Hawk and Dove #4

[iamrman]

Writers: Barbara and Karl Kesel

Pencils: Rob Liefeld

Inks: Karl Kesel

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Kestrel empowers a street punk to kill Hawk and Dove.

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Next: Incredible Hulk 162.

Comments

[michael_ellis_day]

I think well of both writers but I never read this book, so all I have to go on is excerpts and pages out of context, but...it doesn't grab me. I'm just not seeing from the examples given here how Dawn qualifies as a Dove at all. I know Ditko originally mangled the whole concept of what it would mean to be a pacifist super-hero, and Steve Skeates tried hard but still couldn't get it to work, and I'm not getting how this incarnation is even grappling with the idea. An actually pacifist costumed hero can work (Squirrel Girl is 90% of the way there!) and it feels like most writers are fleeing from that possibility.

[thanekos]

It at least puts across Hank as flawed - a lot of Hawk and Dove takes tend to " Hank's aggressive violence is just the correct way of doing things. "

[beyondthefringe]

This leaned far more into Hawk and Dove as avatars of Chaos and Order (as literal forces in the DCU). Don was a pacifist, Dawn is just more of a peacemaker and diplomat. And of course a balance for Hank’s excesses.

[icon_uk]

The original HAwk and Dove were seriously tedious characters. Hawk was one-note conservative angry, Dove was openmindedly liberal... and passive to the point of dullness. Hawk always managed to achive their goal, whilst Dove seemed to spend a lot of time pontificating without achieving anything. Subtle they were not and whilst a good visual, were never rivetting characters. Hank bullied Don, and Don... let him.

When Don died and Hank's Hawk got even MORE angry, he became an even less interesting and more right wing solo hero, very much a Reagan era idea of a superhero.

Dawn's Dove is not passive, but she's not combatitive either.

As beyondthefringe said, this is the series that introduced the idea of them as being agents of the Lords of Order and the Lords of Chaos, though with a twist which comes along later.

At one point Dawn compares their differing viewpoints to camera lenses; Hawk is telephoto, he focusses on something and charges towards it exclusively.

And sometimes that works, and sometimes that doesn't.

Dove is wide-angle, she see's the whole picture and works out how to achive her end result with minimal input. She will allow an opponent to wear themselves out, or use their own stength against them.

And sometimes that works, and sometimes that doesn't, though her track record is better because she thinks things through more than the very reactive Hank does. She will try to defuse a situation, he'll simply try to smash it into submission.

[michael_ellis_day]

Oh yeah, there's no question the original Hawk and Dove were terrible from the start. Ditko was incapable of imagining how any pacifist would think, and seemed to have created the series for Dove to be a straw man to prove why the whole concept wouldn't work. (Jack Kirby on the other hand was capable of imagining a pacifist mindset, and the Forever People were much closer to what a pacifist hero might be like. But as I say, Doreen Green is closer still.)

I should add I'm not a pacifist myself, but I have sympathy with them. More than that, though, I just feel that if an interesting, difficult idea has been put out there, a writer should make a good faith effort to try and engage with it. Or just write something else!

[tcampbell1000]

To be honest, this one never quite got me either. It didn't help that I came to it after Armageddon 2001, which, while not the Kesels' fault, made it more challenging to invest in the lead characters. I had liked Karl's clever use of slang and wordplay in the first few years of Superboy, and hadn't had any complaints about the few Barbara stories I'd read, but...

Part of the problem, I think, is that the series wants to elevate its source material into some kind of exploration of philosophical abstracts, but none of the characters are at all equipped to talk about those. Hank is too dumb and violent, the villains are too violent and dumb, Dawn is too taciturn and goal-focused, and the side characters are clueless, as are Hank and Dawn and most of the villains.

The only one who could maybe shed some light on what's supposed to be happening here is Kestrel, and I don't see him taking time out of his day to write any Nietzsche sequels. (Not sure he can even type with those fingers.)

If any series ever needed an Obi-Wandalfdore-type "wise mentor figure," this one would be it, but from what I skimmed, the Kesels' Hawk and Dove never seem to get any closer to enlightenment (unless you count one of the Armageddon 2001 alt-timelines, where they figure out enough to know it's their fate to die.)

So instead this becomes one of two things, depending on how charitably you read it: a cape book with a few clever flourishes but not half as smart as it's trying to be, or an obscure philosophical exercise with few if any signposts to what it all means, besides "Extremism is bad" and "To fight chaos, order needs to let itself have a little chaos sometimes, as a treat." And I feel like other cape books had already covered those.

[michael_ellis_day]

You and I are on the same wavelength here!

[icon_uk]

I did like that the three Dove candidates all had names which sounded plausible clues without seeming strained: Dawn and Donna both sounding like Don, and Ren sounding like wren, another bird.

[huntleyhaverstock]

I always loved that Hank is a big ol' dummy, and that his attempts at detective work in this series always fail miserably.

For me, the series worked because of its solid grasp of longform storytelling. The Kesels would set up plots and start dropping hints months in advance, making their storyline an ongoing mystery to be solved. Hank and Dawn developed a genuinely warm friendship (booooo on future writers for shoehorning them into a romance), and their supporting cast got built out with more and more fun characters for them to bounce off.

And they DID sort of have an enigmatic mentor figure in Barter, the morally gray guy with the mysterious multidimensional curio shop (which had some fun cameo items on the shelves), who can never give, but only trade.