Don Hall
25 years ago - Don Hall & his twin brother Hank Hall are born.
9 years ago - 16-year-old Don & Hank Hall's father, a federal judge, is kidnapped. Desperate to help him but with diametrically opposed opinions on the right way to do so, the brothers attract the attention of T'Charr & Terataya, lower lords of chaos & order that had secretly fallen in love. They are empowered to summon magical powers as Hawk & Dove, saving their father.
7 years ago - 18-year-old Don & Hank Hall start college, moving into their apartment. They go with the Teen Titans West to Tartarus to rescue Lilith Clay from the Elder Titans of Myth.
6 years ago - 19-year-old Don & Hank Hall and the Teen TItans West try to stop the Ravens from stealing a nuclear weapon, but are decimated when Cheshire detonates the bomb in Qurac. Don is killed. Don begins appearing in dreams to Dawn Granger, the newly chosen vessel of Terataya.
Hawk & Dove are a strange legacy in DC comics... they've appeared consistently, if sporadically, for decades. They've had roles in major crossovers and team books. They've even appeared in the live action Titans series. By almost every conceivable metric, they are successful comic book characters. Yet they've never really seemed to grow out of the role of perpetual background characters. There IS a place for them in the larger DC story, though, and as long as we try to keep to it, they should work.
Don's Comic HistoryHank & Don Hall both first showed up in Showcase #75 in 1968 in a story by Steve Skeates and some guy named Steve Ditko. It was a story of two teenagers with diametrically opposed belief systems both given mysterious super powers, and showed how they both reacted to them. It was more of a thought exercise than a traditional superhero story, but Showcase was actually really good at giving space for unorthodox stories. Within five issues of this one, the series introduced the Creeper, Angel & Ape, and Dolphin.
The idea was interesting enough for Hawk & Dove to be given their own short series that ran for six issues, and the characters continued to make occasional guest appearances over in the Teen Titans through the seventies before becoming members of the spinoff team Teen Titans West. The book was cancelled not long after that, and like most former Teen Titans they were considered retired during the publication of the New Teen Titans in the early eighties. They 'came out of retirement' during the Crisis of Infinite Earths, where Don Hall was killed. It was actually a pretty noble death, but it happened shortly after the fall of Barry Allen, one of the most important deaths in comic history, so you'd be forgiven for glossing over it. |
Don & Hank HallI just did a whole blog post about the way these characters interact with each other, so I won't bore you with it here. We're not really changing much about these characters' story, or their origins, but there are some basic changes we have to make to their overall dynamic if we want them to actually function.
Basically, while they can have some fundamental disagreements about tactics and methods, both characters have to be in agreement about the actual necessity of being a superhero. When the need arises, they both need to be equally willing to act. This is really more of an issue for Don than it is for Hank, but by putting them on equal footing and making them partners, both characters just make more sense. We'll do more with Hank as his story evolves, but just making this basic change makes Don a much better character, and his time as a partner with his brother and a teammate of the Teen Titans West all just make so much more sense. |