HAWKMAN #2

Cover shows strong gloss and vibrant colors with sharp corners; a UPC barcode box confirms newsstand edition. Minor edge wear is visible along the top and right border, with slight surface handling marks near the spine but no visible creases or color breaks. The book is protected in a plastic sleeve, which limits full assessment of spine stress and reflects some glare. Interior and back cover were not assessed.

DC relaunched Hawkman in August 1986 as a seventeen-issue ongoing built around the Shadow Wars storyline, with Tony Isabella plotting and Richard Howell handling pencils and covers over inks from Dennis Jensen and Don Heck. This second installment keeps the Thanagarian premise front and center, pairing Katar Hol and Hawkwoman against Shadow-Thief while Byth and the Midway City supporting cast, including Mavis Trent, carry the subplots. The series arrived at an awkward moment: Crisis on Infinite Earths had just rewritten DC continuity, and the Hawkman mythos was about to be overhauled again by Hawkworld, which left this run stranded between versions of the character rather than establishing anything that later stories built upon.

Market interest is correspondingly modest. There are no first appearances, deaths, or origin sequences here, and no cover that price guides single out, so the issue trades as run filler alongside the rest of the 1986 series. Dealer inventory is deep, copies surface constantly in dollar boxes and in complete-run lots, and demand comes almost entirely from readers assembling the seventeen issues rather than from speculators. Certification is rare because the cost of grading exceeds any plausible return, which means the small certified population is driven by submitters padding bulk orders rather than by market pull.

Buyers for this book are Hawkman completists, Copper Age DC run collectors, and readers curious about the last pre-Hawkworld interpretation of the character. Across grades the spread is compressed: mid-grade and high-grade raw copies sell for nearly the same money, and because 1986 newsstand distribution was still wide, well-preserved examples are not scarce enough to command a premium. The only meaningful upside would come from renewed screen attention to Hawkman driving interest in his back catalog, and even then the effect on a non-key mid-run issue would be limited.