In every installment of “If I Pass This Way Again,” we look at odd comic book plot points that were rarely (sometimes NEVER!) mentioned again after they were first introduced.

Today, we look at an odd (but well told) Brave and the Bold issue that took Hawk and Dove in a whoooooooole other direction (that did not last).

As readers of Steve Ditko and Stan Lee's Amazing Spider-Man are quite aware, Steve Ditko was very much cognizant of the series of protests that were taking over college campuses in the late 1960s. Ditko, of course, was not exactly supportive of these endeavors (it is so hilarious seeing the disdain Peter Parker has for protests due to Ditko. Once Ditko was gone, Stan Lee and John Romita quickly relaxed that sort of thing - Peter wasn't running off and joining protests and Lee probably still took way too much of a "riding the fence" approach with Peter even after Ditko was gone, but it wasn't Peter showing pure disdain for protesters, at least).

When he invented Hawk and Dove in Showcase #76 in 1968, they were therefore firmly entrenched in the politics of the late 1960s, as we can see from the prologue of their first issue, as we meet the pacifist Don Hall and his hawkish brother, Hank Hall...

In case you were curious, there really WERE the occasional pro-Veitnam War protesters back in the day. Certainly smaller in scale, but they DID exist...

Okay, so Hank and Don Hall (who were later given superpowers and became the superheroes known as Hawk and Dove) were clearly young adults.

This was made plainly clear when their short-lived series ended and they joined the TEEN Titans in Teen Titans #25...

Okay, so the important thing is that Hawk and Dove are teens, just like the other members of the Teen Titans.

Well, Hawk and Dove quickly left the Teen Titans (this was during their period where they fought crime without costumes. Back in the late 1960s, every other pitch at DC Comics seemed to be, "What if they don't fight crime in superhero costumes?" and the Titans were one of the groups who bought into the no-costume approach.

Without appearing in Teen Titans, Hawk and Dove mostly fell into character limbo during the 1970s, but they did make occasional appearances, including some later Teen Titans stories.

However, for the most part, they were no longer around, which led them to become open targets for a really well-told story by Alan Brennert for Brave and the Bold #181 in 1981 that was built around the fact that Hawk and Dove WERE the teens of the 1960s, only it was the 1980s now!

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A popular trend in early 1980s pop culture was to re-visit the people from the late 1960s and see how they were adjusting to life in the 1980s. That's basically what the hit 1983 film, The Big Chill, is about. The great Alan Brennert was ahead of the game, however, as he had this issue of Brave and the Bold (drawn by the regular series artist, Jim Aparo) deal with how Don and Hank Hall are dealing with the 1980s after being so identified with the late 1960s.

They have separated and are no longer close to one another. Don has continued the good fight by working for the state welfare commission while Hank has settled down into suburbia with a wife. However, neither brother is really comfortable with their lives...

Deep stuff, right?

In the end, the message is a mixture of "love your brother" and also "we all have different sides to our personalities and you will only drive yourself crazy if you try to ignore the other side of yourself." The Hall brothers understand this as the embrace after the bad guys are all taken care of in the issue...

But anyhow, the big hook in the story relies on the brothers being in their late 20s (which even that doesn't really make sense, since they were probably in their late teens when they debuted, but whatever). That, of course, was much older than their fellow Teen Titans.

That was quickly ignored when they showed up at the wedding of Donna Troy in New Teen Titans #50 a few years later...

Funny stuff from Marv Wolfman and George Perez!

Hank would be a college student AFTER Crisis (Don died in the crossover event), so the late 20s stuff was just dropped right away and never picked up on again.

If anyone else has a suggestion for an interesting plot point that was introduced and then almost instantaneously ignored, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!