.

Proof of the Pudding

Readers of this irregular feature might assume I have an inherent objection to the resurrection of dead superheroes. With qualifications, I admit to this negative predisposition to the practice. Where it represents a storytelling shortcut; where it represents a betrayal of an earlier comics piece of substantially greater merit than the work in which the character died in the first place; where it routinely and systematically trivializes death; and where writers give the matter no more consideration than having a human being overcome a common cold, indeed I will object. However, note that in the cases of Professor X and Superman I gave writers the thumb's up even despite my reflexive bias.

For some characters, such as Kid Eternity, the Spectre, and Deadman, a peculiar relationship with death belongs in the core concept, and events like coming back from the dead involve a truth to the essential design rather than the hackwork of an uninspired, talentless, or overextended writer. Hawkman, as noted above, already has such a peculiar relationship with death, originating some 60 years or so ago.

For some events, furthermore, the return of characters from the dead results from considerable dedicated effort from able and inspired creators, as we must recognize Johns for his JSA work. By superhero comics standards, this piece neither insults the intelligence of the reader nor cheapens the (genre-specific) notion of death.

In short, the delivery, to a large degree, justifies the effort, turning what can appear as a ludicrous storytelling conceit within a shared cosmos of rules that pretend to allow change for a genre that inherently resists it through permanent casting of figures into iconic roles. The logic of superhero comics implies the very resurrection tales dealt with in this feature; and, in the rare case where someone seems able to pull one off well, we should stand aside and watch an artist perform. For Johns' work here with Hawkman, I hope the gamble pays off.

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Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

Column 260. Completed 03-JUN-2001.