The Shadow War of Hawkman #4

History

DC Vice-President and Executive Editor Dick Giordano decided Hawkman was overdue for a revival, and writer Tony Isabella — already known as the creator of Black Lightning — won the editorial green-light by pitching a 'trust no one' espionage thriller rooted in Silver Age Thanagarian mythology; Isabella reportedly read every prior Katar Hol appearance before scripting. Richard Howell penciled all four issues with inking by Alfredo Alcala, and the covers were finished by Howell and Giordano himself; Alan Gold served as series editor. Isabella had already laid out a multi-year story arc in his original proposal, but the editor who succeeded Gold on the subsequent ongoing series curtailed that ambition, and Isabella eventually ceded full writing duties to Dan Mishkin by issue #10 of the ongoing.

Trivia · 8 facts

• Story title: 'The British Are Coming!' — the concluding chapter of the four-issue limited series (cover date August 1985, on-sale April 9, 1985).
• Written by Tony Isabella; pencils by Richard Howell; inks by Alfredo Alcala; cover by Richard Howell and Dick Giordano; edited by Alan Gold.
• Fell Andar — the Thanagarian commander and primary villain of the miniseries, created by Tony Isabella and Richard Howell — dies in this issue, killed by a death-blast from the Absorbascon-maddened Rab Mekir as an act of revenge; Rab Mekir also dies.
• Aquaman (Arthur Curry) and the Elongated Man (Ralph Dibny) appear as members of the Detroit-era Justice League; their presence in the prior issue (#3) was part of the Hawks' mission to purge their identities from JLA computers.
• The issue contains an early (and Comics Code–constrained) mainstream depiction of gender-nonconformity: Captain Olcott is coerced into aiding the Thanagarian invaders to keep his cross-dressing secret from his military superiors.
• The limited series was explicitly conceived as a market test; its positive reception directly led to Hawkman Special #1 (1986) and the launch of Hawkman vol. 2 as an ongoing series later that year.
• Fell Andar, though killed here, was later retroactively reused by writer John Ostrander in Hawkworld vol. 2 as a continuity-bridging figure — a Thanagarian spy who had impersonated Katar Hol in Justice League International — in order to explain Hawkman's post-Crisis continuity gaps.
• The miniseries exists outside modern DC canon: following the 1989 Hawkworld reboot, Katar Hol and Shayera Thal were established as having only arrived on Earth in the early 1990s, rendering the Shadow War storyline apocryphal within post-Crisis continuity.

Cast · 14 characters

Full credits

Key issues in The Shadow War of Hawkman

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#1 1st appearance — Joe Tracy

Variants (2)