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.
