The Shadow War of Hawkman (Ltd. 1985) (DC Comics) [COMICS]

Hawkman is one of those characters that somehow work even though it’s not immediately apparent why.  After all, his only super power is flight, and that’s a dime a dozen.  His costume is red shorts, green tights, and funny chest straps.  He’s a policeman from another world with access to futuristic weapons, but mostly hits bad guys with a medieval morningstar.  It’s easy to imagine the character having made a couple of appearances during the Silver Age and then being largely forgotten.

Yet although he’s never become a top-tier DC super hero, Hawkman’s second-tier status has endured for decades.  He’s been a long-standing member of the Justice League, appeared in the Super Powers cartoon, and even made the team in the Legends of Tomorrow tv show.  And all despite being saddled with one of the more convoluted backstories (at least in the 1980s-1990s; things have probably smoothed out nowadays with the New 52, etc.).

Hawkman has never been one of my favourite characters, but I’ve always liked his 1985 limited series The Shadow War of Hawkman.  It’s an attempt to take the best version of the character, discard some Silver Age baggage, and set the character on a new course for the future.  The timing, though, is unfortunate, as Crisis would soon come and Hawkman would go through all sorts of complications.  But as a standalone series, these four issues are really solid, helped by clean, colourful artwork and a real love of the character displayed by the writer, Tony Isabella.

Issue # 1 sums up Hawkman’s backstory: Katar Hol and his wife Sheyara are police officers from the planet Thanagar who have come to earth and lived with a local police commissioner while “undercover” as museum curators named Carter and Shera Hall.  The story starts with a local cat burglar named Mousey is forced by aliens to steal anti-gravity devices from the Hall’s secret storeroom.  When Hawkman and Hawkwoman intervene, Mousey tries to confess but then he and Hawkwoman are seemingly disintegrated!  It’s a good cliffhanger.  The banter between Carter and Shera is charming, and Carter is very different than the right-wing jerk he’s sometimes portrayed as in later stories.

Issue # 2 reveals that the aliens behind the theft are fellow Thanagarians who are engaging in secret acts of sabotage to pave the way for earth’s invasion!  Grieving over his wife’s apparent death, Katar reveals his real identity to Captain Frazier of the police.  A really good text page by Tony Isabella tries to make sense of (by-then) twenty-five years of Hawkman continuity, keeping (if re-interpreting) most of it, while frankly discarding some of it.  As much as I hate setting resets in general, you could really see how much Crisis was needed for the DC Universe.

Issue # 3 really shows off how great the colouring works on the type of paper used in the mid-1980s.  I’m nostalgic!  The invading thanagarians want the anti-grav tech they had stolen because Thanagar itself has had a precipitous decline in technology—I didn’t get all of this, but it sounds like a sort of “Dark Ages” situation.  Anyway, it turns out that Hawkwoman is alive!  Another woman at the museum, Mavis Trent, had donned her costume as a joke or something and she’s the one who got disintegrated.  Katar and Sheyara decide they need to keep the madness on their homeworld secret, but also need to stop the invaders.  So, they infiltrate JLA headquarters to erase some data (I’m fuzzy on this part) and fight Aquaman and Elongated Man.  They succeed, but the bad guys have stolen their spaceship!

In Issue # 4, the invaders have used an important device in the Hawkman stories, the absorbacon, to blackmail all sorts of people in key leadership positions on Earth.  But Hawkman and Hawkwoman teleport to their own commandeered ship to repel boarders and, to save Detroit(!), self-destruct their own ship.  Some would wonder if it was a worthwhile trade.  I kid because I love.  There’s an ominous ending: “The war has just begun.”

Overall, it’s really good, and makes me like Hawkman.  Someday, I’ll have to see what else I can dig out featuring the character from this time period.