Originally Posted by
Bored at 3:00AM
Currently, Carter Hall is Katar Hol and Katar Hol is Carter Hall, so it doesn't really matter in the end. The most recent Hawkman series explained that Hawkman and Hawkgirl were being reincarnated across time and space and on an infinite number of Earths, so the Earth-2 reincarnated Egyptian "prince" Hawkman and the Thanagarian spacecop Hawkman were the same guy. Thanks to time shenanigans, Carter and Katar were fused into one guy while Shiera Sanders and Shayera Thal were kept seperated by Perpetua in order to keep her from alerting some higher cosmic forces about what she was up to.
So, Katar Hol is now Carter Hall, and showed up in his full-Hawkworld incarnation in the Venditti/Hitch Hawkman comic. In this comic, he was reunited with Shayera as Carter/Katar/Khufu/Kay-Tar/etc. while Kendra Saunders exists as a separate character and a member of the League.
And, since Shayera is Hawkwoman and Kendra is Hawkgirl, they've each got their own name to distinguish them from each other, even though they are two aspects of the same woman who started Hawkman on his reincarnation cycle billions of years ago.
The upside is that Venditti ended that reincarnation cycle, so we don't have to worry about future creators trying to rehash all this stuff again.
For fans who only want to see Hawkman as a Thanagarian spacecop, you're out of luck, though. It's now just one of his past lives that creators can use if they so choose, but it's not the entirety of his shtick any longer, just as the Golden Age Hawkman is no longer just a reincarnated Egyptian Pharaoh.