SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains major spoilers for Hawkman #1 by Robert Venditti, Bryan Hitch, Andrew Currie and Alex Sinclair, on sale now.


Hawkman is a confusing character, even by superhero comics standards. Is he a reincarnated Egyptian prince? Is he a space cop from a planet of bird people? Is he both? Is he neither? All of those things have been true at some point or other, and it got to the point where a character whose main appeal is a combination of muscles + wings + mace became way too bogged down in his own confusing backstory.

There have been attempts to fix Hawkman before, and they’ve worked, for a time... until someone else came along and decided they want to do the other thing, and he’s been caught in that binary for decades. However, with one double-page spread and a world-changing revelation, Robert Venditti and Bryan Hich have fixed Hawkman forever in the most simple of ways, making the character exciting again and opening up his role in the DC Universe perhaps more than ever before.

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A Tale Of Two Hawkmen

The problem with Hawkman stems back to the Silver Age, and the thing to blame? His name. While other heroes got sci-fi reimaginings, they were reimagined into entirely new characters with entirely different names. Barry Allen, Hal Jordan, Ray Palmer, etc. Hawkman was also given an entirely new backstory, as a police officer from the planet Thanagar who hunts a space criminal to Earth but he was given the name Katar Hol which is all too similar to his Golden Age name of Carter Hall.

If the new Hawkman had been given a completely different name, this wouldn’t have been a problem; we’d just have the Golden Age Hawkman and the Silver Age Hawkman, the same way we have for The Flash, Green Lantern and The Atom. That similarity in name led to people connecting the two completely separate characters in ways that weren't necessary, and things got confusing from there. When the worlds of Earth-1 and Earth-2 were combined in Crisis on Infinite Earths, Hawkman was merged into one character who served on both the JSA and JLA, unlike his counterparts who let the next generation take over.

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It was later revealed that this Hawkman was an imposter, and there was a Golden Age Carter Hall... and then they introduced a new Katar Hol, which made things more confusing. Zero Hour tried to fix things by merging all the Hawkmen into one character but that just made it worse and he was killed off for the better half of a decade. Grant Morrison attempted to fix this by introducing the angelic Zauriel, whom he intended to take up the mantle of Hawkman, completely separate from the Hall/Hol dynasty. That was nixed by DC however, and Hawkman remained a rough spot in continuity.

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Loose Ends and Quick Fixes

Geoff Johns did a pretty good job of resurrecting Hawkman in the pages of JSA, where it was established that he was Carter Hall, the Golden Age Hawkman, with some of the memories of his Thanagarian counterpart. Johns dove deep into the reincarnation aspect of Hawkman and Hawkgirl’s history, delivering stories set in their many previous lives, and things seemed to be all fine and dandy.

And then, Jim Starlin decided he wanted to tell stories about Katar Hol and messed it all up in a single issue, leaving a seed of doubt in Hawkman and the readers’ minds that the Hawkman they’ve been reading about for a decade might not be who they think he his. It didn’t matter too much because the DC Universe was relaunched not long after with The New 52, which had its own solution to the Hall/Hol problem.

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In the pages of The Savage Hawkman, we were introduced to Carter Hall, who slowly learned that he was in fact an amnesiac Katar Hol from Thanagar. It wasn’t the best way around the character's problems, but it worked fine for what it was. The Savage Hawkman included some basic elements of the Prince Khufu backstory into Katar Hol’s history, but for the most part he was a straight-up science fiction character from a planet of bird people.

This incarnation of Hawkman died following a clash with Despero who wanted to claim all the Nth Metal on Thanagar for himself, and his death helped usher in the return of the Hawkman we have now, who is once again Carter Hall, a reincarnated Egyptian prince who has been trapped in the Dark Multiverse for a number of years.

How To Solve A Problem Like Hawkman

In the pages of Hawkman #1, Carter visits Madame Xanadu, a DC mystic who helps him access his previous lives, and the discovery he makes is the simple fix that Hawkman has needed for decades. He hasn’t just been reincarnating across time, but across space as well. So he was Prince Khufu in Ancient Egypt, but he was also Katar Hol on Thanagar, and Catar-Ol on Krypton, Katarthul of Rann, and so many others, all variations on a theme. It’s such a simple fix to the character that incorporates everything we know about him as well as introducing an entire new cosmic history for him to explore.

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The mystery of why Carter Hall has been reincarnating across time and space is at the heart of the new Hawkman series, and it fixes everything wrong with him in one go. It takes an approach similar to Grant Morrison on Batman, who had the philosophy that “it all happened,” and the same is now true for Hawkman.

There’s no need to be confused about his history because all of it is true, you don’t need to worry about what’s canon and what’s not anymore because it’s all canon. It fixes decades of problems by blowing them all up and giving Hawkman the clean slate he’s desperately needed for so long. Hawkman can now be anything, no longer tied down to past interpretations of himself, and for a superhero universe built on legacy and generationality, it’s the best thing that could have happened to him.