Brian, I remember seeing those and marveling at the art. I should seek those out.

*Eventually they married, but I don't recall that it was ever shown "on screen" as it were.

ITEM: The Silver Age Hawkman, Katar Hol, was a police officer on Thanagar, with his wife Shayera. They followed the Thanagarian criminal Byth to Earth, where they became interested in Terran police procedures. They decided to stay and learn - but not using most of their Thanagarian advanced equipment*. They were curators of the Midway City Museum.

*They used their Thanagarian hawk-police wings and uniforms, and on their space craft, they used the Absorbascon intermittently - including to learn about Terran history so that they could become curators, general Terran customs so they wouldn't stick out, and the language of birds - and they didn't have to kill a dragon either.

Confused yet? No? You're about to be.

Hawkman and Hawkwoman were two rather prominent victims of the Crisis on Infinite Earths. The Golden Age Earth-2 version was easy enough to understand. The Silver/Bronze Age Earth-1 version was easy enough to understand.

But when COIE merged them... it all went to hell. That's likely the biggest problem about Hawkman. As previously noted... Katar Hol was a drug addicted rich boy. His father came to Earth and was the JSA's Hawkman and was long lived enough to be a viable hero with the JLA too. Oh, no; Prince Khufu was reincarnated into the Hawkman on Thanagar. Whoops, wait; he was incarnated a LOT of times.

It seemed that every writer had his own, "I'll show you how to fix Hawkman!" story - which fixed nothing.

I haven't read Hawkman since he became a savage, which matches neither Carter Hall nor Katar Hol - but hey, he's Wolverine with wings, so that must work okay, yeah? Maybe the current Hawkman is somewhat recognizable, or at least close to the original character.

Katar Hol, Silver Age or otherwise, is boring in comparison, and merging both versions made no sense.

The problem with Hawkman started with Truman's Hawkworld. Until then, the golden-age and silver-age Hawks were different people and the similarities of their names and professions was just ignored as the JSA Hawks were sent off to fight Ragnarok with the rest of the JSA and the space cops were involved in their own "Shadow War" that was repositioning the characters.

Truman's mini-series and series came out well after Crisis and in-between there were appearances of the silver-age Hawks in various books. However, Hawkworld was a complete reboot of the characters and incompatible with stories published just months prior. This lead to various retcon patches such as establishing that the Hawks that had appeared in the JLA were actually the golden-age characters (never mind that they don't have the spaceship or technology to help build the satellite & teleporters). This also didn't explain who the Hawks were in the more recent appearances while the GA Hawks were off in limbo... so the patch needed another patch. Somewhere along the way, someone decided to also explain the underlying similarities between the Hawk versions, so an ancestor of Katar worked with Khufu in ancient Egypt to develop the nth metal. Later it got more complicated after the JSA were rescued. It was revealed that various bird-themed characters through the ages (Silent Knight, Nighthawk) were avatars of a Hawk-god and were being killed by Vandal Savage. Johns tweaked that by dumping the Hawk-god aspect and making them all actual reincarnations of the golden-age Hawkman and Hawkgirl, fated to die at the hands of the reincarnating Hath-set. The current series decided to expand that further to the point that he is also reincarnating across time and space and so the Thanagarian Hawkman is actually a reincarnate of the golden-age one and presumably the Thanagarian that actually founded the hawk based police force is also an incarnation.