Review: Hawk and Dove Vol. 1: First Strikes trade paperback (DC Comics)

The DC Comics New 52 debut Hawk and Dove: First Strikes had the elements for success. Sterling Gates had written character-heavy stories in Green Lantern Corps and especially Supergirl, such to suggest he could explore well Hawk and Dove's often-complicated private lives. Rob Liefeld, love him or hate him, was there at this Hawk and Dove's "old" DC Universe conception, and brought a sense of legacy and continuity to the title.

These elements never quite come together, however, before the title is cancelled at the end of this volume. Gates's story has potential but doesn't distinguish itself before Liefeld takes writing chores. Liefeld's art starts relatively strongly but loses detail as the book continues, and his writing equally lacks the verve needed for modern audiences. By the end, First Strikes is just not all that interesting, and its cancellation seems right and justified.

[Review contains spoilers]

Sterling Gates's issues of Hawk and Dove see the duo fighting rival bird avatars trying to steal their power, while also dealing with fissures in their own partnership. Hawk and Dove's relationship to the Lords of Order and Chaos who granted their powers has been explored before, but Gates hints at a mythology involving a War Circle of avatars like Hawk -- and at the same time, that Dove's powers may come from somewhere else, and that her abilities may be greater than she or Hawk knew before.

More compelling than new villain Condor and the War Circle, however, is Gates's depiction of the interaction between Hawk Hank Hall and Dove Dawn Granger. Their partnership, here at the beginning of the newly-rebooted DC Universe, is thornier than in their old title's later years -- often they're fighting their enemies side-by-side but not necessarily together. Hank resents Dawn replacing his brother Don as Dove; he also worries that Dawn's boyfriend Deadman may hurt Hawk and Dove's effectiveness, even as he purposefully tries not to be too involved in Dawn's personal life. Dawn hides a new secret past that involves some connection to Don (never, unfortunately revealed in this book) and struggles to balance her role as peacekeeper with her more violent tendencies. That Hank and Dove are young, conflicted, and represent different approaches to superheroing has always made them compelling; all of this is a sound foundation with the potential to drive the series forward.

But Gates's story takes five issues to unfold, including two set at a White House banquet that are almost entirely an action sequence. There are nice touches here for Hawk and Dove fans -- the appearance of old characters like Hank's father and ex-girlfriend Ren, and a mention of Dawn's old boyfriend Sal -- but the story moves slowly. Condor largely tells Hawk and Dove about the War Circle in exposition, such that it's not vivid as a story piece, and there's few other supporting cast or subplots for Hawk and Dove to feel like a fully-realized world.

For the last three issues, Rob Liefeld writes as well as draws. Liefeld gets points for a generally smooth transition -- even as First Strikes's plot begins to go in a different direction, Liefeld roots it in the War Circle mythology, such that it would be easy to think Hawk and Dove has just one writer overall. Liefeld's first solo issue, however, is an unremarkable Batman story; Hawk and Dove are sporadically lectured and praised by Batman, the kind of Batman story that readers have seen hundreds of times and that could as easily have starred Hawk and Dove as Booster Gold or any other second-tier hero. In Liefeld's second and third issues, he pits Hawk and Dove against the sorcerer D'Khan and his henchman, the Hunter; these are silly characters who speak in clichés and whose costumes are severely dated, and by the end there's little in the book to interest a modern reader. When First Strikes ends, to some extent, it's a blessing.

It becomes difficult to actually "see" Rob Liefeld's art, to separate one's opinion of what's actually on Liefeld's page from the work he's done before or his own exaggerated persona. Comic book art need not be proportional nor anatomically correct, nor are artistic tics necessarily a bad thing -- Liefeld demonstrates here a tendency toward open mouths and clenched teeth, but this is no better or worse necessarily than Walt Simonson's squarish heads, Barry Kitson's solid-shaped hair, or Gary Frank's pointed chins. There are times in First Strikes where Liefeld's work is quite outstanding, often it seems when the artist has relaxed a bit -- his Dove on the book's cover, if one ignores the over-stretched Hawk next to her; or the scene where Hawk and Dove question Condor in a police station, where the de-powered villain looks quite menacing.

Where Liefeld's art begs detraction, instead, are instances like the Batman chapter, where Robin Damian Wayne is almost the size of Dove -- as if he were Red Robin Tim Drake and not Damian -- until he shrinks no larger than Dove's thigh in the final scene. There's also a sequence where the villain Blockbuster tries to steal an amulet from Hawk -- Liefeld doesn't draw the amulet at all until pages later when it suddenly appears around Hawk's neck just as Blockbuster grabs it. Liefeld's panels are the most dynamic especially in the book's first issues; afterward, a variety of inkers (including Liefeld himself) give the black lines a sketchy look that lessens the impact of Liefeld's figures. And Liefeld's character designs, especially toward the end of the book, hearken too much to the nineties to be useable now.

The original Hawk and Dove series by Barbara and Karl Kesel was a fan-favorite, and the title's New 52 resurrection in Hawk and Dove: First Strikes was equally welcome. Much like the DC New 52 Static Shock, one has to hope that the characters have enough life to them that they can survive what was simply not a strong enough debut. Neither Gates nor Liefeld did anything wrong necessarily -- in comparison to Static Shock, Gates and Liefeld's book is cogent, just not exciting, whereas Static failed to tell a clear story month to month. Given all the work done by Geoff Johns and others to bring Hawk and Dove back to the DC Universe proper after years in limbo following Armageddon 2001 it would be a significant shame for these characters to fall by the wayside again for good.

[Includes full covers, character designs by Jim Lee and sketchbook by Rob Liefeld]

Next week -- the DC Comics New 52 Deathstroke is full of blood and ... irony? Batman: The Dark Knight is the best team book you're not reading? New reviews coming up -- be here!

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Review: Hawk and Dove (Kesel) trade paperback (DC Comics)

I'm not sure why I didn't read Karl and Barbara Kesel's Hawk and Dove miniseries and series when it first came out. Ultimately, however, my first introduction to Hawk and Dove was at their apparent end, in Armageddon 2001, when the future villain Monarch killed Dove so that Hawk would become Monarch in turn.

I was not up on the comics industry scuttlebutt at the time, and it wasn't until later that I learned that Captain Atom was meant to be Monarch and not Hawk. In my initial read, the suggestion that Captain Atom was Monarch at the end of Justice League Europe Annual #2 seemed an obvious red herring, and Hawk progression to Monarch made sense -- Monarch being the seemingly totalitarian despot hiding seething anger underneath, the perfect combination of Hawk's chaos under a misguided attempt at Dove's order.

Given my overall nostalgia for Armageddon 2001, the subsequent use of the Hawk and Dove characters have therefore held a special place for me -- when Monarch became Extant in Zero Hour, the JSA's revenge against Extant and the return of Dove in Geoff Johns's JSA series, and then the introduction of the new Hawk in Teen Titans (another reason why, even if the quality is so-so, I'd have liked to see the uncollected Hawk and Dove issues of Teen Titans appear somewhere other than the DC Comics Presents book).

[Contains spoilers]

With the first Hawk resurrected as of Blackest Night, my growing understanding through the DC Trade Paperback Timeline of Hawk's appearances in Booster Gold and Suicide Squad after Crisis on Infinite Earths but before the initial Hawk and Dove miniseries, and especially the announcement that Supergirl's Sterling Gates would team with original series artist Rob Liefeld for a new Hawk and Dove title in the DC Relaunch, I thought it was more than past time to check that original book out.

Hawk and Dove is most certainly rough in all the ways one might expect a collection from 1993 to be rough. The printing is done such that most shading and color is made up of fine dots, giving every panel a wavy pattern to it; the colors routinely bleed over the lines and even cover over intended white space if the details are too small. The clothes and especially hairstyles of the characters are ridiculously dated, but I think that's a sign of the times and not necessarily something for which one can blame Liefeld. To Liefeld's credit, this story at the beginning of his career offers suitable superheroic art without much of the exaggeration his work would take on later.

And in the book's introduction, Karl Kesel himself notes some awkwardness to the book's writing. Most egregious to me is that between the first issue, where Hawk Hank Hall and his friends meet Dawn Granger (Dove, unbeknownst to them), Dawn never gets a chance to introduce herself, but by the next issue Hank knows her name and she's become an established part of their circle of friends. Also the story's main villain, Kestrel, bestows some of his power to a street tough that takes on the name "Shadowblade" -- a better example I don't think you could find of the kind of ridiculous throwaway character one could expect from early 1990s comics.

One should forgive Hawk and Dove's flaws, however, coming from a creative team new to comics, especially given how the concept of this Hawk and Dove would continue to stir in comics' imaginations a good twenty years later. One thing I like about the Kesels' structure of the miniseries is that, even as Dove's secret identity is perfectly obvious to the reader from the first issue, the writers keep Hawk in the dark until almost the end, and tell the story to the reader from Hawk's perspective. As such, the story is very much Hawk's -- deservingly so, since Hawk has been a DC character since at least the 1970s -- and charts Hawk's emotional journey to the acceptance of the death of his brother, the original Dove. That the Kesels tell the story in this unusual way, from the perspective of only one side of the team, may reflect their early writing inexperience, but it's a choice that I think distinguishes the book overall.

Second, in the few original Hawk and Dove issues that I read and also here, I like what the Kesels build in terms of Hank and Dawn's supporting cast. In contrast to today's Green Lantern or Flash, which have little "normal" supporting cast to speak of, the Kesels portray Hank and Dawn as ongoing college students, with a group of slightly loopy friends who tease one another, go on dates, and get together for coffee. It's remarkably normal, a throwback to the Seinfeld and Friends era of things. I applaud the miniseries for being convincingly youthful, something Titans of late has failed to achieve. There's a good tone here, and despite lacking a little polish, that alone made the book worth the read when I finished.

In following the DC Universe, what has fascinated me are the little unexplored eras -- that after Crisis, Hawk-sans-Dove did a stint in Nicaragua with the Suicide Squad, referenced in the Hawk and Dove book, before the new Dove showed up. Hawk and Dove may not deserve a firm place on your bookshelf, but with the pair making appearances in Birds of Prey and soon to headline their own series once again, I recommend giving the collected miniseries a glance. It's a fair enough introduction to these two characters, enjoyable despite the rough spots.

[Contains full covers (with logos, no less!), introductions by both Karl and Barbara Kesel]

More on the DC Relaunch coming up, plus Zach King's next in our series of Invisibles reviews, and next week ... Time Masters!

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