Posted By Dan Greenfield on Oct 7, 2018 | 1 comment

SNEAK PEEK: The Hawkman writer takes you inside the Microverse as Issue #5 looms…

In only four issues, Hawkman – helmed by Robert Venditti and Bryan Hitch — has quickly become one of comics’ most consistently entertaining series: a mixture of mystery, Indiana Jones-ish adventure and Hawkman lore, with some Ray Harryhausen sensibility thrown in for good measure.

But if Carter Hall’s going to traipse through time and space trying to uncover the secret of his existence, then it was inevitable that he run into his old buddy, Ray Palmer, the Atom – as we saw at the end of Issue #4.

Seeing Hawkman and the Atom together is one of those little joys in a longtime comics fan’s life: These guys have been running (flying?) buddies going back more than 50 years, when they were frequently paired up much in the same way that Barry Allen and Hal Jordan used to hang out together. Their individual series were even merged for awhile toward the end of the ’60s.

Joe Kubert

Venditti gets it – and I asked him what fans can expect when a two-issue team-up launches in Issue #5, which hits stores this Wednesday (10/10):

“In Issue #1, Carter Hall discovered that he hasn’t just been reincarnated across time, as he thought. He’s been reincarnated across time and space,” Venditti told me at New York Comic Con. “He’s been a Kryptonian in a past life, a Rannian in a past life, a Thanagarian, which we know about, other things as well.

“Well, what we find out in Issues #5 and #6 is that he was in the Microverse in a past life. Ray Palmer is inside the Microverse, as you know from previous stories in the DCU, sort of exploring and protecting it, looking over it, and all those kinds of things. So, Carter’s going to go there, into the Microverse, as part of his adventure. He’s going to run into Ray there and together they’re going to go on a two-issue adventure.”

From Issue #5. Click here for the complete preview at Screen Rant.

Venditti emphasized that this was more than a nostalgia trip.

“It isn’t just about bringing back these two friends and reuniting them for a story, it’s very much about pushing the story forward,” he said. “If you’re a character who has recently discovered you’re reincarnating across time and space, and trying to understand what that means, who better to ask than your best friend, who also happens to be a genius physicist.

“So, Ray’s gonna help him kind of understand a lot of what’s really going on there. And what he’s going to discover, intangibly and tangibly, inside this two-part story, is really going to propel us into the second half of this first year of the series.”

Gil Kane pencils, Murphy Anderson inks

And, yes, those old issues were among those Venditti read in prepping for the series.

“Oh, yeah, sure,” he said. “Absolutely. I went and bought all those. I love those. Y’know, the slingshot cover. The high adventure and the crazy, wild concepts, and the weird villains and all these kinds of things – Bryan and I are very much trying to capture that same spirit of the Silver Age stories, but to put it in this modern setting that we’re in now, in this modern environment.”

Issue #5