Blog
Hawk & Dove
3/13/2021
I’m sitting down, planning out my rewrite of the pages for Hawk & Dove. We’re going to be mixing up their roll in the timeline a little, expanding their story, and including Dawn Granger. In preparation, I’ve actually gone out and read the bulk of their in-continuity appearances… and I wound up having so many opinions that I’m struggling to fit them all into the character pages. There are two major comic creators I want to talk about, questions about moral ideologies in different eras of American pop culture, even some thoughts about sexualization of female characters…. It’s a lot. I thought that, rather than try to stretch the three character pages to include all of this, I’d do it here.
Before I start, though, I should add a disclaimer; this is going to be a lot of opinions. My opinions. I’m fully aware that the internet is already full to bursting with peoples opinions on some of these topics, so if you disagree with some of them, that’s fine. We’re under no obligation to agree with each other… particularly in a field that doesn’t really affect anything, like how we interpret fifty-year-old comic characters.
Before I start, though, I should add a disclaimer; this is going to be a lot of opinions. My opinions. I’m fully aware that the internet is already full to bursting with peoples opinions on some of these topics, so if you disagree with some of them, that’s fine. We’re under no obligation to agree with each other… particularly in a field that doesn’t really affect anything, like how we interpret fifty-year-old comic characters.
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First of all, we should talk about Steve Ditko. While there are a ton of characters to his credit, Ditko is generally considered one of the most important comic creators of all time because of his work on Spider-Man. He co-created the character and is responsible for the first 39 issues, which collectively have defined the character pretty much forever. It’s hard to overstate just how profound his influence on comics as a whole has been just from that work alone.
I’m sure you’re already familiar with Ditko’s well-known belief in Objectivism, the moral philosophy of Ayn Rand. I’m not going to be able to say anything about Rand and Objectivism that isn’t already being said by much smarter people than me, so I’ll just invite you to do your own reading here. Ditko was pretty adamant that his beliefs WEREN’T an influence on his work, but I’m hardly the first person to say that the influence is pretty evident. His later characters constantly play with the relationship between external reality and personal morality, and these ideas are clearly heavily at play in the concept behind Hawk & Dove. |
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You can sort of see why he didn’t stick around, though. Conceptually, Hawk & Dove was clearly built on the growing division among Americans in the late sixties. People that support the war efforts vs people that don’t. In practice, this was depicted in the comics by having each character follow two very distinct behaviors, although the comic seemed to suggest that these were one and the same. Hawk was extremely fast to use violence, while Dove basically refused to ever even hit anyone. By itself, in a comic book, where stories are basically parables of good and evil told entirely through punching bad guys, this immediately puts Dove at a disadvantage, although over the years it’s gotten fun to see all the ways writers have chosen to interpret this.
What really seemed to cause the initial concept of Hawk & Dove to not quite function correctly, I think, is that Hawk was all about immediately taking personal action, regardless of consequences, while Dove was so obsessed with worrying about consequences that he would often not take action at all. While the book tried to make it seem like these were two extreme takes on the original moral divide, it is really, really hard to suggest, in a world of superheroes, that the character who wants to not take action is in any way right. These are fictional stories. The whole narrative thrust of fiction DEPENDS on the characters taking action. If the entire call to action is “one character dives in heedless of consequences and the other follows him begrudgingly out of familial duty that he resents”, you’re really setting up that second character to be hated. |
Which is unfortunate, because there was absolutely space here to explore something about the roles non-violence and personal moral responsibility played in the world of superheroes. After six issues, however, the original book ended, and Hawk & Dove became supporting characters in the Teen Titans. Dove died in the final issue of the Crisis of Infinite Earths (notably saving some kids in the middle of a disaster, in a perhaps ironic display of being selflessly proactive), and soon we were introduced to a new partnership as Hank Hall met the new Dove, Dawn Granger.
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This is really where the bulk of the Hawk & Dove appearances happen. They started with a five issue miniseries by an upcoming 21-year-old comic phenom before they got their own ongoing series that ran for a full 28 issues. On the surface, it solves the basic problem the original duo struggled with, because Dawn didn’t equate non-violence with inaction. She was actively working to be a superhero. Now that we had two equally active participants in this superhero duo, they should have been primed to actually dive into some very interesting questions about morality and the role of violence in these stories. So what stopped them?
Rob Liefield. |
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I’m exaggerating here. Rob Liefield is very much the Michael Bay of comics. He knows what he likes and draws it. In this case, however, I actually think that Rob’s penchant for big muscles and big guns and unnecessarily sexualized women were all actually still in their formative years, that he was being forged in the same fires of Reagan & Rambo’s America that were likewise forging the comic he was drawing. In short, it was just a time where pop culture wanted big dumb violent heroes with easily sexualized female sidekicks, and Rob was very good at delivering. As hard as the Hawk & Dove series worked to expand the mythology of these characters, the basic archetypes at play had pretty thoroughly shifted.
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The really frustrating thing is that this core concept feels like it’s so compelling. In the language of today, you’re talking about a conservative superhero and a liberal superhero, and who doesn’t want to see that pulled off? Ultimately, though, it’s practically unusable because there’s no way a writer or reader could execute this concept without bringing in their own biases as to what a conservative or liberal character IS.
Of course, a Moral Objectivist like Ditko wouldn’t buy that, he would believe that there is moral truth that exists outside of the perspective of the people involved, and maybe that dichotomy is why he quit in the first place. |
Personally, I can see how back in the 60s the distinction between conservatve and liberal would look like pro-war & pro-action vs anti-war and anti-action, but those perspectives really don’t hold up in a modern context. In fact… my opinion here… I’d go so far as to say that the roles are practically reversed, with conservative ideology now favoring inaction, and liberal ideology being considerably more proactive. I’m pretty sure that’s not a take a conservative reader would appreciate, however, so while the version of Dawn I’ve presented here is very much based on modern, dynamic, youthful activism, Hank is not going to be an attempt to represent a modern day conservative. It's just not really an archetype I'm interested in depicting.