Hawkman is the "Dayenu" of the DC Universe

Wait, I've got more to say about DC continuity and about Hawkman.

As I said earlier, a bunch of DC heroes were actively published after the decline of the Golden Age: Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Arrow, and Aquaman. Since they weren't rebooted, there was rarely really a line drawn establishing which adventures of theirs were on Earth 1 or Earth 2 until books like Justice League of America forced the issue. But for all of these folks, the Silver Age versions had the same origins, secret identities, etc.

The more common Silver Age scenario was for a new character to be created with the same codename, but a different secret identity (and often different powers). So we had Hal Jordan instead of Alan Scott as Green Lantern, Barry Allen instead of Jay Garrick as Flash, Ray Palmer instead of Al Pratt as The Atom, etc. Simple enough, and once it was firmly established that these reboots were on a different world ("Earth 1") than their Golden Age predecessors ("Earth 2"), it was easy enough to follow.

Hawkman, however, is neither fish nor fowl (sorry).

The Golden Age Hawkman, created in 1940, was Carter Hall, an archaeologist who was the reincarnation of Prince Khufu, an Egyptian who was murdered, and I won't get into the whole deal beyond that point, other than to note that his shtick involved discovering the anti-gravity "Nth metal," which allowed him to fly, his reincarnated lover became his wife Shiera (and the hero Hawkgirl), and he used ancient weapons because of the whole reincarnation thing.

Flash forward to 1961, and the Silver Age reboot. This time, Hawkman is Katar Hol, an alien policeman from the planet Thanagar, who is sent with his partner and wife Shayera to pursue a villain who has escaped to Earth. They ask the local police chief for help going undercover as humans, so he naturally gets Katar a job as head of the local museum (sorry, folks who, you know, studied and got a degree). And he gets them to change their names to the much more human sounding Carter and Shiera Hal, as well. Once they solve the case, they stay on earth to "study human police techniques" because we're somehow better than a planet that's established interstellar travel.

So we've got a character with different origins and personality, as with the characters like Flash, but he's also got, if not the same name and identity, one that's close enough to be really confusing.

Of course, as long as they were on separate Earths, it didn't really matter, any more than there being a Bruce Wayne running around as Batman on each Earth having different adventures did.

But then Crisis happened. And that would have been bad enough (Hawkman is the Dayenu of the DC Universe). 

At first, DC kept going with the characters. Carter was trapped in Limbo with the rest of the JSA fighting Ragnarok (as one does), and Katar joined the new JLI and had adventures with Superman.

But then Tim Truman wrote a new origin story for the Katar Hol version (called Hawkworld). It was damned good, and would have been fine as an updated origin. But someone at DC decided that it was actually a contemporary story, and that the spin-off series would see THIS iteration of Katar/Hawkman sent to Earth. That meant that Katar Hol could not have been on Earth previously.

So DC's solution here was to say that the Hawkman who worked with the JLA in the early days and fought crime in Midway City was the same Hawkman who'd formed the Justice Society. Okay, so far, that's not totally unreasonable. But then the “Hawkman” who joined the JLI was retconned to be Fel Andar, a Thangarian villain who’d brainwashed a woman into thinking she was Shierra Hall/Hawkwoman (DC had long ago ditched the “Hawkgirl” name). As one does.

(I have not mentioned Carter’s son Hector, who became the Silver Scarab and then Sandman, kinda, because that’s both a long story and one impacted by the Vertigo/DC split, which is a whole other continuity ball of wax. Nor did I mention Carter’s foster son (kinda) Northwind, an actual birdman from a place called, I shit you not, “Feithera.”)

Anyway, we lived with this clusterfuck until Zero Hour, the first of many attempts to clean up the mess that Crisis created (and probably one of the better ones, in spite of what I’m about to describe). During Zero Hour, every “Hawk” character (except for Blackhawk, who was not a part of this narrative) merged into, I kid you not, a Hawk God, who was the new Hawkman for the next year or two of the series until everyone just said, “fuck it, we can’t use this guy.” 

Really. Grant Morrison had to create a new winged character (a fallen angel named “Zauriel” because Grant Morrison) for his JLA because Hawkman was off-limits.

Finally, in the late ‘90s, Geoff Johns rebooted the JSA, and gave us a new Hawkwoman (Kendra Saunders) and reincarated Carter, and essentially went back to the “Carter keeps being reincarnated” version of Hawkman. And things were simple-ish until they died, undied, died again, and then DC rebooted everyhing and let ROB FUCKING LIEFELD write the character, and things got impossible to follow until Dark Knights: Metal, where Scott Snyder wrote some bullshit that was also impossible to follow but better than Liefeld’s BS. 

Anyway, none of this bullshit would be a problem if it weren’t for Crisis, is my point.

Why I Hate Crisis on Infinite Earths

Expanding on a comment ("Each year, I hate the end-result of Crisis a little more (even if I genuinely loved the story itself)") I made on someone's post yesterday:

I LOVE Crisis on Infinite Earths, but the outcome has sucked for decades. The initial outcome -- having the Earth 2 JSA/All-Star Squadron adventures take place on Earth 1, is mostly fine by itself.

But right away, we had the problem with the Continuously-Published Five: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Arrow, and Aquaman. Since their Golden and Silver Age versions were the same (as far as secret identities, overall origins, etc went), they couldn't both exist, so the Golden Age versions were excised (and new heroes were invented to retcon past stories). This also applied to a handful of other Golden Age characters DC brought into the fold (Captain Marvel and Plastic Man both come to mind -- Plas as the FBI liaison to the All-Star Squadron was fantastic).

But that wasn't as bad as Problem #2, which was the changes made to modern heroes (Superman never was Superboy, Hawkman is a modern hero just coming to earth, etc). This in turn impacted associated characters, so Power Girl was now somehow tied to Atlantis (until she wasn't), the Golden Age Hawkman was also the Silver Age one (until he wasn't), the LSH (don't even get me started), etc.

But even that's not as bad as problem #3. While the Earth 2 Golden Age stuff mostly still existed, there was a HUGE amount of contemporary Earth 2 stuff that was lost. We had Batman dying, Dick Grayson becoming the new Batman in a way that mattered (not like the crappy interim plotlines we've seen periodically), Huntress being Batman/Catwoman's daughter, Black Canary and Red Tornado moving between Earths, etc. And of course, the entire concept of Infinity Inc as essentially the only group of contemporary heroes on their Earth loses meaning when they merged and became instantly less relevant than The Outsiders or The Forgotten Heroes.

Needless to say, almost every effort to try to "fix" these problems has gone from bad (Infinite/Final Crisis) to "Scott Snyder must have blackmail material on someone" (Dark Knights: Death Metal and Infinite Frontier).

Anyway, while there have absolutely been some fantastic books since then (including ones like Morrisons' Animal Man that built on Crisis), the actual DC Multiverse structure as of 1982 was still better than anything since.

This blog could have been a Substack

My friend and former co-worker Lee posted a few weeks back about coming back to blogging after years away (I found out because I still had his blog in my RSS reader, and I cannot mention RSS without cursing Google for killing Google Reader). The Verge article he linked to makes a good case, and frankly, I miss ranting for more than a few sentences. Yeah, I can do that on Facebook, but the vaunted algorithm hides those posts; if people aren't going to read my writing, I'd rather they not read it on purpose. 

Of course, there's plenty of longform writing these days, as my title implies. Yeah, everyone and their sibling has a newsletter. I subscribe to like sixty, and my inbox is so overwhelmed that I barely read any of them. When I do, it's more often than not because someone linked to the newsletter on Substack, so it's almost like I'm reading, well, a blog entry. Substack even makes public newsletters available via RSS.

But I also like the idea of owning my domain and the place I'm writing. Yeah, no one really owns it all, but at least I can create my own space here. I still have my Dreamwidth account and my LiveJournal one (I use the latter to occasionally post about how awful the war in Ukraine is to piss off their owners), but none of Substack or Dreamwidth or LJ or FB are "my" spaces (yeah, I know -- wasn't going for the joke there but I'm not going to delete it).

Oh, and the domain name? A reference to the pilot of The Tick, one of the best animated shows of all time.

Anyway, hi! My name's Adam and I love a lot of pop culture and have a lot of opinions. I've written for online publications like Bookslut and Chud.com back in the day (RIP both of them), and traditional publications like Publishers Weekly and Library Journal. I once tried reviewing a bad horror movie a day on Livejournal (and made it nearly four months), and met my spouse on a fannish listserv (for Charles de Lint) long before meeting your partner online was in vogue.

I've worked at three universities and one college in some form of either IT or Academic Technology for the last 28 years, and have lived a third of my life in each of New York City, Atlanta, and the suburbs of Boston (Watertown and now Waltham). I have one spouse, one grown daughter, one small dog, one medium-sized cat, and one monster cat.

My hope is to update this site once a week or so. If I find myself sticking with it and getting readers, maybe I'll throw up a Ko-fi or Patreon option, but that's down the road.