Blast From The Past And A Fear Of The Future
It's funny. Now that we've gotten past all the "definitive origin" aspects to this series, which took two years to really flesh out and come to a conclusion, we're finally at a cool aspect of this story, where Hawkman and Hawkwoman died in our present day, but their souls were granted one more life, where they Quantum Leaped back into the forties, to a previous life of theirs, where they are again a part of the JSA and fighting for truth, justice and the American way....... and all that jazz. Even with this being interesting and me being a huge fan of Golden Age heroes, this aspect to the story is still troublesome because since our heroes already once lived this life....... do they know what's coming ahead of them? What do they know and how does their new one-life predicament affect their reincarnating feud with Hath-Set? Let's jump into this issue where we pick up some time after "Flash Comics #1" from 1940, where not only did we get Hawkman's origin, but the death of Hath-Set's incarnation of this time period, Anton Hastor. Let's check it out.
As we saw in the previous issue, with this being the only life that Hawkman has left to live, he's a bit freaked out at the thought of actually dying and staying dead, which is bumming out Hawkwoman, who because of the timeframe that we have now, is Hawkgirl once again...... which isn't the point, but my mind went off on a tangent while I was writing that. The point is, Hawkman is half the man that he used to be and Shayera is trying to snap him out of it. Too bad that at this time the Nth Metal dagger that originally brought forth Carter's memories in the original story has been stolen and is being used by Anton Hastor to locate Hawkman. The thing is..... a lot of this isn't really explained to people who don't know Hawkman's Golden Age origin so I don't know if people are going to be lost during this story because all it really does is make brief references to things and then immediately moves on. If that wasn't bad enough, the dagger that was stolen was stolen from the JSA brownstone so that Anton Hastor could find Hawkman........ who lives at the brownstone....... You see the problem here?
So to find out who stole the dagger, Hawkman uses his mace to psychically link to the dagger, while Anton Hastor is doing the same thing and they both realize who each of them is..... this then leads us to a train for some reason where Anton uses the power of Anubis to make everyone on the train a zombie for Hawkman and Hawkgirl to fight....... this is kind of cool, but I'm still kind of hung up on stealing the dagger from the brownstone and the fact that Anton Hastor is alive because after his and Hawkman's first encounter in 1940..... he died. Yeah, that's not really explained here and we move on to try and push Hawkman's buttons so that he can get over his fear of death for our next and final issue.
All in all, I really enjoyed the art in this issue a lot and the random zombie battle was pretty cool, even if our lead up to that point didn't make a lick of sense. I mean, nothing about this story really makes any sense and we're no closer to finding out what Hawkman and Hawkgirl remember about this life if anything, and with one issue left, I don't think that's going to happen. So yeah, the setup to this story is nonsense through and through, but dealing with Hawkman and Hawkgirl having one life to live, while Hath-Set (Anton Hastor) still has a vendetta that goes through reincarnations is something that makes sense to talk about, I just wish it was explained why Anton Hastor was still alive when his first appearance was also the place that Hawkman killed him. Yeah, not the biggest fan of this issue, but I look forward to what the ending will be and what it will lead to with this time period's heroes.
Bits and Pieces:
While the art in this book is great and I love the era that our hero currently lives in, the callbacks to the Golden Age Hawkman in this issue are pretty random and not explained to the point that it feels like if people aren't familiar with comics from 80 years ago, they might not pick up on things happening in this issue. Callbacks aside though, this isn't a great issue. The setup is so random and doesn't make much sense overall, even if I'm a fan of the overall story, exploring what Hawkman does when he only has one life left to live.
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