The Situation Has Not Improved

I was never a fan of the Fraternity of Raptors retcon to Darkhawk's origin. I'm not opposed to the concept of the Raptors themselves. "Secret group working behind the scenes to guide the course of the Shi'ar Empire" is fine. Adding in that they were out of commission for a long time and have reemerged with a kind of "What the fuck happened? We gotta this back on track attitude," attitude isn't a bad touch.

That doesn't mean it was necessary to link Darkhawk's origin to them. I definitely don't think tying him to the same cosmology as the Phoenix is necessary. One thing I enjoy about Marvel's cosmic setting is all the strange and disparate parts moving around out there in the same ballpark. That shared sandbox, all the different creators with different ways of thinking about things put their ideas in the same pot and they more or less coexist.

You got your various star-spanning empires, which are of course all hostile to each other. You have your embodiments of various cosmic concepts. You have your space police force guys. A living planet, complete with facial hair. A group of insane hobbyists who brag about being the last members of their respective species. An entire planet acting as an insane asylum, staffed by talking animals. Inscrutable space gods with heads shaped like coffee mugs. Space truckers, ebings made of pure energy, whatever stuff you want to pull from the '50s sci-fi/horror comics, on and on.

They don't have to be connected to each other. They can be, but it isn't necessary for them to interact. It's a big universe; there's plenty of room for unusual stuff to simply be its own thing. You can get a lot out of taking two characters or settings that occupy different niches and playing them off each other. The dynamics vary depending on what you're combining. Rocket Raccoon is going to interact with that space truck differently than Ronan the Accuser, and they're both going to respond differently to the Phoenix, or Galactus showing up on their doorstep.

Darkhawk's original origin was that the suit was one of five a interstellar gangster press-ganged some scientists into making for him. It's perhaps not the origin you'd expect for a strange amulet that lets you control a powerful suit of armor, but it's not a bad one. There are still criminals in space; they will want ways to deal with enemies or protect themselves from threats. Not all of them are going to go to the trouble of hiring Technet or Death's Head to do it for them. There are countless worlds in the Marvel Universe that have been inhabited, with their own ideas and technologies. Even if they're abandoned now, all their people dead and gone, the things they created might persist. They might be just drifting through space, and every so often, one is going to fall into someone else's hands.

And that's fine. They can just be their own thing, a reminder that there's all sorts of mysteries and secrets out there yet to be discovered. And they aren't always going to be connected to something we already know about.