Waiting for the Trade - Hawkeye

Waiting for the Trade

By Bill Miller

 

Hawkeye: My Life as a Weapon

By Matt Fraction, David Aja and Javier Pulido
Collects Hawkeye # 1 – 5 and Young Avengers Presents #6
 

Why I Bought This: I like Hawkeye. I buy most Hawkeye solo titles sooner or later and with this one getting rave reviews I opted for sooner.

 

The Plot: Hawkeye takes Kate Bishop (The Young Avenger that used the Hawkeye name while Clint was dead and/or being Ronin) on as a sidekick and attempts to take down organized crime and perform missions for SHIELD.

Warning Spoilers ahead, particularly the final sentence of the chapter 5 recap is a major spoiler you should avoid if you intend to read this.

Chapter 1 – In the opening page Hawkeye falls out of a building and is hospitalized. Six weeks later he goes home to a slum building in NYC owned by some Russian Dude who is in the process of evicting one of the tenants. Clint sees the guy is within his legal rights to do it. Later Clint hangs out with all his neighbors for a barbecue and we see Russian Dude wants to evict everyone by ridiculously raising the rent. Clint seeks out Russian Dude in an illegal casino and gives him a duffel bag full of money to pay everyone’s rent. Russian Dude doesn’t actually want the money as he needs the building vacated for presumably nefarious purposes so a fight breaks out. Clint, who is in his civilian identity—ergo sans arrows, gets thrown through a window and shot in the arm. He’s about to be shot again when Russian Dude’s dog--whom Clint had given a slice of pizza earlier--bites its master to save Clint. This gives Clint the opportunity to punch everyone out although the dog gets hit by a car in the melee. Clint takes the dog to the vet where Russian Dude tracks him down. Clint wins another brawl and then buys the building outright from Russian Dude. Clint’s dog pulls through surgery.

Chapter 2 – Clint has Kate over at his house and he shows her a conspiracy he has stumbled onto courtesy of “hobo code.” They then dress up James Bond style to attend an underworld circus cruise that includes Owl, Hammer Head, Tombstone, Madame Masque and Kingpin as attendees. The cruise is hosted by Ringmaster of the Circus of Crime and he uses his hat to hypnotize and rob the audience, including the criminals. Hawkeye and Kate are immune due to spy sunglasses and go off to investigate. Hawkeye gets ambushed and captured by generic thugs led by a student of the Swordsman. Kate arrives and makes the save. The commotion causes Ringmaster to arrive and he’s got an Uzi so Kate shoots his eyes out with arrows, which Hawkeye thinks is taking things a little too far. Swordsman’s student challenges Hawk to a fight, and Clint takes him down fairly hard with a regular arrow as well. And then Hawkeye and Kate take the motorboat Ringmaster had loaded up with everyone’s money. When the hypnotism wears off we see Kingpin is not happy with this development. Hawkeye then officially invites Kate to be his sidekick and she accepts.

Chapter 3 – Hawkeye shows all of his old school trick arrows to Kate, who mocks some of them. Later Clint meets some chick in a red car and they fall into bed together. The next morning guys with Uzi’s attack and kidnap her. Clint gets Kate to pick him up in a Volkswagen and we get a long car chase scene in which Clint has to use every one of his trick arrows in a story that ends up being really fun and clever in a way a play by play recap can’t do justice to. In the end Clint saves the girl and they part with a kiss.

Chapter 4 – A tape of Clint assassinating a terrorist has fallen into the hands of a black market auction in Madripoor so SHIELD sends Clint there undercover with an unlimited credit card to buy it back. He gets made by Madame Masque and her goons tie him up and steal his credit card. At the auction we see Kingpin, the Maggia, the Mandarin, the Crimson Cowl and Hydra are among the other bidders. Masque wins the bidding, but when she gets back to her until room we find out she is Kate Bishop in disguise.

Chapter 5 – Hawkeye, while still tied to a chair, is attacked by the Hand and thrown out a window, but is rescued in the nick of time by Maria Hill on his old skycycle. The fight draws hotel security who uncover Bishop’s ruse. The real Masque gathers Kingpin and Viper to discuss the situation when Hawkeye flies in for the save. The heroes fight some AIM and Hydra thugs and manage to steal the tape back. Afterwards Kate questions Hawkeye about the tape’s contents but we learn it was faked by SHIELD to uncover a mole in their organization.

Chapter 0 – Reprinted from Young Avengers a few years ago it is the story of how Kate and Clint met. Kate goes on date with teammate Patriot but decides she wants to just be friends. She is attacked by Ronin (Clint in a dumb ninja costume Bendis put him in while the world at large still thinks he’s dead at this time.) Clint in the brief fight decides she has some skills and invites her to meet him in the obligatory abandoned warehouse. (His interest in her is because she took up the Hawkeye mantle after he died). Once there he unmasks as Hawkeye. They have an archery competition over the name and bow that Clint wins while getting to know each other. After some personal drama with the other Young Avengers, Kate gets Speed to help her break into New Avengers headquarters to steal the bow back. This impresses Clint enough that he gives Kate his blessing to carry on as Hawkeye.

 

Critical Thoughts: This is a trade that got better each chapter. It’s funny because after the first two chapters I was all set not to like this. Having Hawkeye using regular non-trick arrows to stab people isn’t nearly as interesting as the character’s classic interpretation and having Kate blind someone with regular arrows seemed exceptionally hardcore and out of character from the little I’ve seen of her. (I have one Young Avengers trade and the characters appeared in Civil War.) And then chapter 3 came along and it was all about the trick arrows and it was so fun and clever and it started to turn my opinion on this around. Chapters four and five seal the deal, in that it starts off looking like exactly the sort of take on Hawkeye I hate (him as a remorseless killer or in this case a government assassin, which is kind of the same thing) but in the closing panel we learn the exact opposite of that supposition is true and I was like yea, okay Hawkeye is in good hands here. Plus the ride from point A to point B in those two chapters is a lot of fun, with Fraction making good use of the Madripoor underworld setting.

There are a lot of little things I like here as well. The interaction between Kate and Hawkeye really clicks. I had read chapter 0 before in the aforementioned Young Avengers trade I own and really liked the dynamic between the two in that story, so this feels like a natural outgrowth of that. I thought using Ringmaster as a Hawkeye villain was a fairly inspired touch considering Hawkeye’s own background in the circus; although I would have preferred a traditional Circus of Crime story to fully explore those themes than what we ended up with. Finally, I think the ongoing subplot of Hawkeye versus the entire criminal underworld shows potential. Kingpin in particular seems like he’s getting annoyed by Hawkeye’s shenanigans and that has the potential to become a major story down the line.

Ultimately, while I prefer what McCann recently did with Hawkeye better than what Fraction is doing as that is just more inline with my favorite memories of the character, I can see the validity of this interpretation. It plays up that Hawkeye is a more morally ambiguous than Captain America, but that’s always been the case between those two. Ditto, the stressing of Hawkeye as the most human of the all Avengers. These themes have always been part of the character but rarely as out front as they are here; making this feel like a different take yet one still in line with the character’s core.

 

Grade B-. A rocky start to set the tone it wants to, but once it finds its footing the storytelling is pretty remarkable in the ending chapters.