With the announcement today that Alan Ritchson and Minka Kelly will play Hawk and Dove on DC’s Titans, we have a kind of crazy theory to float about the future of those characters, and how it ties into their comic book counterparts.
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There is not an exact 1:1 counterpart for this take on Hawk and Dove. According to the initial casting reports, the pair are a couple, rather than siblings or relative strangers as they have generally been in the comics. During the 1980s run on Hawk & Dove, the idea of Hank Hall and Dawn Granger pairing up was flirted with but, as far as we or DC Comics fan and podcaster Michael Bailey can remember, nobody ever pulled the trigger.
The original Hawk and Dove were brothers, but Don Hall (Dove) died during the Crisis on Infintie Earths, and his brother never fully recovered. Hank/Hawk, already a pretty belligerent sort, eventually went bad.
And that’s a question we’ve got rolling around in our heads: could casting Hawk and Dove be a smokescreen for DC’s use of Monarch, Hawk’s “evil” identity,” as a series big bad?
It could certainly be an interesting move, although there are dangers and it does not entirley seem to sync up with what we know about Titans so far…so let’s take everything into consideration.
Armageddon 2001
Armageddon 2001 was one of DC’s first big post-Crisis comic book event series. It centered on a hero from the future, Waverider, who traveled to the past in order to figure out which of DC’s superheroes had gone evil and become a brutal, armored dictator known as Monarch in his own time.
It is well known among comic book fans that while Hank Hall eventually became Monarch, that was not always the plan.
Originally, Monarch was to be Captain Atom, a character powerful enough that he rivaled Superman and was the basis for Doctor Manhattan in Watchmen. Those plans fell through because before the series was finished, a report that Captain Atom was Monarch started to circulate in the fan community.
This was pre-Internet; these kinds of leaks simply did not happen all the time. DC was flummoxed, and decided to make another hero go bad. Ultimately Hawk got the role in part because the Hawk & Dove series was already on its way out.
The logic behind making Hawk into Monarch related to the mythology of Hawk and Dove, that they were stand-ins for beings that represented chaos and order. The two of them created a necessary balance, and without Dove (Dawn, too, appeared to die in Armageddon 2001), Hawk took it upon himself ot become Monarch and try to represent both sides of the balance.
The event was popular enough to spawn a pair of sequel/spinoff series, although arguably the longest-lasting repercussion of the story was the introduction of Waverider, who would stick around in the DC Universe up until his death in Time Masters: Vanishing Point about 20 years later.
How could that work on TV?
So what makes us think — other than the mere existence of Hawk and Dove — that Monarch could be on the horizon?
Well, first of all, the Titans’ biggest, most obvious foe is taken: Deathstroke is appearing on the upcomign season of Arrow (and in The Batman).
It might give the Titans a truly formidable foe if part of the setup here is that Don Hall, the original Dove, is already dead and the whole first season of Titans could lead to the revelation that Monarch is somehow tied to Hawk.
We have also heard a recent rumor that DC might be putting together a hardcover special edition that would collect the Zero Hour miniseries along with the two main Armageddon 2001 one-shots. That pair of stories could easily just be interpreted as “Jurgens + time-travel” stories…but Armageddon 2001 has never been reprinted, so if these characters were being used in a big way, perhaps the idea would be to surreptitiously get it out into the market again in a way that would not raise suspicion and potentially spoil the show.
(That, after all, would be a kind of bitter irony in an adaptation of Armageddon 2001).
The potential problems
There are a couple fo obvious reasons why the Monarch story might not fly on Titans…even if it seems like a really cool idea at first glance.
First of all, The Flash just — JUST — had a season-long story that centered on an armored, corrupted, future version of the hero being the mysterious main antagonist. At the time, we did not think of the Savitar arc as being similar to Armageddon 2001…but in hindsight, it really kind of is. It might be difficult to sell that again on a DC show so soon.
The initial reports also indicate that DC is considering Hawk & Dove as a possible spinoff if Titans is a hit. The fact that there are many iterations of Hawk and Dove over the years could make that feel less like a rebuttal, but the reports also indicated that these two actors would reprise the title roles.
Obviously there are ways around that second point: you could have a whole series that centered on the pair of them working together to find balance so that Hawk never becomes Monarch. Still, it makes the whole thing feel less like a grand plan and more like…well, a couple of characters came to Titans.
