This week will be Steve Ditko week. I will start with the tame stuff and work my way up.

If creating interesting characters that endure is a sign of success for a series than the 1968 Hawk and Dove series was a success. However as far as creating a long term comic run it was a failure and probably didn't need to be so. So what happened to cause it to last just 6 issues?

Hawk and Dove were created by Steve Ditko and Steve Skeates for Showcase #75 with a premise that a writer could really run with. Teenagers Hank and Don Hall were granted powers by a voice to transform into the "heroes" Hawk and Dove who appeared to have the proportion strength of an average man. Seriously, look at the cover of issue #1. Those fancy dressed gentleman beating down Hawk and not super powered or even highly trained fighters. They're a group of thugs called the Drop-Outs. In fairness Hawk and Dove do seem to be SLIGHTLY tougher than most men but seriously, the voice didn't exactly go all out in granting them powers.

Hank was Hawk, an aggressive punch first ask questions later type while Don as Dove was much more hesitant to act and believed in non violence. The writers could have approached the series as a philosophic debate on aggression vs passivism or conservativism vs liberalism or even chaos vs order (I mean the country was in the midst of the Vietnam war for God's sake) but this being a DC comic book and the 60's, nah. Problems manifested themselves pretty much immediately with issue #1. One thing I will mention is that Ditko is a staunch follower of Ayn Rand and an Objectivist and in future journals I'll mention how this plays out further but suffice to say Ditko is the kind of guy who would see Dirty Harry or Death Wish's Paul Kersey as positive roll models for fighting crime. Ditko stands to the right of Frank Miller and as such would much more easily identify with Hawk. Skeates on the other hand felt more aligned with Dove and the friction between the two Steve's quickly boiled over.

This dynamic could have worked brilliantly. Ditko could be the voice of Hawk arguing the position of aggression while Skeates could voice Don with his own counter arguments. Instead each of the Steve's accused the other of sabotaging their favored character. If I had to take a side I'd probably go with Skeates. For one thing Ditko along with Giordano would change the -script Skeates would submit emasculate Dove. As Skeates said, "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". Meanwhile, Ditko complained that Skeates made Dove the only reasonable one of the two and maybe that was true before Ditko had his way with the -script but what was published was a toothless and useless Dove. Hawk may have been in serious need of anger management but at least he did something. The characters Hawk and Dove never tried to even present an argument for their beliefs we just had one angry character and one timid character. Just look at the angst of Dove on the cover of issue #1. That's pretty much him through the entire issue.

Rather than use their differences in a positive way Ditko stopped plotting after the first issue and quit the series entirely after issue #2. I liked issue two better than one because Dove's tentativeness had a reason and he actually did something useful. I liked the way he would grapple with the villains without actually striking them. In one funny part Dove tries to reason with an escaped convict who is in the midst of attacking him which goes over about as well as it would in real life. Steve Skeates left the series after four issues leaving Gil Kane as both writer and artist for the final two issues.

Hawk and Dove had two things going for it, the premise and the art. I may vehemently disagree with Ditko's politics but the covers for Showcase #75 and issues #1 and #2 were WAY better than the later four issues. Issue #1 has one of my favorite covers ever and I would consider getting a high grade CGC copy just for the cover. I know a lot of people will likely disagree with me on the 1968 Hawk and Dove series but for me it was potential wasted.

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