I'm Guessing It's A Big Picture Retcon

While I was in Marvels and Legends this week, I flipped through War of Kings: Ascension #2. So let me see if I have this straight: Chris Powell hallucinated Evilhawk, the character he fought in issues #24 and 25 of his original series. The Evilhawk armor did exist, but Chris was the one inside it, not an intergalactic gangster who wanted to transfer his mind out of the armor and into an organic body (namely, Chris').

Furthermore, the Darkhawk and Evilhawk armors weren't constructed under orders of aforementioned intergalactic gangster. All of that was conjured up by Chris' mind to cope with the data flow he received from the amulet. "Evilhawk" was actually Chris in a different armor he summoned without realizing it, running amok while Chris was blacked out or something*. Chris' seeing some hideous, mishapen thing every time he took off his helmet was just another hallucination as well, which I guess means he actually just looked like himself all along. Is that the gist of it?

Snarky footnotes notwithstanding, I'm not really here to ridicule this new origin, even if I do hate this type of "Everything you knew about X is wrong!" style of stuff. So maybe I am here to ridicule it, I haven't decided yet, so I'll just play the rest of the post by ear, see how it goes. I don't know, the Darkhawk armor having been designed to help a space gangster consolidate his power, but winding up with a teen who uses it for good seems like a decent idea. The overall theme doesn't really seem to have been changed by the startling revelation. Whatever grand design this Heirarchy of Raptors subscribe to does not seem to be a good one, given the fact they provided Blastaar with a freaking Cosmic Control Rod**. So it's still a case of an Earth teen lucking into a weapon that was usually bent towards ill purposes, only he used it for good. The difference is the weapon was tied into something a little larger than the pursuit of ill-gotten gains.

I guess it would have been harder to get Chris into War of Kings with the gangster origin. It might have been interesting for Chris to be perceived as the gangster because he was using the Darkhawk armor, and then see Chris try and deal with that. Some folks might be after him for the gangsters past misdeeds, others might want to curry favor with him, out of fear or greed, and Chris could see if he couldn't use that to his advantage. Though that would be treading on Agents of Atlas territory, wouldn't it? It can still work similarly with the Heirarchy of Raptors, but I would think an obscure group with vague goals nobody's seen in milennia wouldn't have much of a following, or much recognition.

* Were I a petty man, I'd point out that in Darkhawk #24, when Chris is fighting Evilhawk in an old amusement park, a member of Code B.L.U.E. shouts 'Freeze! Both of you!' Which wouldn't seem to make sense if Chris was actually in the Evilhawk armor and just hallucinating that he was still Darkhawk fighting Evilhawk, meaning there was only one person to have freeze. Good thing I'm not a petty person.

** Should we figure that the sudden emergence of the Raptors are some many years is some universal response to the forces of Life being stronger than ever? Are they agents of Death like Thanos, but not as high on the totem pole?