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.
