Hawkman #22 Review

Getting Maced

Written By: Robert Venditti

Art By: Fernando Pasarin, Oclair Albert, Wade Von Grawbadger, Jeremy Cox, Rob Leigh

Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: March 11, 2020

The saga of the Sky Tyrant continues as Carter Hall's friends, Hawkwoman, The Atom and Adam Strange desperately try to find a cure for the Batman Who Laugh's Infection that now runs through our Winged Warrior's body, making him into his evil Earth-3 version from a past life.  Yeah, it's a lot to take in, but that's nothing compared to the Sky Tyrant's plan to open up a doorway to another dimension that will end billions of lives throughout the Universe so that he can make sure the cosmic scales never even out and that he always has people's lives on his hands, making it so his curse or gift of resurrection never ends and that he'll continue to live on forever.  Let's jump into this issue and see if our heroes are able to stop the infected Carter Hall from achieving his goals or if they'll all go down one by one by the hand of the Sky Tyrant.  Let's check it out.

For this issue of Hawkman, it seems we're going to be exploring Shayera's connection to Carter and her resurrections.  The thing that comes off weird though is that it seems like Hawkwoman isn't aware of her past lives or even that she's had them.  It isn't until she touches the stone that Sky Tyrant was after that's supposedly a key to destroy the Universe that she experiences a full-on total recall like Carter did towards the end of the first year of this series.  It's weird though because this feels odd because in Justice League Shayera was aware of Kendra Saunders and they talked about how they were the same person, just during different lives.   Also weird is the fact that Carter still doesn't remember all of his lives and that Shayera is just given a taste here even though it's been speculated that she was the original woman to give Carter his endless resurrections.  Maybe it will all come together by the end of this arc, but for the big wow moment of this issue, it didn't hit me as much as I would have hoped and only made me realize that I still don't know everything about what's going on with our hero's memory and why he can't recall everything he should be able to.

Beyond Hawkwoman's realization about who she is here, we have ourselves a big ass battle between our two Hawks and the big take away from it, beyond some good old fashion fun is that Carter Hall's consciousness is stronger than we previously believed and that maybe the infection doesn't have as strong of a hold on our hero as we previously thought, but we won't find out here though because by the end Shayera and Carter are teleported away by the key, but as for why or how I have no idea.

All in all, I loved the art in this issue and even though I'm not a fan of how Shayera remembering her past lives was handled....... because it doesn't really make sense to me, it was something that this book seriously needed to address because it's been the elephant in the room since we gave Hawkman his own series again.  This is an alright issue though that moves the plot in an interesting direction, while also giving you some background in what Earth-3 Carter Hall felt for Shayera's counterpart of that world, not to mention we see that our hero is on the way back...... at least his mind is stronger than we thought and that's an exciting development because I'm pretty much done with the infection angle to our hero.

Bits and Pieces:

While I don't quite get Shayera's new memories for something that feels like she should have already known about, especially for what we've seen from Justice League issues, this was still a decent issue that brought some backstory and some fun, not to mention it looked great while doing it.  This feels like it's one step closer to getting the infection story over and done with and for that alone I can at least be a little happy.

7/10