Polite Dissent

Now that Crisis on Infinite Earths is over, I’m going to pause in my strict chronological review of Hawk and Dove and look at how the Crisis affected them. OK, I know the Crisis killed Dove, but what I mean is how all the post-Crisis rewriting of continuity affected the original Hawk and Dove stories. To do this, we are going to jump ahead in time to Secret Origins Annual #3 from 1989. This comic, by Marv Wolfman and a variety of artists, is the equivalent of a bad TV clip-show with Nightwing forced to remember past Titans adventures, this time re-written into post-Crisis continuity (it reminded me of the horrible Buck Rogers episode where Buck is hooked up to a machine that reads all his memories — i.e. clips from previous shows — in an effort to discover who the villain is, and it ends up being Gary Coleman).

I wonder why Wolfman felt that he needed to change the Teen Titans’ history at all. All the characters were Earth-1 characters and they didn’t have any adventures or interactions with Earth-2. I suspect it was his way of putting his own stamp on some of the older stories and maybe trying to rewrite some of the particularly bad ones.

No changes were made to the origin of the Hawk and the Dove, nor were any changes made to the stories from their own comic. Similarly, their first adventure with the Teen Titans in Teen Titans #21 was left unchanged.

Their next stint with the Titans, from Teen Titans #25-29 was rewritten. In the original story, the Titans along with Hawk and Dove were present at a peace rally when a riot broke out. One of the rioters pulled out a gun, and though the heroes tried to stop him, the gun went off and a Nobel Prize winning scientist was killed. The Titans blamed themselves for not preventing the shooting, and the Justice League blamed them too. A mysterious rich man offered them a chance to do good without using their powers or costumes, and they jumped at the chance. Several bland and uninspired stories followed.

In the new post-Crisis version of the story, the riot was a plot to intentionally kill the Nobel Laureate. The plan was hatched by a police officer with radical separatist ties. When he saw the Titans, he decided to frame them for the murder. The Justice League, despite having the “World’s Greatest Detective” in their ranks, went along with the idea that the Titans were guilty. The teens decided to give up their costumes and powers until they could prove their innocence. It’s still a stupid plot, but better than the original.

The next Hawk and Dove adventure with the Teen Titans was in Teen Titans #50-52 and it also is ret-conned. This was the adventure where the Teen Titans West debuted. It was also the last original adventure of the Teen Titans West*. In the previous version, the Titans West were composed of Hawk, Dove, Lilith, Bat-Girl (the Bette Kane hyphenated Bat-Girl, not the Barbara Gordon unhyphenated Batgirl), Golden Eagle and Beast Boy. Gnaark the caveman, who was Lilith’s fiance, was also along for the ride.

In the revamped version, Hawk, Dove, Golden Eagle and Beast Boy are still part of Titans West. Bette Kane is there, but she is now known as Flamebird, not Bat-Girl. Inexplicably, Mal Duncan and Karen Beecher (Bumblebee) are now part of Titans West instead of the original Titans, as they were in the pre-Crisis version. This is particularly interesting because at this point the Titans still had their hideout in Mal’s disco — so what’s he doing out west? He’s going by the name Gabriel in the rewritten version, while in the original story he had retired his Gabriel identity and switched to calling himself Guardian. The rest of the plot is unchanged, with Captain Calamity and Mr. Esper remaining the villains of the piece.

*Teen Titans #56, a fill in issue by Marv Wolfman and Mark Bright, gives us another look at the Titans West and presents the post-Crisis Gnaark. This story occurs sometime after the original Teen Titans #51, when the Titans West were still a team. According to this story, Don Hall (Dove) and Lilith were dating, though clearly it wasn’t that strong of a relationship. While getting a tour of the West coast S.T.A.R. Labs from Karen, Lilith gets a strange vibe from inside one room. Somehow, this leads the Titans West and East to a South Asian excavation led by a rogue S.T.A.R. scientist. Working with the Titans, he is able to unearth a Cro-Magnon man frozen in ice, yet mysteriously still alive. A strange crystal from a meteor is fused to his chest. This frozen prehistoric man is Gnaark. His meteoric crystal allows him to communicate telepathically with Lilith and the two of them fall in love (sorry Don). The bad scientists want to dissect Gnaark while the good scientists want to return him to life. He gets shot in all the confusion and falls into an irreversible coma. He dies, still on life support, a year later — Lilith still by his side. I’m not sure what this story accomplished except explaining Gnaark’s place in the post-Crisis world, and warning us that Lilith is not a faithful girlfriend. Poor Don, dumped for a Cro-Magnon.