Superheroes Behaving Badly VIII: Hawk

Some characters establish themselves early on as the kind of cast one would prefer to miss; an exceptional performer in this regard, though, does not become complacent, but instead discovers how to increase his nuisance value through the years.

Such describes the Steve Ditko creation Hawk, of his concept series Hawk and Dove, a character who lost his reason for being when Ditko stopped doing the stories at the dawn of the seventies. Yet in 2000 the character still appears, still unwelcome; the current sequence in JSA features the character.

The last surviving Hall brother endures, though, not as a hero, but because he enjoyed the dubious promotion to Evil Overlord Villain in the early nineties. Given the problematic nature of the character, perhaps inevitable forces drove writers to recast the onetime semi-hero as the Slayer of Heroes. For whatever reason, though, the character becomes more and more of a persistent annoyance as time goes on, and one can't help wishing he'd just disappear.

One Half of a Pair of Incomplete Characters

Hawk and Dove, as Ditko conceived them, represented human virtues or personality traits rather than existing as fully-formed characters. Hawk represented violence without reflection, and Dove hyper-self-conscious pacifism, moral questions resolved in the person of their father, the judge, who represented the more balanced personality that only used either extreme as the occasion demanded.

Outside of this moral/philosophical model, the duo would never work very well. Hawk particularly, when cast as other than a Virtue or Vice, became something of a Spandexed goober. One could either play him in the bellicose mode in which he operated as a personified trait - making him play the role of the superheroic berserker that would become tiresome in comics by the eighties - or tone him down into something like a more arrogant version of Robin in the Cardy-era Teen Titans.

In the absence of their original creator and context, however, both characters had lost their place and purpose, and would never quite work again.

Post-Ditko Aimlessness

Ditko had few tenures to compare with his run on Amazing Spider-Man. More typically, in the years after his first departure from Marvel, he would create some new and unusual concept, propel it for a while, then move on when the book got cancelled. This meant that he had a fair stable of orphaned heroes that few other talents could make work as well as he had. So, in both DC and Marvel, we find characters like the Creeper and Doctor Strange, whom some observers credit with never quite working again after Ditko.

Hawk, and his complement Dove, represented an extreme case of this. Other characters, even if something essential changed in Ditko's absence, occasionally managed to find a place in later comics. In the case of this duo, though, a full decade and portions of a second would pass before someone might arguably make the concept work again.

Until the experiment with the Kesel Hawk and Dove book, which did not, in the long run, succeed, DC would occasionally attempt to use these once-compelling properties. Teen Titans notwithstanding, Hawk (and Dove) would find themselves in the comics limbo of the unmarketable.

Crisis Blues

Crisis on Infinite Earths played pawn sacrifice with scads of second-stringers and the occasional has-been first-stringer. So, therefore, one could expect that characters without a place - such as Hawk and Dove after Ditko - might appear on the "most likely casualty" list. In the event, therefore, Dove, the cringing and indecisive complement to Hawk's bellicose stupidity passed on, perhaps due to some falling masonry or something equally anticlimactic.

Hawk, however, in the absence of a foil or a balance took on the role of overdone hyper-violent early-eighties heroes like Punisher or Wolverine (in their more dumbed-down forms, not their best interpretations). As such, he typically came off like Rambo on steroids (is this redundant?)

Even the late-eighties Kesel Hawk and Dove book failed to put Hawk back on the right track, and one might have seen some coming doom from the character based on the fact that his very nature made him difficult to use. Even good writers (like Kesel) have limitations, and a character who does two things - snarl and fight - doesn't offer much to work with.

Armageddon 2000

Someone, someday, should print a book called 1,000 Uses for an Redundant Super-Hero. However, I don't know how much success a potential author will have in writing this book, since the uses one can get out of one don't number that many. Mostly, you can a) ignore such heroes, b) kill them, or c) make them into villains.

The electronic age played a role in Hawk's destiny, as those who recall the circumstances of Armageddon 2000 will recall. This series dealt with a supervillain from the future, named Monarch, who had destroyed all the superheroes on the earth of his alternate future. This villain, we knew (from cryptic hints) began as a superhero, whose identity would appear later in the series.

DC had intended Monarch to represent a corrupt future evolution of Captain Atom. Unfortunately, a breach in security released this information, where it propagated through chat rooms and DC had to change their plans at the last minute, picking, instead, that hoary DC institution....Hawk.

Did the two readers who recognized the character actually care about this turn of events? Surely the drama could not have lived up to expectations with this last minute retrofitting of a ruined plot twist.

A certain logic seems to work here, though, since both Hawk and Dove - whichever version - played the roles as avatars of complementary cosmic forces. Assuming the death of Dove (which happened a second time in this series), one could presume that the second power might invest in Hawk and bring his power levels up to a cosmic scale.

Readers of other columns of mine might note that I have a bias against godlike heroes and villains because the scale of their power takes them too far from interaction with ordinary human beings and therefore makes the stories lack something to connect them with flesh-and-blood readers. This principle, if it applies at all, applies here.

DC, by whatever means they came to the decision, had resolved to corrupt some superhero - which role circumstances inclined them to pick Hawk for - and thereafter the hero would appear no more as a hero, but in the form of Monarch and his subsequent incarnations.

Therefore, from beginnings as something of a sociopath, Hawk would progress to the more respectable role of mass-murderer and All-Purpose Evil Overlord.

Zero Hour

I'll strive to avoid my usual Zero Hour themes here, partially because they lack relevance and partially because I don't know what DC could have done very differently after managing to paint themselves into corners after failing to act quickly enough to take advantage of opportunities created by the aftermath of Crisis in the eighties.

Zero Hour relates to Hawk because he played the role - not as Monarch, but as Monarch's later stage, Extant - of one of the cast of villains propagating like roaches in that work.

By Zero Hour, however, Hawk/Monarch/Extant had become a syncretic villain, thanks to his ability to absorb other heroes and their powers (I don't know if this ability appeared during his time as Monarch or not). For instance, he absorbed the time-traveling hero Waverider, who, supposedly, provided the time-traveling powers that Extant would manifest in the late stages of Zero Hour and in his recent appearance in JSA.

Extant, as he now would call himself, would enjoy his finest moment of villainy in a trashy two-page sequence in which he aged most of the Justice Society to death. This cheaply-executed incident did not suggest the excellence of writing of which Zero Hour's writers had previously demonstrated an ability; rather, it fell into the category of hastily-contrived pathos-building stunts, so that the crossover event could have some soulful-looking heroes grieving after their fallen.

Still, the event served to remind readers of Hawk/Monarch/Extant's role as a hero-killer. Unfortunately, overuse had made the death of a hero a trite thing, lacking the drama intended in the Death-of-the-JSA sequence.

Furthermore, the ends of Extant and Monarch - involving things like rewriting of history/continuity and the possible fracture of a universe into a multiverse - seemed to cast them more as Evil Cosmic Editors than great threats to the future.

Nonetheless, Monarch/Extant did leave behind him a series of significant crimes, including a campaign of superhero pogroms, global domination, and the attempt to control/destroy the entirety of time itself. All of these, according to the logic of the stories, began as consequences of the character's derangement beginning with the deaths of both of his companions, the male and female Doves. Yet as Extant Hall seemed somewhat more lucid than as Hawk in the Kesel-era Hawk and Dove books.

Comics has a few great villains, but most of these appeared before 1965, and Extant seems unlikely ever to become something that belongs among their number.

The Present

By killing half of the JSA, Extant unfortunately gave himself tenure in superhero comics. A villain who kills a hero guarantees himself at least one revenge story arc, and possibly an unending, interminable, incessant series of them.

So we have the present, with the JSA confronting Extant again, since that character's unwelcome reappearance in the early teens of JSA. The character of this book as a very readable piece which, nonetheless, attempts to houseclean loose ends of the wreckage of DC's "Earth-2" concepts means that sometimes unwelcome pieces must eventually resurface.

The current, fairly ambitious arc in JSA seems intent on reconciling a number of questions left by the DC universe retcons since 1985, including "What happened to Lyta/Fury," and "What Happened to Hawkman." Regardless of the outcome of such cleaning operations, the unpleasant business of the return of an annoying character - annoying both as hero and as villain - makes reading such pieces problematic.

Hope springs from within on this piece, though, as an opportunity. The pages of recent JSA, with their inclination to resolve hanging questions, may contain the ultimate resolution of the Hawk problem; even better, they may dispose of the character altogether.