Polite Dissent

The second issue starts with Hawk confronting a gang of crooks, as well as the new Dove, in a warehouse. Refusing to accept that there’s a new Dove, Hawk attacks her — or at least he tries to. She manages to elude him and along the way they manage to K.O. every criminal. She leaves reminding him that while Don may be dead, Dove isn’t.

The next morning, Hank meets up with Kyle, Donna, Ren and Dawn. He figures one of the girls must be the new Dove, so he starts questioning them, trying to discover who it is. Unfortunately, his questioning is along the lines of “So, Donna – is that your real hair?” and his results are about as dismal as you’d expect.

That evening, Hank joins his parents for dinner at the French restaurant Le Parc (where he orders “A cheeseburger and fries. American Cheese.”) A commotion develops in the restaurant when Dove starts fighting a team of small time thugs across the street. Hawk intervenes and then accuses Dove of following him. She just looks away and refuses to answer. “Get out of Washington,” he tells her. “If you know what’s good for you.”

Hank runs into Kyle and Donna at a local diner the next morning. Dawn and Ren join them a few minutes later. Ren tells them she had been photographing the massacre that had occurred at Le Parc restaurant the previous night. Looking at her photos, Hank realizes that the massacre is somehow connected to the gang he had fought at the warehouse. He excuses himself and runs over to the warehouse. Kestrel, however, has arrived there first and quickly captures him.

The third issue opens with a full-scale battle between Hawk and Kestrel that rages through the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum. Hawk finds Kestrel his toughest opponent ever. He’s quickly battered and bruised and even breaks his hand while punching Kestrel. Hank drops an airplane on Kestrel then hides in a closet, waiting to change back to Hank so he can escape. A good idea, but Kestrel finds him first and decides to finish the fight once and for all. Luckily, Dove chooses that moment to intervene. She grabs Kestrel’s arm and flips him away. Kestrel chases after her, but she’s always manages to stay one step ahead of him. Too late, Kestrel realizes that Dove has led him far enough away from Hawk so that he can change back to Hank.

Kestrel hasn’t given up. He breaks into the police station and releases Shadowblade, the leader of the thugs Hawk and Dove defeated the night before. In a Faustian bargain, Kestrel promises the young thug power. The next morning, the new and improved Shadowblade leads a team of gunmen in an attack on the Georgetown campus designed to flush out Hawk and Dove.

These two issues continue the theme of introducing the new Dove. It’s understandable that Hawk doesn’t want a new Dove because he doesn’t want anything to tarnish his brother’s memory. Clues are given to the new Dove’s identity, but plenty of red herrings are strewn about as well. Kestrel finally meets the pair, and it is clear that he shares some connection to them and their origin. The terms Order and Chaos are bandied about and a mystic “experiment” of some kind is mentioned. Some of this is explained in the mini-series, but the true nature of Hawk and Dove won’t be fully explained until the second year of the subsequent Hawk & Dove series.

The Kesels remember that Hawk and Dove can only be in costume when danger is present, a fact many previous writers had ignored. They actually use this as a plot point. Hank is shown to be a good fighter, but also clever enough to know when to escape. Unlike the first Dove, these issues make clear that the new Dove won’t avoid a fight, but she tries to end it quickly as possible by using her brains. She also sees the big picture: she doesn’t have to defeat Kestrel in combat, just lead him away from Hawk.

The pencils by Liefeld continue to be quite good overall. Still, some of the “quirks” that will dominate his later art can be seen starting here. He was drawing excellent backgrounds in the first issue, but by issue three, fewer and fewer panels have drawn backgrounds. He also starts using more stock poses in these issues (like the Art Adams “girl standing with one hip thrust out”).