Hawk
& Dove 1993 (SC TPB) 128 pgs.
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Hawk
& Dove 1993 (SC TPB) 128 pgs.
Written by Barbara Kesel (a.k.a. Barbara Randall) and
Karl Kesel. Pencils by Rob Liefeld. Inks by Karl Kesel.
Colours: Glenn Whitmore. Letters: Janice Chiang. Editors: Mirk Carlin,
Renee Witterstaetter.
Reprinting: Hawk & Dove #1-5 (1988-1989 mini-series)
Rating: * * 1/2 (out of 5)
Number of readings: 2
Published by DC Comics
This re-invention of Hawk and Dove (after the original
Dove was killed off) has a similarly-powered villain, Kestrel, looking
for Hawk, apparently for recruitment purposes, and killing just about everyone
who gets in his way...literally. Meanwhile Hawk has to deal with the fact
that a woman has cropped up wearing his dead brother's costume...and he
doesn't know who she is.
The story starts out well, with a secondary plot involving
thugs working for a mysterious chemical company. The non-super scenes of
Hank (Hawk) Hall at University, meeting some new buddies, is fun, with
good dialogue. Even the humour of Hawk portrayed, basically, as a moron,
blundering his way through situations even as he thinks he's the cat's
meow, is kind of fun. And the idea of treating Dove's identity as a mystery
is unusual.
Unfortunately...
Barbara and Karl Kesel haven't delivered sufficient plot
to justify 111 pages. Turns out Kestrel and the chemical company are connected,
and Kestrel's plan follows a simple recipe: draw Hawk out with some violent
attack, try to recruit him to the Lords of Chaos, if he refuses, try to
kill him -- then repeat, ad nauseum. The "domestic" scenes of Hank
and his college buds never really go anywhere, or develop the characters
beyond the opening few scenes. And the mystery of Dove is, well, pretty
obvious (and avoid the introductory essays until after you've read
the story). Most damning of all, the story never resolves anything. Kestrel
keeps dropping cryptic references as to how Hawk and Dove don't know who
gave them their powers, or why...and then never provides the answers. Sure,
you get some hints, but I assume it was left for the regular series to
fill in the blanks.
Ultimately, this is another multi-issue story that sags
under its own length. The dialogue is good and condensed into, say, three
issues, I might've enjoyed it more.
The series is pretty action heavy, but action should be
more than just repetitive fight scenes dragged out over many pages. You
need a sense of a goal, of accomplishment, and a sense of variety. Since
Kestrel wants Hawk, and Hawk and Dove want Kestrel, it limits the story
options.
I was out of comics during Rob Liefeld's rise to stardom,
and know nothing about him except that this was among his earliest work.
Here he gets the job done, nothing more. There are awkward bits with perspective,
with it unclear which character is in the fore ground; his eye for knowing
what to emphasize is weak (the bad guys wear stylized bracelets...but even
knowing that, and flipping back to early scenes, it's hard to notice them);
and as the chapters progress Hawk begins to look more and more like an
ageing sumo wrestler -- no kidding! There's also a character who, I think,
is supposed to be Asian...but you wouldn't know it. The art isn't terrible,
but I certainly wouldn't have pegged him as a guy on the verge of fan adulation.
However, I've always like Janice Chiang's lettering.
Now on to the highbrow stuff.
Never more than cult characters, the original Hawk and
the Dove were created in the '60s, epitomizing their namesakes: an aggressor
and a pacifist. Added to the mix was the fact that they were bickering
brothers, giving the "symbols" very human grounding. Supposedly creator/artist
Steve Ditko (a bit of a conservative) left the series after he felt the
scripts were being slanted too much against Hawk. But though a lot of comic
folks claim they're Liberals, it was clear (bearing in mind I've
read only a few -- a very few -- stories over the years) that they didn't
quite know what to do with Dove, or how to write a story where a pacifist
might be effective. Too entrenched in the action/fisticuffs of comics as
they were, Dove's pacifism was reduced, sometimes, to hitting people with
his butt (I kid you not) as if, by not using his fists, it made it non-violent.
Logically, the stories should revolve around the characters trying to resolve
problems as much as beat up bad guys, but such sophisticated storytelling
may have been beyond most writers. Bob Haney probably could've done it
-- he's written a lot of two-fisted storries, but also less knuckle-driven
adventures.
Finally, Marv Wolfman and the DC editors announced the
end to such '60s idealism by killing Dove off during the Crisis
on Infinite Earths debacle.
So how do '80s/'90s sensibilities deal with an ambitious,
allegorical concept intended to be an examination of a nation's soul?
By lobotomizing the whole premise, that's how.
This new Dove is not a pacifist. Instead, the dynamics
are between brains (Dove) and brawn (Hawk) -- or rather brains & brawn
(Dove) and just brawn (Hawk). This isn't even like the original Star Trek
TV series, where the contrast was between logic and emotion, and how each
philosophy had its strengths and weaknesses. Dove is the hero and Hawk
is the dork. Substituted for the real world politics of pacifism and aggression
is the fantasy ideologies of Order and Chaos -- stuff that was pretty cool
in Michael Moorcock books I read as a kid, and can even be nifty in a metaphysical
story, but here it just seems like what it presumably was: a retreat from
anything edgy or provocative or that might force the readers (and the writers)
to think! I shouldn't have been surprised by the change. After all, DC
made it clear what it thought of its resident pacifist...by killing him
off. But the terms "Hawk" and "Dove" don't stand for chaos and order,
they stand for war and peace. Still, try telling that to the geniuses
at DC. It's a bit like reinventing Batman as a guy with a grasshopper motif,
but still calling him Batman -- it don't make sense.
As well, by losing the brothers element, and the character
dynamics inherent in it, another, fairly unique aspect of the series is
gone. For that matter, Hawk no longer seems acrophobic. This new Hawk and
Dove are just a little more like any other super heroes. They no longer
represent anything tangible, they're no longer family, and since their
"extraordinary powers" were never very extraordinary...
A final thought on the violence of the thing. On one hand,
the story goes for glib humour and fun action...on the other hand, Kestrel
goes around brutally massacring scores of people. O.K., so DC upped the
bar on mass deaths by destroying whole planets simply for convenience in
its
Crisis on Infinite Earths, and Marvel gave us Carnage -- a Spider-Man
foe who's a super-powered serial killer. But it's still...disturbing at
times, the cavalier way death is handled. Consider: Don Hall is dead, no
more than a few months, but is Hank and, especially, his parents, really
portrayed in a way that seems at all convincing as a family that has lost
a son? Modern comics up the levels of violence and death...but fail entirely
to deal realistically with the repercussions.
The follow-up series, though it lasted longer than the
original, was still relatively short-lived (and even that may be nothing
to brag about, since my understanding is that the audience has so imploded
over the years, sales figures that are considered "a hit" today would've
resulted in an instant cancellation notice twenty years before). Subsequently,
I believe, this Dove was also been killed off and Hawk turned into a
villain. What their current status is, I don't know.
Cover price: $12.95 CDN./$9.95 USA
Written by Geoff Johns (plotting: Geoff Johns and James Robinson). Pencils
by Rags Morales, with Patrick Gleason. Inks by Michael Bair, with Christian
Alamy.
Hawkman: Endless Flight 2003 (SC TPB) 176 pages
Colours: John Kalisz. Letters: Bill Oakley, Kurt Hathaway. Editor:
Peter Tomasi, Ivan Cohen.
Reprinting: Hawkman (2002 series) #1-6, the lead story from Hawkman Secret Files #1
Rating: * * 1/2 (out of 5)
Number of readings: 1
Published by DC Comics
Additional notes: intro by Johns; cover gallery; data sheets and character profiles from Hawkman Secret Files #1
Hawkman has become, so I understand, one of the biggest victims of DC
Comics' constant obsession with re-inventing itself, and "clarifying" its
fictional reality. Because he's a high profile character (which means no
editor's quite prepared to put him out to pasture) without being that
commercially successful a character (meaning they're constantly putting a
fresh spin on him) it's actually hard to keep track of who and what Hawkman is
supposed to be.
Even after reading Geoff Johns' introduction to this collection of the
character's latest self-titled comic, I wasn't entirely sure. The long and the
short of it is that this Hawkman is basically modelled after the Golden Age
one: he's Carter Hall, the reincarnation of an Egyptian prince who fights
crime using his anti-gravity wings. Somehow this ties into the Silver Age
version of the character (who was from the planet Thanagar)...but I don't
think he's supposed to be that version of the character. Johns explains
all this in his intro...I just had trouble getting my brain around it.
Hawkgirl owes even less to previous versions. She's a new re-incarnation of
Hawkman's traditional love...but she doesn't remember any of that, so instead
of husband and wife, she tends to regard his advances with skepticism.
Wow. I've written three paragraphs and I haven't even tackled the stories
themselves!
The story here has the Hawks relocating to St. Roch (a thinly disguised
version of New Orleans) where they become affiliated with the local museum.
Hawkgirl's there because she's investigating the murder of her parents some
years before. Hawkman's there, well, because Hawkgirl is.
The museum is in danger of being bought out by a sinister rich dude, and
Hawkman and Hawkgirl whisk off to India looking for a museum employee who was
searching for an artifact that could turn the museum's fortunes around. Things
take a bizarre turn as Hawkman, and some old foes like Shadow Thief, find
themselves transported to another dimension, and caught up in a conflict
between races derived from Hindu myths. After that, it's a return to St. Roch,
and a team up with guest star Green Arrow to investigate a series of murders
that implicate him.
And, to be honest, I don't have a lot to say about it all. I didn't hate
it...but little excited me.
I mentioned in my review of the mini-series, The Legend of the Hawkman,
that I have a certain affection for the Hawks from their pre-Crisis days.
Maybe that was the problem. Maybe I brought too much baggage to the book,
comparing these characters to the ones that lived in my head.
I didn't really care about this version of the characters -- insofar as I
could get much sense for their personaliies at all. Both seemed kind of
blandly generic, except prone to bursts of unwelcome brutality, snarling
"Rahh!" in mid-battle, or gleefully employing excessive force (and
demonstrating implausible bursts of super strength). And true to what seems
policy at DC, they seem dumbed down a bit from the Silver Age versions. When a
character remarks that he's gotta polish up on his Hindi, Hawkgirl
sarcastically replies: "Don't we all." The message from the "new" DC seems to
be: who needs an education when you can hit things instead? Likewise, the
action scenes don't generally revolve around the characters thinking
their way to a solution, so much as just hitting harder than the opposition.
Johns clearly likes the tough guy aspect, harping on it in his introduction
as a characteristic he really wanted to employ.
There's something odd about wrapping a series around a character who even
guest star Green Arrow, acting as the voice of reason, criticizes for his
character flaws and brutality. (Without him being brutal enough that you can
say, ah, that's who he is, ala Valiant's X-O: Manowar).
And aside from those superficial traits, I never really felt Johns got me
into their heads. Yet the characters are why a reader is supposed to come
back, month after month!
The plotting is fast paced, and certainly flamboyant (particularly the
other dimensional stuff) but a bit vague, as if Johns and co-plotter James
Robinson were going through the motions. The stuff in India should've been
exciting and interesting (if one can forgive the arguably racist portrayal of
the Indian army as a bunch of corrupt thugs, or the imperialistic notion that
an American archaeologist can help himself to another country's national
treasures). And Hawkman discovers things are not all that they seem in the
other dimension. But the plot twists are pretty stock stuff, and kind of
rushed. Hawkman is captured and made a slave...and then escapes about three
pages later!
The plot with Green Arrow in St. Roch is also slight. They barely start to
investigate when Green Arrow basically lays out the solution for them. The
climactic fight is literally a whole issue of, well, fighting. To be fair,
there's a certain imagination at work, as the Arrow (who actually takes center
stage for the climax) squares off against another archer, and the fight seems
modelled after a John Woo scene as it takes them all over the room and back
again...but that still doesn't keep it from being repetitious and pointless.
And the sub-plots involving Hawkgirl's murdered parents and other things
don't get resolved...or even progress particularly.
The art by Rags Morales is, at times, quite stunning, with detailed
backgrounds, and well realized, dynamic figures, and artful, brooding shading,
with even a hint of someone like Michael Golden in the work. Yet even here I
quibble. For one thing, there's my common complaint that modern comic art can
seem a bit too...busy. With detailed backgrounds, and detailed figures, all
crammed into the same panel, the crucial impact of the scene can get lost in
the intricacies. And the scenes of the Hawk's flying just weren't as striking
as they should be. I mean, that's what Hawkman has going for him: his cool
costume, his neat-o wings, and that he flies. When the Hawks rise into the
air, you want a sense of these majestic, birdlike beings swooping through the
sky. I didn't feel Morales captured that. He was more interested in the big
muscles, the swinging clubs, the action, the fighting, but not so much the
majesty.
Even I recognize I'm nitpicking. I mean, I acknowledged Morales is a good
artist...then quibble that he didn't really capture the essence of the Hawks
in flight? I acknowledge the pacing is brisk, (some) of the stories
flamboyant...then say they were simplistically developed? But reading is a
visceral experience...and viscerally I didn't like the characters, or even
feel they were particularly well developed. Re-reading some old, pre-Crisis
Hawkman stories I have by writers ranging from Gardner Fox to Bob Rozakis...I
actually was caught up in them more than I was by these issues! A second
reading might soften my stance (as it did with Legend of the Hawkman)
but, for now, childhood affection notwithstanding, nothing really grabbed me
or made me interested in pursuing subsequent adventures.
Cover price: $21.95 CDN./ $12.95 USA.
Written by Paul Levitz. Pencils by Joe Staton. Inks by Steve Mitchell, Bob Smith, Bob Layton, with Bruce Patterson, Jerry Ordway and Mike DeCarlo.
The Huntress: Darknight Daughter 2006 (SC TPB) 224 pages
Colours/letters: various
Reprinting: the Huntress stories from DC Super Stars #17, Batman Family #18-20, Wonder Woman (1st series) #271-287, 289-290, 294-295 (1977-1982)
Rating: * * * (out of 5)
Number of readings: 1
Additional notes: intro by Paul Levitz
Published by DC Comics
The Huntress, in current DC Comics continuity, is Helena Bertinelli, the daughter of a mob boss who fights on the side of justice. Prior to that, the Huntress was Helena Wayne, the daughter of Batman and Catwoman on the alternate world of Earth 2 (it was that version of the character that served as a loose inspiration for the version in the TV series, Birds of Prey). Initially created in the 1970s to join the ranks of the Justice Society (Earth 2 heroes appearing in a then revival of All-Star Comics), the Huntress was launched off into a solo series of back up tales, most notably in the pages of Wonder Woman (until the Crisis on Infinite Earths which eliminated Earth 2, therefore the Earth 2 Batman, therefore, this Huntress).
But as DC has begun re-acknowledging its multiple worlds concept, it has released some TPB collections of its old Earth 2 stories...including this collection of the solo adventures of the pre-Crisis Huntress (including her origin tale).
Though never having read a solo Huntress tale, I picked this up for various reasons. One, just because it's sometimes fun to try something precisely because you aren't that familiar with it, two, because I do have a fondness for the Earth 2 reality and, three, because the series was comprised of short 8-10 page instalments. (I know it sounds funny to buy something based on the page count of the chapters, but I've sometimes enjoyed collections of such shorter format series, such as Showcase presents the Elongated Man or Marvel Masterworks: The Sub-Mariner).
These stories are all written by Paul Levitz and drawn by Joe Staton, the duo who created the Huntress in the pages of All-Star Comics. In his intro, Levitz points out that he was pretty young when he wrote these and acknowledges it probably shows. I would also add that though Levitz has climbed to the very heights of the biz (President of DC Comics itself) he was probably never more than a capable writer. I've certainly enjoyed Levitz's stuff on things like the JSA and his long run of the Legion of Super Heroes is well regarded and produced some great stories. But he never really developed a "voice" or a something you could identify as his particular strength or style. He's just a decent, working writer.
Which probably explains why the result here is...okay. Nothing more, nothing less.
The plots rarely manage to be more than filler material. And though Levitz tries to introduce a supporting cast...not much is done with them (maybe a problem of the short page count of the instalments). Likewise, sub-plots just seem half-heartedly introduced and developed. Even a burgeoning romance with a DA, and its complications when he learns Helena's secret and is unsure if he can deal with it (cleverly reversing the gender cliches) never quite becomes involving, because we never much care about the relationship. (Ironically, a sequence where the now adult, Earth 2 Robin shows up for a few chapters creates a more intriguing romantic tension).
Above all, Huntress herself is pretty bland and clean cut. Too often heroines were not given the same character range as male heroes (who could be dark and brooding, or wisecracking, or nebbishy, etc.) Levitz has trouble quite coming up with a distinctive core to the character. Surely the gimmick with Huntress -- despite being driven to become a crime fighter by the death of her mother -- is that crime fighting is more the family business than a driving obsession. But instead of seeing that as an off beat motive, Levitz wants to portray her as a character who "has" to do what she does (hence the tension with the DA who loves her but not her lifestyle).
Part of the fun of Earth 2 stories is the way they can draw upon a whole separate mythos and pantheon of heroes and villains -- but there are surprisingly few guest stars: her JSA team mate Power Girl crops up for a story arc, and the aforementioned Robin, and occasionally Earth 2 villains like Solomon Grundy appear.
There are some decent tales. A three parter involving a prison break/riot is a memorable tale, providing an off beat backdrop. And other stories are okay page turners. Particularly towards the end there's a nice story arc, that benefits from the fact that it is less a single story, than separate adventures that build upon each other.
Joe Staton's an artist I kind of like, but can be a mixed bag, as his style is often kind of loose and cartoony. Some series he can really make his own because they play to his strengths, such as the shape shifting Plastic Man, or memorable runs on Green Lantern. But there's less of an obvious visual "key" to the Huntress series, so sometimes Staton's loose, cartoony art just seems kind of, well, loose and cartoony. (Though he does go for an unexpected bit of cheesecake here and there, with Helena sometimes in cleavage barring bath robes and the like). Different inkers bring different things to Staton's pencils, and I actually preferred the stories toward the end where inkers like Bruce Patterson and Jerry Ordway bring a more realist finish to Staton's pencils. Yeah -- you loose some of the feel of Staton's art (the two Ordway inked chapters you'd barely realize it was Staton drawing) but it maybe suits the more down to earth nature of the character.
This collection doesn't represent the whole of the Huntress' solo stories -- her stint as a Wonder Woman back up continued for another couple of years. But this represents the entirety of Levitz' full credit scripts (he received a plot credit on one or two other stories). And though Staton stuck around longer, he too handed over the reigns to other artists. So although this does form a surprisingly self-contained collection -- the final story arc resolves, and the romantic thread with the DA isn't left dangling -- there are a few other minor threads that don't go anywhere.
Ultimately, this collection of 1970s/early '80s stories are basically what they are. Nothing particularly special or noteworthy -- this isn't some long lost classic run. At the same time, there's nothing egregiously wrong with them either.
Cover price: $__ CDN./ $19.99 USA.
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