|
Dove Got a Raw Deal: Aggression, violence, and gender roles in Hawk and DoveAngela Griffen. 19 May 2005.
Saying superhero comics are sexist is a bit like saying human beings breathe oxygen; the fact is so well-accepted in some social circles that it rarely needs to be said. However, when people discuss the sexism in comics, the main focal point is on problems like the art objectifying women, or the sexual violence committed against women who are supposed to be superheroes. While these complaints are important and not at all unfounded, what is rarely addressed is the equally sexist point of view superhero comics have had with regards to men for much of their history. This problem can be easily seen with only a little background knowledge and a bit of thinking in Barbara and Karl Kesel's 1988 five-part miniseries, Hawk and Dove, penciled by the then up-and-coming Rob Liefeld. The depictions of the male and female protagonists of Hawk and Dove, along with events that were taking place in the DC Universe at the time, lay down hard and fast rules about what constitutes "correct behavior" for men and women, and is more than willing to eliminate any character that doesn't fit the mold. The 1988 Hawk and Dove miniseries was not the first appearance of the superhero monikers of "Hawk" and "Dove" by a long shot. The original concept of the superhero duo was put forth in 1968's Showcase #75, which presented the case of brothers Hank and Don Hall. The siblings were teenagers, extremely political, and fiercely at odds with one another. They were granted superpowers by a mysterious voice in order to save their father, a judge in their college town, from being murdered by a man seeking revenge for a harsh sentencing (Showcase #75). Hawk and Dove, as Carmine Infantino says in an interview on Bill Walko's Titans Tower website, was DC Comics way of taking on the Vietnam conflict. Hank, the Hawk, and Don, the Dove, were simply an allegory for what the company made of the highly divided political attitudes of the time: compromise was really the necessary ingredient (Hawk and Dove Genesis). The brothers also appeared in a short-lived ongoing series of their own called The Hawk and the Dove, which ran for a mere six issues until it was cancelled in 1970. Hank and Don fell into obscurity for the next decade and a half, especially after the Vietnam conflict was no longer the hot-button social issue it had been in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and in 1985, Don was killed off in a company-wide event known as "The Crisis on Infinite Earths" when his powers mysteriously disappeared as he was saving two children from being crushed under the rubble of a collapsing building. It is a few months after the death of Don that the Kesels begin their tale. Hank, after spending the past few months getting himself into trouble while grieving for his brother, returns home to Washington D.C. to attend college. While he is investigating some gang activity in the area (and, of course, getting into a fight with said gang), he meets a female superhero who calls herself Dove, and claims she's his new partner. Hank, still grieving over the death of his brother, violently denies her, yelling "No one can ever be Dove again!" (Hawk and Dove #2) Over the course of the miniseries, the true origin of the powers of Hawk and Dove is explained; the Lords of Order and the Lords of Chaos, who are bitter enemies in the mystical world presented in the DC Universe, each have a member who thinks the two groups instead need to work together for balance. The Lord of Order gives its power to a prospective Dove, and the Lord of Chaos gives its to someone who will become Hawk. Anyone can be Hawk and Dove, and if one dies, they will be replaced by another suitable vessel (Hawk and Dove #5). Here, the Kesels take the Hawk and Dove mythos out of its original context of the Vietnam conflict in order to allow the heroes to continue to exist decades later. The problem is what this means as far as gender roles are concerned. Hank, the vessel of chaos, is loud, brash, and brutish. One of the main reasons he is grieving over the death of his brother is the feeling that he was unable to protect him. "Don was always in things over his head," he thinks after he has an argument with Don's ex-girlfriend, "I had to go along to protect him... keep him safe. Some job I did. Don's dead. Dove's dead" (Hawk and Dove #1). Hank is also extremely Stoic. In the course of the miniseries, he gets himself badly beaten on a number of occasions, even breaking his hand and arm at one point. When a friend questions him on it, he replies that he went to the hospital earlier. "They put a band-aid on it, kissed it, and now I'm better. Okay, Kyle? Anyway, I've lived through worse" (Hawk and Dove #3). Hank is socially awkward to the point of humorousness, and in his search to discover the identity of this new, female Dove, he continually puts his foot in his mouth, asking things of his female friends that can be taken as sexual innuendo such as "Well, where were you last night?" or if their hair color is real (Hawk and Dove #2). One of his friends, Ren, defends her attraction to Hank by saying, "I like 'em big and stupid, so sue me!" (Hawk and Dove #1), and later, another acquaintance calls him, "the man who makes Stallone look intellectual!" (Hawk and Dove #3). Hank is a buffoon, constantly under the critical eye of his so-called friends. In part, this is an aspect of the superhero genre in general; because the heroes are often trying to protect their secret identities, and are caught up in other, more important aspects of the world, they come across as spacy and silly to those not "in the know." However, the new Dove is one of Hank's female acquaintances, and she always comes across as graceful and pleasant, so while the tradition of the superhero playing the fool in social situations explains some of Hank's behavior, it does not explain all. Hank's fighting style is simple: hit them as hard as you can, and as much as you can. As the main villain of the piece says, proudly, of Hank, he's full of "power, strength, rage. [He]'s everything the masters promised" (Hawk and Dove #3). He functions on brute power level, and at several points in the story is depicted armed to the gills with artillery. Liefeld’s art style only enhances this super-macho image. His highly stylized art is well-known for being full of, "huge muscles, huge breasts, huge guns, huge explosions, and plentiful violence" (Rob Liefeld). This is Liefeld's earliest jobs as a penciler, so his art style is significantly toned down, but Hank is overmuscled in most of his appearances as Hawk in the miniseries, and when he and the new Dove visit the Chaos Realm, he becomes out-of-proportionally huge in comparison to his female counterpart. "So what?" one might say in response. Some men are big and brutish and kind of dim. Men are encouraged to be violent and aggressive and Stoic. How is making Hank act in this manner sexist? It is, after all, consistent with depictions of him going as far back as 1968, and seems more a case of realism than of sexism. These points are, to a point, valid, because the problem really isn’t with Hank. The problem is Dove. More specifically, the problem is Dawn Granger, the second Dove and the replacement of Don Hall. From the beginning of the Hawk and Dove crimefighting duo, it was patently obvious that the writers and artists had no idea what to do with Don Hall, and really, who can blame them? Don’s pensive nature and aversion to physical violence didn’t make him the most likeable character for people accustomed to writing and drawing in the action-focused genre of superhero comics. Steve Skeates, the writer of the original 1968 The Hawk and the Dove series said, Quite often, my idea of what to do with the Dove was have him do brave stuff - and then it would be changed by either Dick [Giordano] or Steve [Ditko] into the Hawk doing that stuff. They'd say it was out of character for the Dove. They seemed to be equating Dove with wimp, wuss, coward or whatever. And I don't really think it was because they were more hawkish. I just don't think that they knew what a dove was. (Hawk and Dove Genesis).This sort of attitude and confusion towards Don's pacifism wasn't just held by the writers of the 1968 title, but can be seen well into the 1980s, including the decision to kill him off in "The Crisis on Infinite Earths." His replacement with a female Dove makes the statement made by Don’s death all the more concerning. As Barbara Kesel recounts, her husband and co-creator of the Hawk and Dove miniseries told her long before they wrote the story, "I never liked Dove as a guy. Too wussy. I always thought Dove should be a girl" (The Kesels on Hawk and Dove II). The more one thinks about it, the more the death of Don Hall, portrayed nearly unanimously by multiple creators as a "wuss" or someone who was never very good at being a superhero, seems to say loud and clear what kind of attitudes are and are not proper for males to have; and Don's pacifism and philosophical thought are not part of these "accepted" attitudes. Don's replacement with Dawn Granger speaks even more loudly. Dawn is good at everything she does. She's graceful, quick, and always on top of things. When she's first introduced in the miniseries, she catches a pitcher of soda dropped by a waitress without spilling a drop. She describes her powers to Hank, saying, "I've always been a good judge of people, but as Dove it's like I'm working on a supernatural level. Each gesture reveals a thousand clues about a person. In seconds, I know how everyone in a room will act and react" (Hawk and Dove #5). In essence, her superpower is "feminine intuition." She fights defensively, in contrast to Hank’s ultra-offensive style. "In a way," she says, "my enemies defeat themselves" (Hawk and Dove #5). She focuses intensely on teamwork, and functions as a nurturer and moral center to Hank’s chaotic ways. At base, Dawn is "the perfect woman." As Don tells her in an issue of an ongoing Hawk and Dove series that sprang out of this mini, You're quite an impressive young lady. It fascinates me that we have—or had—the exact same power, but you can do so much more with it. Part of that's because Hank was my older brother. I always looked up to him. I wanted him to like me, but we were so different...I guess I was never really true to my own nature. I never really tried to explore my own strengths. (Hawk and Dove [v3] #5).Where Don as Dove was bad at most things he did, hated by his writers, and generally considered a terrible superhero, Dawn is good at just about everything, moving gracefully and seamlessly through the world of superheroes, and charming everyone in her path. Where Don didn't fit into the world of superheroes and macho posturing, Dawn was able to—because she was a woman, so she could get away with it. While Dawn certain fits the stereotypes of women, she comes out on top here: she's smart, funny, and good at just about everything. It's hard not to love her. These archetypes seen in Hawk and Dove in the eighties are an indication that sexism hurts men and male characters just as it hurts women and female characters. While the sexualized violence committed against women in comics is atroious, the rigid ideas of what is and is not correct male behavio pervasive through the Hawk and Dove miniseries is also concerning—not least because the male character whose archetype made him a better as a girl in the eyes of DC Comics was also punished by what appears to be permanent death. That said, today things seem to be somewhat better. In the cartoon version of the DC Universe, Justice League Unlimited, Hawk and Dove appear in their Hank and Don versions, and Don is the same old vocally liberal character he was in the 1960s—but as competent as Dawn Granger. In the continuity of the comics, Hank has since gone to the side of evil before dying himself, and the new Hawk to Dawn's Dove is just as loud and brash as Hank ever was—but female. Hawk and Dove are never going to be the superheroes to go to for characters who are more than archetypes; they are, after all, only metaphors at their base. However, as comics become more self-aware of the problems in their writing, the sexism that was mentioned as oh-so-prevalent in the genre is slowly becoming something of the past.
Sources |