Neither of these two characters is Firestorm For those that have read my review of The Fury of Firestorm #4, I apologize beforehand because some of my comments here will mirror those. As I keep saying I am still working through my backed up readings since the month off that I missed (though I am only a week behind now.) This morning my sequential process of reading caught me up to Hawk and Dove and issue #5. This is the first series of those being canceled to make way for the second wave of the new 52 that I have read knowing about the pending cancellations. With that in mind though, this issue was completely awful and save for some of the ones in the early part of Red Hood and the Outlaws (which I begrudgingly admit is getting better) this is the single worst issue I have read thus far in the new 52 from the perspective of trying to tell a story (the Red Hood stories were bad for other reasons, namely the depiction of Starfire.) Still with this failure I think there are some lessons which can be learned from this failed series. One might be to never to try to give these characters their own ongoing monthly again, they are nice characters and I especially like Dawn, but they have consistently proven themselves to not to be able to hold down a monthly series. I think that there is a better lesson to be learned here though and one which can be applied to Firestorm. In Hawk and Dove the main villains which were introduced were Condor and Swan. Granted this alone took a lot of lacking imagination to come up with. "Hawk and dove" is of course a long standing term for outlook on war which has been co-opted by the political systems in North America, where those words are supposed to be almost insults. Condor and swan on the other hand means nothing. Yet the characters were created as almost carbon copies of the heroes. This creates a situation where it is really hard for the reader to associate with the villains. Most of the great villains are so because they are nothing like the hero. For instance, in Superman comics I have always found that the least engaging villains are those that can stand face-to-face with Superman and fight it out. Rather the villains such as Lex Luthor and Brainiac that have confront him in different ways are much more engaging to read. Even a villain like Bizarro who is mostly the same as Superman still seems as though he is different enough due to outlook. This comes back to the impending problem with Firestorm. Thus far the two hero firestorms have faced off only against governmental black ops squads, but the firestorm protocol is being used elsewhere to create other villains by the same process., a Quraci and a Russian (Pozhar). The original Firestorm dating back to the late 1970s had a decent and varied group of villains to work against (Killer Frost, Parasite, Plastique and even Black Bison), and so I don't see the new one succeeding all that well with somewhat generic and carbon copied villains.
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Fire storm is the next series that needs to get let go. I love Gail but this is just trash. Hawk and dove, Firestrom, Static, justice league Int, Red hood( getting better), and Teen titans ( I like it now) are the worst series in the new52 IMO. They should have just carried over from brightest day and have ronnie and jason cont to be that version of firestorm. This whole reboot of their story is just trash.
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