Polite Dissent

The second story in Teen Titans #31 (January/February 1971) is the last original Hawk and Dove appearance that will be printed for six years. Given the deplorable stories in their recent outings with the Titans, and the quality of this story here, it’s frankly a surprise that they were brought back at all.

As “From 1 to 20” begins, Hank is prowling the city streets and alleys with a pair of binoculars looking for a crime he can stop as Hawk. He sees a suspicious man walk up to a newsstand, but instead of robbing it, he buys a poetry magazine. Hank notices that the customer received $20 in change for a $1 magazine and figures that this is some kind of shakedown operation. He changes into Hawk and trails the man. A mugging derails him and he loses sight of the customer.

A short time later he runs into Don and describes the situation. They scope out the newsstand and see the same man come up and buy a second poetry magazine. By this time Don has figured out what’s going on, and he and Hawk capture both the customer and the newsstand owner. It turns out the newsstand was the front for a counterfeiting gang. Thus one of the gang’s thugs would come by, pay $1 for a poetry magazine and get a counterfeit $20 back in change. This was how the gang got their funny money on circulation.

Convoluted and credibility straining isn’t it? Rube Goldberg could have come up with a simpler plan.

The art by George Tuska is better than the story deserves, with nice use of non-standard panels and shadows to draw the eye. Sadly, he does give Don his worst outfit yet, with an orange tie at least as wide as his head. Now combine this with a maroon suit, blue shirt and tan belt. No wonder the girls prefered Hank.

I’ll admit that it’s nice to see some attention paid to the Hank/brawn, Don/brains dichotomy again, but not at the expense of plot. Steve Skeates, who was the one of the creators of Hawk and Dove, supplied this story. Even though he helped create the duo, he wrote some of the worst stories for them. The entire counterfeiting plot is simply asinine and hurts to think too much about. A gang spends its time counterfeiting $20 bills instead $50s or $100s? Then their idea of a clever plan to get the $20s into circulation is to have one of their muscle-bound goons buy a poetry magazine at one of their newsstands and get the counterfeit $20 in change? Surely there are easier and less conspicuous ways of carrying this off. Ouch! Now I thought too much about it and my brain hurts.

Sadly — as poor as it is — the Hawk and Dove tale is still much better than the Teen Titans main story. Unless you are a Teen Titans fetishist, I wouldn’t recommend this issue, even if you see it in the quarter box.