'Titans': Rob Liefeld Shares Early 'Hawk & Dove' Artwork

As the title characters make their debut on Titans today, famed comic book artist Rob Liefeld has [...]

By Russ Burlingame

As the title characters make their debut on Titans today, famed comic book artist Rob Liefeld has been sharing some of his thirty-year-old original art for Hawk & Dove.

Liefeld's pencil lines in these images are very tight, making it clear why he would be so keen to ink his own work at times over the years.

You can see a few pages of Liefeld's art below.

This is not the first time Liefeld has given fans a look inside his early days: last September, he shared some original designs for Hawk & Dove done even before the series launched.

The Hawk & Dove miniseries Liefeld drew served as a sort of reboot of the Silver Age heroes, bending Dove's gender and opting for more general superhero adventures and less political references. The miniseries ended up being well received by fans, spawning its own ongoing series (with Greg Guler taking over for Liefeld) which ran until 1991.

Long after Liefeld co-created Dawn Granger and reshaped the trajectory of the Hawk & Dove property, DC would bring him back as part of 2011's reboot "The New 52," where he would write and draw the characters.

If you're unfamiliar with Dawn's incarnation of Dove, she first gained her abilities during the Crisis event, taking up the mantle after the first Dove passed away. She has the ability to transform into a superpowered being when calling out her moniker. Once she's transformed into Dove, her various powers include flight, heighted vigilance, and agility. She's used those powers throughout the DC Comics world, including in Teen Titans, Birds of Prey, and Blackest Night.

"We brought in a supernatural element. Hawk and Dove were no longer war and peace, they were chaos and order," Liefeld explained to ComicBook.com at Comic Con. "There was a supernatural realm, the chaos realm and order realm, that they tapped into their powers. Geoff goes, 'you guys took it and did the whole supernatural thing!' He compared it to what he did with the Lanterns, creating the whole rainbow of Lanterns and taking it in a different direction. Dawn Granger has stuck and Brightest Day, whatever Geoff Johns does, he finds a way to put Hawk and Dove in it. But now, seeing her, I just wasn't prepared for her to stick her hand through a guy's face and have the face explode. I'm in my hotel Tuesday night, both Jim Lee and Geoff Johns texted me to say 'The Titans trailer is dropping at six o'clock and you're going to be a happy guy.' Jim even laughed, he said there's a scene you're going to really like.' I'm in my hotel room and I'm sitting in my bed and I go 'Whoa! Rewind, rewind, screengrab, screengrab.' It was hard to catch that, but I got every moment of that first exploding that face, and I'm like 'that's the way you make an entrance!' And then she whips around and cuts someone with her dove-wings. I'm very excited about Titans. The thing about their supernatural origins is that Raven has a very supernatural story so it's a great way to connect them all. My buddy Akiva Goldsman, with whom I'm doing the Extreme Universe on Netflix, executive produced Titans with Geoff Johns, so it's a good time."

That effort was short-lived, but Liefeld's relationship with DC was less so, leading to additional assignments throughout the "New 52" era.

And if you have enjoyed this stroll down memory lane, and happen to have a thousand dollars or so lying around, the final page of the seires -- a splash featuring the title characters -- is apparently available on eBay now.

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