Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Comics, hawkeye, marvel

Review: Hawkeye #2 – The Good, The Bad And The Severely Maimed

Published Sat, 08 Sep 2012 13:30:48 -0500

Louis Falcetti writes for Bleeding Cool;

Hawkeye is not Daredevil. Marvel has a winning combination in the pairing of Waid & Samnee and Hawkeye seems to be very much in that same "acclaimed writer/hip artist" mode. Does putting David Aja on a book mean Marvel is trolling for more awards? I mean, is he REALLY that good? Yes he is. But Matt Fraction's trademark snark is starting to seep in at the sides and if it's not reigned back in favor of something genuine, I'm afraid we might end up with another Defenders situation on our hands.

It feels like everything in this book has to prove to the reader that Fraction is above everything. From the introductory recap, following a brief summation (extremely brief, three lines) it closes with, "didn't we cover all this last time?" It might be an attempt to disarm the reader in a friendly, casual, off the cuff way. But it reads like a snide commentary on the extremely useful introduction pages found in many comics today.

A newspaper headline reads, "EVERYTHING AWFUL OH GOD SOMEBODY DO SOMETHING". How are we supposed to read that? This is what Hawkeye sees when he views a paper? Maybe the editor at The Bugle went off his meds? Or it's Fraction's way sarcastic commentary on the current state of world affairs. Which is fine I guess, but what's it doing here? What does it add to the story beyond letting the reader know that the book's author has a "funny way" of looking at the world?

This however is just window dressing to bigger structural problems within Hawkeye. I know that Hawkeye isn't Reed Richards. I know that he's not Tony Stark. But has he always had the intellect of a concussed gym teacher? Is this some residual teen angst, Fraction firing back at the meatheads from homeroom, but in a subtle enough way where we're supposed to just smile at the well meaning buffoon?

Then there's another Fraction calling card, the dismissal of anything too "comic book-y", another way of showing the audience that, sure, he writes superhero comics but he's not, you know, "into them" or anything. Most of the time this device takes the form of the protagonist saying something along the lines of, "I know I'm just a guy in a funny suit with a silly name but…" However in this issue we get Hawkeye's, "…once upon a time when I was…well, dressing up like a ninja, sort of…"

Another thing that didn't set right with me while reading Hawkeye #2 is the body count. Right off the bat Fraction takes advantage of a universe without The Boys in it, by having poolside bystanders riddled with bullets while Clint & Kate make their get away. What are they breaking up that's so horrible that a few innocent bystanders don't even register on their radars? They are trying to stop a group of thieves…who are robbing criminals. Then as for the actual damage inflicted by team Hawkeye, Kate & Clint both shoot people in the back of the neck with arrows and Kate fires a few right into the eyes of their pursuers. At least these are addressed but only in the way that the reader is assured that none of them are dead, but their future lives will be difficult. I'm not a doctor, nor am I an expert on archery. However I fail to see how it's possible to fire arrows into a persons eyes and not have them die immediately. Let's put Phineas Gage on the back burner and just try to look at things how they actually, regularly occur. I understand that they are both marksmen, so if it was an issue of saying, "I shot him in the leg, but missed the artery", that I would believe. But the back of the neck and into the eyes and we're supposed to accept that everybody makes it out of that? These are the good guys? Will Hawkeye be on the (rumored) Punisher lead team this fall?

What distresses me about these missteps is that the book isn't bad. In fact, when Fraction can ease up, step back and actually commit to something without irony or disaffected, wry detachment the book is positively brilliant. As this sequence clearly illustrates.

Fraction and Aja are putting out a book that's human, funny, well paced and absolutely gorgeous. But the way things are shaping up, this book is going to end up too hipster for regular readers and not hip enough for the hipsters, creating a title that no one wants and that would be a shame.

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