Review: Hawk and Dove Vol. 1- First Strikes
Quick Summary
Pros: The first half of the book presents a compelling mystery that builds up a lot of excitement for the second half of the book.
Cons: The second half of the book completely drops any interest that the first half built up. Hawk and Dove are both characterized poorly. The book’s conclusion is generic and boring. The artwork has a lot of small flaws that bring it down.
Overall: This is a book that starts out alright but completely destroys all of its positives as it enters its second half. It draws readers in with the promise of an interesting conspiracy that has the potential to improve everything about the series. It then drops this mystery and ends the book and series without answering any of the questions it brought up. In addition, poorly characterized main characters, a jarring writer transition, and a generic conclusion weigh down this already sinking ship. If you are looking for a book that will build up your hopes only to disappoint you in the end, this is for you.
Story
Hawk and Dove Vol. 1: First Strikes, by Sterling Gates and Rob Liefeld, is a book with a lot of promise that ultimately loses it all by the time it concludes. Right out of the gate, there are problems; the initial threat is generic and neither Hawk nor Dove are endearing enough to pull readers into their drama. However, these problems can be overlooked because the conspiracy that is being slowly revealed promises to present a far more interesting threat and help develop the main characters. Unfortunately, this compelling mystery is completely discarded before it can play out, leaving numerous questions unanswered and tons of potential untapped. Instead, the book tells a few short and generic superhero stories before the series is finally cancelled. This book’s biggest positive directly leads to its biggest negative and makes this a volume that only manages to excel in disappointing.
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The beginning of the book doesn’t do much to impress. It starts out with Hawk and Dove fighting a generic horde of zombies and then delves into the duo’s personal life. The problem here is that Hawk’s unpleasant personality makes his personal life unpleasant to read, and Dove’s personal life isn’t expanded upon enough to be entertaining. The book flirts with problems surrounding Hawk’s grief over the loss of his brother and his current issues with relationships and school, yet doesn’t commit to anything long enough to build any real interest.
Instead, the real interest comes from the closest thing this book has to a main villain. Condor is introduced as another avatar of war who has knowledge of a secret organization known as the “Circle.” He reveals that Hawk and Dove’s powers are not particularly unique and that the duo are just one small piece of a much larger conspiracy. Reading about this mystery got me legitimately excited for this book and honestly started to make up for some of the problems that I had in the beginning.
However, before this mystery can be elaborated on at all, the writing team switches from Gates to Leifeld and the mystery is dropped completely. Multiple questions about Dove’s past, Hawk’s future, and the “Circle” are never addressed again and are left without anything close to an answer. Even plotlines that do receive some semblance of resolution are poorly handled; for example, Dove’s relationship with Deadman is ended so suddenly that it lost any emotional appeal it could have had. Something went wrong with how this series was handled and, unfortunately, it killed just about any hope this book had.
The end of the book contains a few chapters of stories that are so generic they could star two completely different heroes and remain completely unchanged. There is nothing here that provides anything more than fleeting interest, neither of the heroes become any more compelling, and issues involving sexism and logic show up far too often. For example, Dove refuses to kill one of the chapter’s villains yet has no problem with allowing Hawk to finish him off. This portion of the book fails in more ways than one and provides a disappointing end to both this volume and this series.
(spoilers end here)
Art
If you were to take a cursory glance at this book, you would likely determine that the artwork, by Rob Liefeld, looks alright but isn’t anything special. Nothing in particular would jump out as being either good or bad and the overall impression would be that this book looks incredibly average. However, anything beyond a cursory glance reveals a number of small flaws throughout the work that really start to add up by the end of the book.
For starters, characters’ expressions are either exaggerated to the point where they border on comedic or are so overused that they become annoying to look at; Hawk and Condor are two big offenders here as both characters have the exact same grimace on their face for the vast majority of the book. Then, there are more than a few places in this book where the structure of the artwork is confusing or a dialogue bubble points to the wrong character. In addition to this, every female character is ridiculously sexualized any time they are not wearing a costume. Small grievances like these make a big difference when they can be found in such large quantity and really drag down an otherwise decent looking book.
Continuity
Hawk and Dove Vol. 1: First Strikes starts the Hawk and Dove New 52 series. This means that this is the first volume in a brand new continuity, so there are not many references to previous books or Hawk and Dove’s history.
The Hawk and Dove series was cancelled after this volume. They make one small appearance in issue #0 of DC Universe Presents, collected in DC Universe Presents Vol. 2: Vandal Savage, but are mostly absent from comics for a while. The duo reappear in Titans Hunt (Review).
This volume also makes references to other comic books, detailed below:
- The death of Don Hall is brought up. This death happened in Crisis on Infinite Earths.
- Despite taking place in a new timeline, Boston Brand and Dawn Granger’s relationship from Brightest Day seems to have carried over.