Hawkeye: My Life as a Weapon

Writer: Matt Fraction
Artists: David Aja, Javier Pulido (Alan Davis/Mark Farmer on Young Avengers)
Colour Artist: Matt Hollingsworth

A Page 45 Comic Book of the Month

Clint Barton (aka Hawkeye): “Ok...this looks bad.”

Page 45 have been running the Comic Book of the Month Club for about six years now, the idea being that they recommend a comic every month and those that sign up get 20% discount. There's no tie in, and you don't have to buy each one. It's a wonderful way to expand one's literary horizons, especially given that the people there have very good taste. I've probably not enjoyed two of the books, and given there's been seventy four of them so far, that's an excellent hit rate. It has to be said also that even the ones that missed at least had something interesting about them. The seventy fifth Comic Book of the Month (or CBOTM) was announced at the start of April – Hawkeye: My Life as a Weapon. A super-hero book for the first time in the club's six year history.

I am not a big fan of modern day super-hero comics. I've tried to like them, and always find myself gravitating back towards them, only to leave after a year or so. For the most part they are extremely derivative and incestuous. An example would be the prevalence of major supporting characters and villains that first emerged fifty years ago, or at best twenty years ago. They seem to have lost their sense of fun and are written as if they want to be taken seriously as adult works, but have the most ludicrous plots this side of Dan Brown. An instance of this would be known psychotic Norman Osborne being made head of the US intelligence agency, or whatever SHIELD is, a few years ago due to one action during an invasion by aliens. That would work in a comic aimed at children up to the age of fourteen, as they used to be. Aimed at an adult audience, that sort of weak writing just does not hold water.

Anyway I don't want to digress too much into my feelings on a genre of comics. I just felt it necessary to lay the context for this brief review of Hawkeye.

So what did I make of Hawkeye: My Life as a Weapon? It has a lot to recommend it. Stephen Holland at Page 45 said that “...it's not even a super-hero comic” and he's right. Five of the chapters are extremely light on the tropes you would expect of the genre, and the first chapter especially is close to wonderful, without anything that would indicate this was part of the whole tights and capes thing. It feels much more of a crime comic, and one can't help but speculate as to whether the creators would like to have pursued that route, with Russian gangsters and a flawed, and very vulnerable hero, trying to do the right thing. At times it reminded me very much of Frank Miller's run on Daredevil in feel, when Miller was desperately trying to disguise the crime stories he wanted to write. David Aja's art especially seemed to evoke this, particularly in the scene in which Clint Barton enters the underground casino.

Matt Fraction and David Aja were unfortunately only together for the first three issues here. Unfortunate because, despite the couple of issues which I will be coming to, the there was real promise of something a little different. Matt Fraction's plots feel fresh and his dialogue is sharp. His handling of foreign languages is brilliant and funny:

Ringmaster: “Ladies and gentlemen. (French stuff.) (Wait, maybe some Italian too)”

Trust me this comes across much better on the page. The real star is David Aja though, which is why it was such a shame he only did three chapters of this book. The design is beautiful, but it fits perfectly into a seamless storytelling. There's a scene where our two heroes are walking across the floor to some stairs at a posh circus party, and Aja executes this with such grace it makes you want to shout out with joy. It is this quality that makes this shortcomings all the more galling.

Let's take the first problem I found. In the first issue, Matt Hollingsworth uses a nice subtle colour code to illustrate time, with pages that take place later in the narrative in a predominantly blue pallette. It worked well until the Russian thugs visit Hawkeye in a vets, which utilises the colours to let us know this is later in the narrative. At the bottom of the page we cut to a long rectangular window seen from the outside, and that blue palette. The very next panel, at the top of the next page shows Hawkeye being thrown through a window and landing outside. The same blue colours are used, so I didn't click that this was going back in the story again. I could have noticed that the window was different, but these were action scenes so the pace is fast. The average reader doesn't slow down to examine every detail in the panel during these scenes, or if they do the artist has usually done their job incorrectly (although admittedly there are times when you want the reader to slow down during an actions sequence). A minor thing maybe, but it pulls you out of the story, and thus shatters the spell that the creators have been trying (successfully) to weave to that point.

The second major problem is much more intrusive. The thing with super-hero comics is that they usually rely too much on prior knowledge on the characters and what has happened to them. In order for this book to really succeed as a self-contained effort, it would need to be a satisfying read for a reader with no prior knowledge of the characters inside. To this end I tired to approach it as if I did not have any knowledge of the characters (not too hard as I've never really read much of Hawkeye outside his Avengers exploits, and I know nothing of Young Avengers). So Kate Bishop, the other major character in this story, is introduced thus:

Clint Barton (aka Hawkeye): “Kate took over for me as Hawkeye once upon a time when I was...well dressing up like a ninja, sort of, is the short version. She is without doubt the finest and most gifted bowman I've ever met but she's like nine years old and spoiled rotten.”

She's nine years old. This brings up some major problems with the whole story, but the first thing I wondered was why Matt Fraction didn't bother to tell the artist, or why David Aja decided to draw her more like a young woman the a pre-pubescent girl. There are other problems at work here too, such as why Matt Fraction, having said she's nine years old, then tells her one of the reasons he wants her to work with him is that he doesn't want to sleep with her, which together with the images leads the reader to think that maybe she's not nine years old after all, but closer to twenty. Kate is persistently portrayed as being sexually mature until Javier Pulido draws her being unmasked in a later story, in a panel swiped directly from one of the Hernandez brothers in which she looks just like a little girl. There's also the unlikely ability of a little girl to pass herself off as a major criminal, to mix in adult society with ease, and to drive a car like an expert. Normally you could pass this off as the sidekick genre trope, but the book moves so firmly away from these tropes that this jars badly. We're shown Hawkeye getting consistently hurt and ending up in hospital at times. It goes to such great lengths to present a much more adult tale, and this aspect just ruins all of that.

The two chapters drawn by Javier Pulido are decent enough, but it is a bit of a let down after the opening chapters, and does not appear to advance the plot any from chapter two, at the end of which it appears that Clint Barton has drawn the eye of many of the heavy hitters in the underworld. In fact my last main criticism of this book is the inclusion of the Young Avengers chapter at the end. If anything it should have come near the start to illuminate the relationship between Kate Bishop and Clint Barton. As a self-contained work it would really have been more useful to have just included the issues that advanced the overarching story, unless this has not been finished or even dealt with. The Young Avengers chapter instead just reads like filler.

Surprisingly enough I did actually enjoy reading this book, especially the first three chapters, despite the above criticisms. As I said earlier, the standard set by Fraction, Aja and Hollingsworth was so high that the faults, when they appear, impact a lot more than they would normally have done. I would still urge all to read this, even if just for the consummate skill Aja shows in his page design and storytelling. That's half the fun of participating in the CBOTM club. I would never have picked this book up on my own, and so would have been unaware of just how good Aja can be. Now he's an artist I'll be on the look out for, and definitely someone I'll be investigating further, and so the sum of my knowledge becomes a little greater, and my appreciation a little deeper.