Skeates was (and I suppose still is) a shitty hippy writer who biggest claim to fame is that he "stood up to" Steve Ditko by being a shitty hippy writer.
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For his second series at DC, The Hawk and the Dove, Ditko was teamed with a man whom he supposedly considered a “hippy writer”—Steve Skeates. In the interview with Jon Cooke, Giordano explained the situation he found after he arrived at DC:
I came in as editor right in the middle of “The Hawk and the Dove” story in Showcase. Steve Ditko already had the rough plot worked out. Steve Skeates worked from that plot and came up with a script. The Showcase was okay because Steve [Skeates] followed basically what Ditko wanted him to do. But from that point on it was terrible for them both.
Giordano then went on to explain a little of the tension between Ditko and Skeates, though it would appear his memory was faulty on some of the exact details:
I’m not sure where Skeates fit in there, but I think he leaned towards Hank [the Hawk].
Ditko would pretty much eliminate whatever was in Steve Skeates’ scripts that he didn’t feel belonged there. At that point, I think that Ditko’s agenda was more the furthering of his philosophical views than writing and drawing entertaining stories.
Giordano is correct that Ditko was interested in furthering his philosophical views, but he misremembered “where Skeates fit in there”—just as he misremembered elsewhere in the interview about when Ditko had worked for him at Charlton in relation to when he began working at DC.
Skeates’s own political inclinations are evident in the Teen Titans issues he wrote (#28-32) shortly after he stopped working on The Hawk and the Dove. In those issues, the Titans are held up as paragons of the antiestablishment movement—in one case, against their mentors in the Justice League who represent the Establishment.
Regarding his working relationship with Ditko, Skeates has related a story about the only other time they had worked together—on the Question story in Blue Beetle #4, which was the last work both did for Charlton before moving to DC and The Hawk and the Dove:
Ditko and I very rarely had any personal contact at all! Still, a rather interesting happenstance did occur when I scripted my one and only Question episode (the one I wrote under the pen-name Warren Savin—”Kill Vic Sage!” it was called!)! I did a bit of dialogue in which The Question says to the villain of the piece “Now listen, my friend . . .” and therefore received a six-page letter from Steve detailing why the Question would never call a criminal “friend,” and even if he meant it sarcastically, why sarcasm was somehow beneath The Question!
This was a rather daunting and even rather scary letter for someone who was essentially still a “green kid” writingwise to receive, to say the least! The offending “friend” reference was of course removed from the finished product. . . .
However, after moving to DC and again being teamed with Ditko, Skeates stood up for his own views regarding the direction the series should take. Apparently, he was not only opposed to Ditko’s Objectivist leanings, but also to what he considered the more privileged position that Ditko gave to the Hawk’s right wing reactionary politics.
Hank and Don Hall (the Hawk and the Dove, respectively) represented two views of the use of violence to solve problems—Hank as a reactionary warmonger and Don as a radical pacifist. The language used to describe the characters on the cover of Showcase #75 supports Skeates’s opinion that the Hawk is presented more favorably.
The very concept of The Hawk and the Dove lends itself to a deconstructive reading—an analysis of binary oppositions in which one of the two elements is “privileged” over the other. Ditko probably wrote the text for his cover illustration, and he chose words that are “privileged” through the particular connotations they carry.
The Hawk is “tough” and a “challenger”—words that refer to traits that are considered favorable in American culture. Conversely, the Dove is “tame” and “challenged”—words that carry the connotations of weakness and a sense of being handicapped.
Essentially, the privileged position of the Hawk’s descriptors entered American culture from two linked sources:
1. The seventeenth century New England Calvinists who continue to greatly influence all of American culture due to the seminal effect their sermons and other religious tracts had in the shaping of the American identity.
Their writings were practically the only things published in North America during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Thus, they were widely distributed and read throughout all thirteen colonies, and they had an incredible impact on the shaping of American culture.
The New England Calvinists expressed their preference for the Old Testament’s aggressive attitude toward sinners over the New Testament’s pacific attitude—a preference that persists throughout contemporary US popular culture.
2. The rugged and individualistic frontiersmen who also helped establish American ideology as they expanded westward across the continent—taming the wilderness, the land, and the “savage” Native Americans as they did so.
As the writer of the dialog and narrative captions, Skeates should have been able to use language that bolstered the Dove’s stance if he felt the story needed it. Admittedly, though, given the privileged position in American culture of words evoking active force over passive peace, it’s difficult to find such words—especially for a superhero comic book, which has the notion of “active force” as one of its basic conventions.
Ditko was obviously going for alliteration on his cover. However, for the interior captions, Skeates could have described the Dove as disciplined rather than tame. It certainly would raise the Dove’s stature if readers thought of him as a “tranquil and disciplined” man (akin to a sensei) rather than as a “tamed pacifist.”
However, Ditko had the final say on script approval—at least on the first two stories—and he probably would have rejected “disciplined” as a descriptor because he would equate that trait more with a disciplined, rational mind such as an Objectivist should strive to attain.
Of course, choosing privileged words to describe the Dove was only half the problem. Ditko also controlled a lot with his visuals. For instance, the body positions of the characters on the cover for Showcase #75 indicate that Ditko did indeed favor the Hawk over the Dove—perhaps subconsciously, but I doubt it.
The Hawk’s shoulders are back and his head is held high. In contrast, the Dove’s shoulders are slouched and his gaze is downward in a submissive gesture. Additionally, the Hawk’s right hand (the strong hand for most people, and a symbol here for right-wing politics) is erect in a fist that allows him to either block a blow toward his head or use it offensively to deliver a blow. Conversely, the Dove’s left hand (the weak hand for most, and a symbol here for left-wing politics) is flaccid and can only provide passive protection of his genitals.
However, in light of the larger story he wanted to tell within the entire series, Ditko actually needed the ideological positions of the Hawk and the Dove to be equally off-center. He should have been in favor of both more egalitarian language from Skeates and more egalitarian body postures in his own illustrations.
The entirety of Ditko’s concept for the series reveals that his own ideological interest was not in privileging the Hawk’s position over the Dove’s since the Hawk is not the Objectivist in the story. Instead, the Randian character was the father, Judge Irwin Hall, who denounced the irrational views of both of his sons.
Ditko clearly intended Judge Hall to be a character created in the mold of such Rand protagonists as Howard Roark (The Fountainhead) and John Galt (Atlas Shrugged). Such characters are the epitome of Objectivism, and Rand presented them as two of the few men who are fit to judge others due to their own unquestionable morality and adherence to Aristotelian logic.
(This notion of the adherence to Aristotelian logic is the reason Ditko gave The Question’s supporting character, Professor Roder, the first name “Aristotle”).
In this regard, Judge Hall is also similar to Ditko’s Mr. A as the only character in The Hawk and the Dove who adheres to the Apollonian principles of rationalism and individuation (in contrast to the Dionysian values of emotionalism and assimilation).
Rand championed Apollonian principles, and she played them against what she considered the “mobocracy” of a democracy that exalts the Common Man and the emotional foundation of socialism/communism. She viewed both the “democratic mob” and socialism as Dionysian-based concepts that undermine the work of rational individuals in a capitalist society.
These Randian views are respectively translated in The Hawk and the Dove as the populist reactionary stance of the Hawk and the socialist activism of the Dove. As a “hippy” (especially in Ditko’s eyes), Skeates favored the Dove’s position on the Vietnam War (and towards violence in general).
Thus, due to this conflict with Skeates, Ditko only plotted the first two Hawk and Dove stories (Showcase #75 and The Hawk and the Dove #1). He then left the series after completing the pencils for the second issue, which was fully written by Skeates (including the plot).
Giordano must have supported Skeates’s position since Ditko was cut out of the plotting process and Skeates was allowed to take control of the direction the series would follow. Thus, in accordance with his principles as an Objectivist, Ditko was obligated to leave the series he had created. However, his departure from The Hawk and the Dove may have less to do over his conflict with Skeates and more to do with problems he was having on Beware the Creeper.
