Full disclosure I dont like hawkman and hawkgirl, and them being a big part of this story is super meh to me and i mentally skip over their distinguished mentally-challenged bird asses.
Hawkman is the lamest fucking thing and he's easily the worst part of Metal.
well, nobody does because outside of JSA (the best major DC series nobody reads), Hawkman was a disaster area to the point that DC explicitly told Morrison he couldn't use him for JLA and approved a literal angel as a character instead of letting Morrison discard the canon snarl
even New 52 refused to start over from pure scratch with the character and Hawkgirl like METAL has
his extended inclusion in METAL is because Snyder realized Johns (who was part of the crew on JSA and helped rewrite Nth Metal as "ninth metal" and take an axe to the parts of the canon snarl) would totally let him rebuild the character and i'm sure they're going to explain away the 30 year canon snarl by his having been trapped in The Dark Universe Forge the whole time
which it should be pointed out Johns already offered up DC Editorial during Brightest Day just for them to trash it for New 52, but now that he's in charge...
Carter Hall for a long time wasn't the greatest "modern" detective, but he's a historian and archaeologist (who also has lived for thousands of years), so he often played a companion role to Batman in this regard (or Ralph Dibny) which is why in the early issues of METAL when Batman starts tracing the stuff historically he goes to Carter's journals which form the other half of the plot as Carter would have that information but Bats wouldn't (especially since it's partially supernatural)
Hawkman and Hawkgirl have the problem of that they're really two different sets of heroes that have been mashed together, there's the whole immortal part and then there's the Thanagar stuff...this used to be, pre Crisis, the Earth One and Earth Two versions, but after Crisis, they fucking mashed them together and were insistent this not be undone until they spent so long walling him off they finally realized nobody gave a shit about Hawkman anymore
Hawkgirl's role in a lot of stuff since (like the cartoons) is what Hawkman's used to be when people forgot he was supposed to be the JLA's historian and backup detective, the funny part being that her entire back story was tied to Carter's except editorial had no issue with writers redoing it every couple of years to fit her new role in a series because they just used something that's been a part of the characters forever, that whenever they die they're just re-incarnated anew and sometimes with it taking a while to remember everything
