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scans_dailyI'll say from the start, as I've said before, that I love the Kesels' "Hawk and Dove" run, Hank and Dawn were great characters, the supporting cast was fun, they went to some interesting places and developed the concept of Hawk and Dove in ways the original series never managed.
I ALSO love themed villains, those whose obsession takes control of their lives and emerges in some warped form of criminality or lifestyle. The Riddler, the Serpent Society, hell, even the Death Throws (The Multiverse's only homicidal criminal team of... umm... jugglers)
Now even bearing both those facts in mind, I have to admit that sometimes things can be taken a little far, an amusing verbal tic becomes so irritating that you just want to scream at the people on the page to STOP IT!!
Case in point.... from 1991, Hawk and Dove
That's one heck of a melodramatic title isn't it? "Input: Action.... Output: DEATH!" (Dun-dun-DUNNNNNNN!)
The story follows an old, one-time, Batgirl villain called the Velvet Tiger. She's a villain with an unusual power, she's a time manipulator of a very specific sort. She can step outside the normal flow of time and move around a world that's frozen from her point of view. No one knows that she can do this, and she makes sure no one finds out. She uses her power to establish herself a sort of criminal savant, if she suspects that someone is cutting her out of her protection money, she can search their entire office between heartbeats and she will find anything that is there. That's the sort of thing that encourages a healthy respect, especially if you don't know how she finds things out.
There's a drawback though, when she's outside time, she ages at a normal rate, she appears to be a woman in her twenties, but she muses that she should barely be a teenager, if she'd aged in normal time.
Still, she's successful enough that people like Bruno Mannheim call HER, but that sort of thing breeds enemies. As she discovers when the telephone in her chaffeur-drive limousine explodes and what what emerges is perhaps the worlds most annoying team of assassins...
Yeah, they talk like this exclusively and NON STOP! (The kid with the dreadlocks is Modem, the black haired girl is Cursor, the kid with the prosthetic unicycle (Sorry, I have no idea what else to call it) is Database, the large guy is Mainframe... You have no idea how long it took me to figure that out. Since EVERY expression they use is computer related, weeding out the names isn't as easy as it usually is)
Hank and Dawn were passing by in civilian guise when the car crashed, and that was enough danger to allow them to trigger the change to Hawk and Dove...
"RAM his ROM"? Oh dear oh dear oh dear... And to show this computer virus IS infectious, even Dove starts doing it...
And just to date this story completely, check out the music reference in the next page.
Would a single sentence in plain English kill you guys? Really?
Now that I admit is more than a little bit creepy, not Hakker himself, so much as his method of materialising by subverting and taking control of his underlings bodies. ICK!
Turns out he's Lani's never before mentioned brother Ward... her LITTLE brother, which just gets even more confusing...
Meanwhile..
At this point I pretty much have to stop as I'm out of page count, which is almost a relief. It's also the ONLY appearance (AFAIK) of Hakker and his Cyber Brats. Now, annoying as they are, they have a suitably odd visual, and a basic, if well-presented, powerset; Cursor controls her flying cannonball thingie remotely, Mainframe can upgrade his fighting skills and size, Modem can materialise between electronic systems and it's not clear what Database can do, but he does appear to be linked to information acquisition. They would make a good "introductory" level group of villains for a novice hero or hero team (Much like the Female Furies, or the Wrecking Crew tend to be for their respective companies), but the fact they talk like stuffing Chris Claremont and a copy of Computer Weekly into a blender and pressing purée (metaphorically speaking of course) makes me a little relieved we never saw them again.
I ALSO love themed villains, those whose obsession takes control of their lives and emerges in some warped form of criminality or lifestyle. The Riddler, the Serpent Society, hell, even the Death Throws (The Multiverse's only homicidal criminal team of... umm... jugglers)
Now even bearing both those facts in mind, I have to admit that sometimes things can be taken a little far, an amusing verbal tic becomes so irritating that you just want to scream at the people on the page to STOP IT!!
Case in point.... from 1991, Hawk and Dove
That's one heck of a melodramatic title isn't it? "Input: Action.... Output: DEATH!" (Dun-dun-DUNNNNNNN!)
The story follows an old, one-time, Batgirl villain called the Velvet Tiger. She's a villain with an unusual power, she's a time manipulator of a very specific sort. She can step outside the normal flow of time and move around a world that's frozen from her point of view. No one knows that she can do this, and she makes sure no one finds out. She uses her power to establish herself a sort of criminal savant, if she suspects that someone is cutting her out of her protection money, she can search their entire office between heartbeats and she will find anything that is there. That's the sort of thing that encourages a healthy respect, especially if you don't know how she finds things out.
There's a drawback though, when she's outside time, she ages at a normal rate, she appears to be a woman in her twenties, but she muses that she should barely be a teenager, if she'd aged in normal time.
Still, she's successful enough that people like Bruno Mannheim call HER, but that sort of thing breeds enemies. As she discovers when the telephone in her chaffeur-drive limousine explodes and what what emerges is perhaps the worlds most annoying team of assassins...
Yeah, they talk like this exclusively and NON STOP! (The kid with the dreadlocks is Modem, the black haired girl is Cursor, the kid with the prosthetic unicycle (Sorry, I have no idea what else to call it) is Database, the large guy is Mainframe... You have no idea how long it took me to figure that out. Since EVERY expression they use is computer related, weeding out the names isn't as easy as it usually is)
Hank and Dawn were passing by in civilian guise when the car crashed, and that was enough danger to allow them to trigger the change to Hawk and Dove...
"RAM his ROM"? Oh dear oh dear oh dear... And to show this computer virus IS infectious, even Dove starts doing it...
And just to date this story completely, check out the music reference in the next page.
Would a single sentence in plain English kill you guys? Really?
Now that I admit is more than a little bit creepy, not Hakker himself, so much as his method of materialising by subverting and taking control of his underlings bodies. ICK!
Turns out he's Lani's never before mentioned brother Ward... her LITTLE brother, which just gets even more confusing...
Meanwhile..
At this point I pretty much have to stop as I'm out of page count, which is almost a relief. It's also the ONLY appearance (AFAIK) of Hakker and his Cyber Brats. Now, annoying as they are, they have a suitably odd visual, and a basic, if well-presented, powerset; Cursor controls her flying cannonball thingie remotely, Mainframe can upgrade his fighting skills and size, Modem can materialise between electronic systems and it's not clear what Database can do, but he does appear to be linked to information acquisition. They would make a good "introductory" level group of villains for a novice hero or hero team (Much like the Female Furies, or the Wrecking Crew tend to be for their respective companies), but the fact they talk like stuffing Chris Claremont and a copy of Computer Weekly into a blender and pressing purée (metaphorically speaking of course) makes me a little relieved we never saw them again.
