Shadow Thief

41 years ago - Carl Sands is born in Japan, his father a British merchant marine. He is reincarnated from Hath-Set.

30 years ago - 11-year-old Carl's mother dies of a drug overdose. He hunts down a hidden ninja clan, convincing them to take him in.

19 years ago - 22-year-old Carl kills another student, and is cast from his adoptive clan. He becomes a thief.

15 years ago - 26-year-old Carl steals the soul-knife from a museum, unlocking the memories of Hath-Set, and allowing him to manifest his shadow-self. He becomes Shadow Thief.

11 years ago - 30-year-old Carl first battles Hawkman & Hawkwoman, their Nth Metal weapons countering each other. He is ultimately stripped of the soul-knife, and imprisoned.

7 years ago - 34-year-old Carl escapes from prison, and collects small traces of Nth Metal to lightly tap into his shadow self.

4 years ago - 37-year-old Carl steals the soul-knife, regaining full access to his shadow self. His past life as Hath-Set is revealed, and he nearly kills Hawkwoman. She and Hawkman retire as a result.

3 years ago - 38-year-old Carl attacks Hawkgirl, whose memories of her past life as Ke-Dre are unlocked when she touches the soul-knife. She rejects the influence of the past and destroys the soul-knife defeating Sands.

1 year ago - 40-year-old Carl Sands is freed from prison by Gorilla Grodd to join the Legion of Doom.

Shadow Thief is a long-time recurring villain in DC's mythology. He's probably the highest profile Hawkman villain, but he's also regularly appeared in anthology stories for a wide variety of characters. We're actually giving him an even bigger role in the larger story of the Hawks, but I think you'll all immediately agree that this works exceptionally well.

Shadow Thief's Comic History

Carl Sands appeared for the first time in The Brave and the Bold #36 in 1961, very early in the Silver Age in a story by Gardner Fox & Joe Kubert. He basically functioned like a classic Gardner Fox gimmick villain; He was a criminal who was caught when a cop spotted his shadow, which led him to become obsessed with his shadow and to experiment on it in prison. If this was a Flash villain, that would really be the whole story; the next step would be him simply building a device that lets him defy physics. Shadow Thief's story goes one step further, however; his experiments let him contact and save the life of an extradimensional being that repaid him by letting him use a device called a 'Dimensiometer' that allowed him to move through the world as a living shadow.

This more advanced version of a Gardner Fox origin story actually gets even MORE innovative. While we were still in the middle of his introductory flashback, He was contacted again by the extradimensional being, who told him that he needed to return the Dimensiometer, because it' continued use will affect the planet's magnetosphere and cause a worldwide ice age, wiping out all life on Earth... and Sands just flat out ignores him. I haven't seen a lot of references to this beyond his introductory story, which is wild, because that is CRAZY.

Shadow Thief continued to appear as a regularly occurring villain in Hawkman stories across the 60s and 70s, generally in one-off tales or anthology books that needed to grab a utilitarian, recognizable villain to drive the plot.

In the late 80s, when the Hawkman story was being retconned in the pages of Hawkworld, the ongoing series following after the post-crisis miniseries, we met a new take on Shadow Thief; this time, he was a ninja assassin hired by Byth to steal the Hawk's ship and granted a piece of Thanagarian tech to do so. Notably, this bit of technology is now a known commodity to Hawkman and Hawkwoman, meaning they're able to use it too, leading to a series of battles while everyone is in shadow-form.

The innovation here is the suggestion that Sands is actually a practicing ninja before he was ever empowered. Later appearances wouldn't forget this, exactly, but he was generally presented more as a career thief than as an assassin.

Our Shadow Thief Story

We're actually taking a cue from Shadow Thief's appearance in Justice League Unlimited, by taking his connection to the Hawks one step further; not only are his powers in our story going to be magical, and tied to his use of the Nth Metal soul-knife, but we're actually going to make him the reincarnation of Hath-Set. This immediately steps him up like crazy to give him a huge role in their story, but he actually fits that role exceptionally well.

In order for this to work, we need to use the idea from the 80's version of Sands by making him an actual practicing ninja, which is a decidedly 80's idea, but it works once you let him happen. From there he can unlock his powers by finding the Soul-Knife. His powers actually make more sense if they're magical rather than scientific, and when combined with his background he can actually continue to use a scaled-back version of them even when he's disconnected from the knife. Of course, once he gets it again it can trigger a massive story between him and the Hawks that advances their larger tale of reincarnation and revenge... I really hope the scope of this story comes across because I really like what we came up with.

Following this story, the next logical destination for Sands is in the Legion of Doom. He's exactly the sort of legacy villain their lineup is built for.

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