Polite Dissent

Warren, a hippie painter, borrows a dime from Don to make a phone call. As he calls the police to report a robbery that’s yet to happen, he is shot and killed. Because Don was the last person to see Warren alive, he is taken to the police station for questioning. At the police station, Don encounters his father and Frank Heinsite, a mayoral candidate.

After watching the high school basketball game, Hank decides to patrol the streets of the city as Hawk looking for crime. He spots some masked robbers breaking into the art museum. He confronts them, but is knocked out in the brawl. Upon waking up, he calls the police to report the robbery.

The next morning, Hank is stunned to read in the paper that no robbery occurred at the museum. Puzzled, he tells Don what happened and Don runs off convinced that the murder and “robbery” are linked. Arriving at the apartment of Warren’s girlfriend Marie, Don interrupts some thugs who are there to shoot her. There is a brief fight and the pair escapes. Don takes her to the art museum, but more thugs show up there and the chase is on.

Again prowling the city as Hawk, Hank breaks up a jewelry store robbery. He sees the van from the museum robbery the previous night, but cannot follow it as he is finishing up with the jewelry store robbers. A short time later, he hears gunshots and sees Don and Marie being chased by the thugs. Together, the three of them run to the city park, where they elude the criminals and meet a group a hippies. The hippies agree to help Marie while Don and Hank go off in search of the mysterious van.

Hank and Don manage to find the van in front of Heinsite’s house. Hank thinks they’re robbing it, but Don isn’t so sure. They sneak into the house to discover that the house is full of art. It turns out that Heinsite had paid some crooks to steal the paintings from the art museum and replace them with forgeries painted by Warren. When Warren got cold feet, Heinsite had him killed. Heinsite and his thugs confront Hawk and Dove, but the heroes easily defeat them and leave them tied up for police (but not without some property damage, courtesy of the Hawk)

The story is a fairly clever idea, but would have worked better as a straight mystery instead of the action/mystery hybrid it tries to be. There’s also some painful dialogue in this issue, particularly when Hawk decides to talk street (“Listen, Man…mercy just isn’t my bag…dig?”).

Gil Kane’s art again is outstanding. He makes excellent use of the entire panel, incorporating both foreground and background into the scene in a way that’s missing from much of today’s comic art. Unfortunately, his action scenes are the weakest art of the issue, which is ironic as they were the high point of the previous issue. Much of this can be blamed on the script, which can’t decide if the story is a mystery or an action story, and is only mediocre on both counts.

There is a definite shift in Don’s attitude this issue. First he engages in some mild fisticuffs with the crooks in Marie’s apartment. Later, he reminds Hank: “I still don’t think that excessive violence is necessary! Or justifiable!” This is a significant shift from his previous views where he thought that all violence was wrong – no matter the circumstances. Originally, he never would have hit the thug, even a gun wielding one. He would have found another way to incapacitate him.

Is this a real change in Don’s attitude? Or could it be that writer Steven Skeates was finding it difficult to write a superhero who never engages in fisticuffs? The answer is probably a little bit of both. This is Skeates’s last issue on The Hawk and the Dove (though he does co-write some of their later Teen Titan adventures) and I suspect the difficulty of writing Dove was part of his reasons for leaving. Don’s subtle change of attitude also nicely sets up one of next issue’s themes, where Don’s pacifist views are challenged when Hank is critically injured.

Notes:

1. Don is in his blue blazer again – for both days the story occurs in — but this time he is wearing a red tie. His bow-tie seems to have been a Ditko affectation and Don stopped wearing it when Ditko stopped doing the art. Of note, Peter Parker — even at his nerdiest — never wore a bow-tie.
2. Hank’s always described as athletic, but hasn’t yet been shown to actually participate in any sports.
3. There is no scene in the book that even vaguely resembles the cover art.