Hawk
25 years ago - Hank Hall & his twin brother Don Hall are born.
9 years ago - 16-year-old Hank & Don 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 Hank & Don 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 Hank & Don 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. Hank tries to cope with his loss by diving headfirst into his Hawk identity, but rapidly begins descending into chaos.
5 years ago - 20-year-old Hank's connection to T'Charr is slowly weakened as he becomes more violent, his Hawk identity shifting into Kestral, empowered instead by M'Shulla, another Lord of Chaos with far more sinister motivations. Dawn Granger, the new vessel for Terataya, who manages to save him from himself and restore his original powers, battling Kestral together. She helps Hank deal from his loss and begin rebuilding himself.
3 years ago - 22-year-old Hank starts taking classes again, becoming roommates with new student Dawn Granger, their proximity empowering them to call on their magic and adventure into the Paths Beyond together, exploring the realms of the Lords of Chaos and Order.
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.
Hank'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. |
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After Don's death in the pages of the Crisis of Infinite Earths, Hawk next appeared in a miniseries drawn by future Image comic founder Rob Liefield that introduced his new partner Dawn Granger, as well as a conceptual expansion on the twosome and their powers. They were empowered by extradimensional beings of Chaos & Order. Hawk in particular, a vessel for a Lord of Chaos, was constantly struggling against the violent influence of his patron, and could lose himself without the guidance of Dawn. It was a pretty cool direction for the series to take, and the miniseries led into an ongoing series that lasted a full 28 issues.
Unfortunately, Hank was never a very likeable character. Originally designed as a depiction of the most aggressive beliefs of the sixties, he continued to do that in the eighties, and the result was... well, the dude was an asshole. Aggressive, violent, sexist, racist... Sure, you could say he was acting that way because of the influence of an extradimensional lord of chaos, but that didn't really make him fun to read. In the major DC crossover Armageddon 2001, part of the mystery was the identity of the future despot, Monarch. When the secret (that it was Captain Atom) was leaked, they chose to shift at the last minute, and make it Hank. He was now an archvillain, soon also responsible for the continuity resetting crossover Zero Hour, along with Hal Jordan's Parallax. While he's made a few appearances since, this was more or less the end of Hank. |
Hank & DonThere needs to be a very clear distinction between Hank while he works with Don, and Hank after Don's death. When he's working with his brother, while the whole concept is that they're supposed to be diametrically opposed, they need to be at least in agreement that they're going to be superheroes together. Sure, they can be arguing and ripping into each other the whole time, but they at least need to have an equal desire to rise up and take action. Hank can be tougher, more willing to get his hands dirty, but should avoid being an actual hateful person, because no matter how tough he's supposed to be, we still need to LIKE the guy.
Other than the relationship between the characters, we actually don't have to change much about their story at all. They are first empowered when their father is kidnapped. Their opinions about how to help are so diametrically opposed that they first catch the attention of lords of chaos & order who grant them their powers as a sort of experiment. From there, they go join the Teen Titans West, and are prolific heroes there until the tragic events of the Qurac bombing where Hank loses his brother. |
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Hank & DawnWithout a companion influenced by a Lord of Order, Hank starts to lose himself, becoming far more violent and unpredictable. In the comics, Kestral is a spell cast by other Lords of Chaos and sent to draw Hank to them. We're going to take that a step further, giving Hank a full year to actually slowly devolve, losing his Hawk identity and instead BECOMING Kestral. It's only when Dawn comes to him, earns his trust, and helps him process his own grief that he's able to push Kestral out, becoming Hawk again, and actually gets to fight and defeat his own rage as an external entity.
We really like being able to use these characters to tell this story about learning to deal with grief, but from there we actually don't really need to have these two out there punching badguys. Instead, we'll take a cue from the 80's series and tie them in more to the world of magic, letting them explore the Paths Beyond and interact with the Lords of Chaos and Order more directly. By focusing more directly on specific stories, this feels like a better way to use these characters and give them their own space. |
Allies & Teams
