December 1990. As Tim Truman conceived it, the HAWKWORLD miniseries was not intended to obsolete previous Hawkman stories, but when DC decided to continue the story as an ongoing series, senior management insisted that it pick up in the present, effectively rebooting the modern Hawkman rather than just updating his origin. This Annual sought to paper over some of the resulting continuity problems while also addressing the similarities between the Golden Age and Silver Age Hawkman, something pre-Crisis stories had just shrugged off. Ostrander's solution was to establish that Katar Hol's father, Paran Katar, had been a Thanagarian scout on Earth decades earlier (under the name Perry Carter), had surreptitiously helped Carter Hall to develop his gravity-defying Nth Metal, and later took the concept of Hawkman and even Carter Hall's emblem back to Thanagar as inspiration for the Wingmen. Ostrander further explains that the Golden Age Hawkman had been a member of both the Justice Society and the Justice League:
(The "1953" reference in the second panel is an error; the events to which it refers (first recounted in "The Man Who Defeated the Justice Society!" in ADVENTURE COMICS #466) took place in 1951.)
In the text pages, editor Mike Gold explains candidly why all this was deemed necessary and the various options the creative team had for addressing it. This wasn't an ideal solution, and several points still remained unexplained (like the presence of Hawkman and Hawkwoman in JUSTICE LEAGUE INTERNATIONAL, which Ostrander tackled later). Beyond that, building a story around the need to rationalize a continuity issue is seldom very edifying, and the contrivances involved (including briefly sending Katar and Shayera back in time, where Katar meets his own father as a younger man) clash uneasily with the tone of the HAWKWORLD series. By far the best part of this Annual is the scene where Wally West meets Shayera Thal and so aggravates her that she immediately starts punching him in the face — not just once, but three times, until Katar reins her in — which has nothing to do with the continuity stuff.
From a story standpoint, I think retroactively removing Katar Hol from the original JLA is regrettable mainly insofar as his HAWKWORLD origin would have given new dimension to his clashes with Oliver Queen. Unlike the previous version of Katar, a knee-jerk reactionary who was ultimately fine with fascist dictatorship as long as it didn't personally inconvenience him, the Katar of HAWKWORLD is by Thanagarian standards a dangerous leftist, full of seditious ideas about social equity and civil rights. However, the most radical leftist on Thanagar is still somewhere to the right of Barry Goldwater, so Oliver would undoubtedly still be appalled by Katar's politics in ways Katar would find perplexing. That would have been a more fun dynamic than trying to shoehorn Carter Hall into the role of Oliver's neocon antagonist.
However, none of that was really on the table in 1989–1990. DC's later obsession with maintaining the sanctity of the pre-Crisis JLA hadn't yet materialized; at this point, the Giffen/DeMatteis Justice League books were riding high, DC regarded the old JLA as a relic that had outlived its commercial usefulness, and the JSA had been discarded (ostensibly permanently) after the Crisis. So, the only thing this Hawkman retcon really needed to achieve was to rationalize why flashback scenes might occasionally picture Hawkman with the original JLA, and this explanation did accomplish that much.
