What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?
- Featuring Hawkman and Hawkwoman!
- By Roger Stern, Dwayne Turner & K.S. Wilson!
- From DC Comics's November 1988 cover-dated Power of the Atom #4!
I had my own Hawkman reboot and redesign in mind way back in the day. My take was an acknowledgement of previous continuity, but with a new Hawkman in a different setting with a redesigned costume. Focus on telling stories that I felt were clearer, isolating the hero from the greater DC Universe to explore what I felt were his strengths. Boil off the accumulated crud and get back to the inherent appeal of the property.
Not so much with the Atom. Besides never having a multi-arc "run" on a series in mind, the truth is that I don't think the Atom property has inherent appeal. Pop culture was filthy with shrunken people narratives in the 20th century, and there's a good half-dozen tiny super-heroes to choose from. The Atom only matters because of who his creators were, and when he was created, and how he was one of the foundational Silver Age science heroes when Julie Schwartz offered the first true shared universe of DC properties in the 1950s. If you're not emphasizing Ray Palmer's unique flavor of shrinking heroes and his connections to the Justice League of America, there's not much else to sell readers.
So the issue opens with Ray Palmer telling the story of how he was warned as a child of a dangerously rocky gorge near a waterfall in his home town that he could now safely dive into because he was action figure sized. It's a nice human moment, but also has this weird meta quality of making The Atom feel like a trifling figure in a shallow pool. Three pages of story are devoted to Potter's Gorge, as Ray somehow fails to recognize that the low-flying bird he bounded out of the water to ride is in fact a very large and muscular man with a bird-themed helmet who co-starred in the same comics as Atom's for decades. It makes Ray look incredibly dense in a non-white dwarf matter way, and Hawkman having his honor wings ripped out of his helmet for the entire appearance does him no favors either.
I read the Shadow War of Hawkman mini-series, the one-off special that followed, and about half a year into the ongoing series before losing interest. That volume of Hawkman last one issue less than Power of the Atom, so I wasn't the only reader who felt that way. I would have benefited from a few pages of recap of the Hawk's Shadow War and the resolution I'd missed. We got three pages of recap alright-- but of the previous Atom issues instead. Apparently, all those Hawkman fans that powered a whole seventeen issue run a year earlier would require orientation on the four glacially paced stories of this run, as if there was no crossover between the Hawkman and Atom audiences. What's worse is Hawkman keeps talking about all they'd lost and how ashamed they were of their home world of Thanagar, without readers ever being context of what events led them to that state. Frustration and apathy were probably not what the creators of this title should have been shooting for.
Ray Palmer's life was a mess of his own creation because he'd outed his double life most publicly, and he was seriously considering taking the C.I.A.'s offer as their agent under a new identity. Hawkwoman especially thinks its a terrible idea, as the couple had just broken ties with an authoritarian regime that they'd disagreed with. At least, that's what I could gather from the context in the dialogue. Anyway, the Hawks had been staying at a friend's place in New Orleans while on vacation from having a title, though they were appearing in Justice League International by this point. It would have been a really good idea to discuss their experiences with the JLI, but everyone gets distracted by their room getting tossed by crooks. Among their missing belongings were their melee weapons and a pair of spare flight belts.
In this incarnation, the Hawks were sleuths who'd once had a perch in Detective Comics, but here they just follow the energy signature on their belts. You'd think we'd get some aerial combat with crooks wearing the belts, but when the Hawks locate the thieves, a positive-gravity trap is sprung instead. Their old foe I.Q. had planned the whole thing as a booby trap, but had not reckoned with their having the Mighty Mite in tow. Despite his advanced technology and presumed high intelligence, the Tiny Titan suckers I.Q. into damaging his own equipment and leads him right into the Hawks' custody. Even though I.Q. dressed like a dandy pre-World War II aviator, I'm still going to claim this as another case where the Atom fights dudes with weapons in street clothes.
Cut to another page of mildly homoerotic foreshadowing of disgraced former president Tricky Dick Nixon and his lumbering houseboy planning a confrontation with the Atom. Cut back to our heroes, also in casual wear, just spending the day together. Shayera Hall and Ray Palmer are a couple of jokesters gently ribbing unyielding rigid straight man Katar Hol, and that's the best part of the book. Ray expresses that the Halls' open cooperation and understanding is in sharp contrast to his own failed marriage, and that as part of his desire to emulate their healthier lifestyle, he would also try to do the work of navigating his new life as a public figure. Frankly, as expected, the combination of the Atom and the Hawks as old friends was greater than the sum of the parts of another low stakes outing in this title.
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