After awhile, all that sincere acclamation starts to feel suspiciously like hype. Writer Matt Fraction, artist David Aja and colourist Matt Hollingsworth's Hawkeye has arrived to the blogosphere's equivalent of three rousing cheers and a shower of rose-petals. Thankfully, it is a fine comic, and if it's not quite the unconditional success that it's been painted as, it's still a promising and enjoyable debut.
Fraction, Aja and editor Steve Wacker have smartly kicked off the book by establishing a distinct, appropriate set-up for the title. Determinedly sidestepping the modern-era compulsion to enmesh solo titles in the complex continuity of the broader superhero-verse, they've deftly established Clint Barton as the guardian of a Brooklyn tenement block which has so far manged to escape the full force of gentrification. As with the same editorial office's Daredevil, this is a book which takes advantage of the rich diversity of neighbourhoods in New York City in order to create a distinctive and productive storytelling niche. Though there's thankfully no attempt made to ignore the existence of the Avengers, Hawkeye's first issue concentrates on the character's off-duty hours in an area of the world where the likes of Ultron and Norman Osborn are unlikely to frequently visit. Placed within such an untypical and interesting milieu, Barton himself is swiftly sketched out as a 21st century version of Denny Colt, constantly baffled, beaten up and shot while goodheartedly attempting to do what appears to be the right thing. As a platform for a variety of genre tales, from rampaging robots to romance, from slice'o'life melodrama to street tragedy, Hawkeye's new status quo is enticing robust and auspicious, playing to the character's strengths as a superhero "fighting with a stick and a string from the Paleolithic era" without precluding the appearance of more fantastical challenges.
Equally impressive is the atmosphere which the book's adopted. Part Lumet, part Capra, the comic's mostly informed by a good-natured, wry, and almost fairytale-like moral tone. No matter how grim the surface of the story is on occasion, it's rarely self-pitying and never embarrassingly worthy. This is a world where gangsters shoot good men in the arm without impeding their ability to haul great dying hounds to the local vets, and where superheroes can fall at least seven stories to the roof of a parked car and suffer only a six week stay in hospital. What counts isn't the verisimilitude of events, but their meaning, and it's a relief to encounter a world in which the charming absurdity of the superhero is acknowledged without undercutting the drama of events. The deliberate artificiality of Fraction's good-versus-evil tale is balanced out by the grit and precision of Aja's art, and the result means that the comic's neither predictably cod-realistic or somewhat over-sentimental. In that, Hawkeye suggests the work of a team who've not only read their Spirit tales, but thoroughly understood the appeal of Will Eisner's work from the period too.
Matt Fraction's plot and script are often both delightful and quietly ambitious. Hawkeye himself is allowed to remain a none-too-bright and yet - mostly - ethical and ingenious knight of the mean streets. Loved by gangster's dogs and roof-barbecuing neighbours alike, he's an impulsive and vulnerable target for an endearing excess of misfortune. It's a delight and a joy to find Fraction concentrating on dense storytelling compromised of a sequence of involving and often touching character moments, and if the book's hard-edged surface fails to entirely conceal a heart of the purest mush, there's nothing wrong with what's largely a celebration of community and self-sacrifice. Although it's obvious that, as with most of Fraction's work, the story is stamped through with a host of specific genre influences, the human element binds the inter-textuality of it all together in a way that makes this a satisfying story rather than a collection of nods and winks to other sources. Matched to that is an admirable determination to present a solidly traditional, self-contained story stiffened by a series of productively unobtrusive and admirable innovations. Hawkeye's narrative switches cleverly between time-periods without traditional markers of scene transitions, for example, a choice which succeeds in charging up events with a series of enticing enigmas. (*1) Even the choice to show Barton's guesses as to the language being used by those around him in their speech balloons adds a touch of novelty and insight to conventions usually presented in a taken-for-granted fashion.
*1:- As most reviews have quite rightly mentioned, Matt Hollingsworth's exquisitely well-judged colours are used to differentiate between time-periods, which avoids the need for story-slowing exposition.
This conspiracy on Fraction and Aja's part to produce a comic which stands in opposition to the past dozen and so years of decompressed storytelling is perhaps the most immediately impressive aspect of Hawkeye. Aja's pages are joyfully dense in incident and detail, revelling in the potential of the comicbook to capture the specifics of time, character and place. Despite his own doubts on the matter, as expressed in the latest Decompressed podcast with Fraction and Kieron Gillen, Aja certainly does give the impression of channelling, though never copying or dumbing down, David Mazzucchelli's style as it blossomed during Born Again. (To take but one example, the scene of Barton's first appearance at the vets seems to playfully and sweetly echo Daredevil's dumping of Nuke at the Daily Bugle in DD#232.) But to note the fact that Aja's art can, accurately or not, be placed in a specific tradition isn't intended to suggest that his work lacks originality, character or quality. Quite the opposite is true, for his art here is undeniably something of a triumph. It's not just that he's fulfilled many of the essential qualities which a great many of today's artists struggle to, though his characters are all distinct and consistent, the emotional meaning of his scenes precise and moving, and the controlled dynamism of his storytelling persistently engrossing and frequently exciting. Yet in addition to that, his choices on the page always illuminate the narrative rather than celebrating his own skills or the conventions of the super-book itself. It is, despite the obvious distinction of these pages, a charmingly selfless achievement, in which the tale and not its teller is what's made to count.
Together, Fraction and Aja have produced a comic which - along with the rare likes of Mark Waid's Daredevil - serves as a satisfying, self-contained experience. Whatever qualifications might be added to such a judgement, their achievement is, in the context of today's all too often anoxeric and heartless super-books, genuine and creditable. Yet there are several problems with the comic which stand out all the more because of the quality of Hawkeye as a whole. And so, while it's laudable that Fraction has wanted to avoid portraying Hawkeye as a one-dimensional do-gooder, the scene in which Barton abandons a wheelchair in the street after having kicked out at it is a conspicuous and unfortunate misjudgement. It doesn't stand as a marker of his daring and impulsive nature, but rather as the brand of a selfish, self-obsessed egoist. "S'a little juvenile, I admit -- but I've wanted to do that for months", runs Barton's narration, as Aja's art shows the traffic blocked by the Avengers' public attack of entitlement. Worse yet is Barton's response to the nurse who quite rightly points out that "That's a two hunner dollah wheelchair y'just kicked inta traffic". An entirely unconvincing apology counts for nothing, since Barton makes no attempt to help in the wheelchair's recovery, while his closing "Bill me" is as complacent and uncaring a punchline as might be imagined.
The adolescent scorning of authority figures and the rejection of community values is not in itself a signifier of virtue, let alone heroism, despite what a great deal of the West's popular entertainment appears to transmit, and Fraction's decisions here leave Hawkeye looking like a profoundly unimpressive individual. No matter how the story tries to load the argument in Barton's favour by presenting the nurse as a foul-mouthed joy-killer, the villain of the piece remains obvious. (*2) It's one of only two moments when Fraction's habit of presenting intriguing ideas without apparently considering their wider meaning shows itself here, but it entirely spoils the flow of the book. The spoilt, callous brat who features in this part of the tale bears no relation to the Hawkeye that's elsewhere in the comic, and his anti-social behaviour undercuts the sense that he's a profoundly decent man. It very much isn't a scene which establishes Hawkeye as cool, and the points it attempts to establish could have been made in a far less disagreeable fashion. (*3)
*2:- It's not that Hawkeye isn't shown as insensitive elsewhere, but there the harm is limited and he acts immediately to put things right. His lack of empathy with his fellow residents, for example, over the matter of "the hassle of moving" shows that he can be obtuse, but that's a long way from the litany of self-righteousness which the wheelchair scene transmits.
*3:- Fraction also has Hawkeye declare that "he's wanted to" kick out at and leave behind the wheelchair for months. It's an example of what psychologists call a technique of neutralisation, because it's a way for the mind to obscure responsibility with a spurious justification. For one thing, Hawkeye's claiming his frustration has lasted months, but he's only been in hospital for 6 weeks. In that, he's over-exaggerating his own hurt so as to legitimize his childishness. Far more importantly, what he wants and what's good for the hospital, the nurse and the traffic are very different things.
Elsewhere, it's hard not to have qualms about "Ivan", the criminal landlord of the "big old building out in Bedford-Stuyvesant" where Hawkeye hangs his bow between Avengers missions. As a stereotype, he's as crude as the very name "Ivan" suggests. Not only is he is the typical pap-crime fiction representation of the Russian as gangster, but he's also the only character in the book who struggles with his English. In fact, he's your all-purpose criminal immigrant, and there's nothing elsewhere in the book to counter-point his brutality and selfishness with a less off-hand view of who is and who isn't an acceptable American. In fact, the community in Hawkeye is only returned to its status quo with Ivan's expulsion, which leaves the whole comic carrying a no-doubt unintended reactionary message.
Similarly, Bedford-Stuvyvesant itself does appear conspicuously, if of course not exclusively, White in Hawkeye, which, along with the matter of Ivan, points to a degree of insensitivity which just a few moments of self-reflection on the part of all concerned might have overturned. (We're shown 38 or so folks in its streets, tenements, gambling clubs and veterinarians, with only 7 of being Black, and only 1 of those - a victim - having even a brief speaking role.) It's a lack of attention to detail combined with a love of the Big Moment which appears again in the scene in which Ivan is apparently being exiled from New York, if not America, by Hawkeye. "I broke no laws, Bro", he declares, which is obviously untrue, given that assault, threatening behaviour and theft at the very least could be added to a charge sheet. But Barton isn't, it appears, concerned with the law at all, which leaves a dubious taste to the comic's conclusion. Here we are again, at the point at which the superhero doesn't just take the law in their own hands to catch the bad guy, but passes judgement and serves sentence too. If only Barton had been made to tell Ivan that he knows he's an illegal immigrant, and that he leave now with the money or else, then the scene would've sidestepped most of those concerns.
It ought to be said that I appear to be the only person in the entire blogosphere who's in the slightest bit worried about these matters, and I've no doubt that the charge of "overthinking" could well be applied to what I've written. And yet, one more pass over the story between all concerned could have eliminated these problems, and everything from the contemptuous business with the wheelchair to the worrying representational issues could have lost without the story suffering at all. That that either didn't happen, or that the issues weren't considered of importance, doesn't mean that Hawkeye isn''t a fundamentally impressive and enjoyable comic book. But it does mean that there's some notable flaws in what's otherwise a fine debut.
Will I be buying the second issue? I suspect I will. But I'll be hoping for just a touch more sensitivity too. Hawkeye's a comic which deserves to live up to own considerable potential.
Reader's Roulette Rating: Go buy, but prepare yourself for some speed-bumps on an apparently pedal-to-the-metal track.
Over-thinking? What else can expect from a blog with such a title?
.
Fraction, Aja and editor Steve Wacker have smartly kicked off the book by establishing a distinct, appropriate set-up for the title. Determinedly sidestepping the modern-era compulsion to enmesh solo titles in the complex continuity of the broader superhero-verse, they've deftly established Clint Barton as the guardian of a Brooklyn tenement block which has so far manged to escape the full force of gentrification. As with the same editorial office's Daredevil, this is a book which takes advantage of the rich diversity of neighbourhoods in New York City in order to create a distinctive and productive storytelling niche. Though there's thankfully no attempt made to ignore the existence of the Avengers, Hawkeye's first issue concentrates on the character's off-duty hours in an area of the world where the likes of Ultron and Norman Osborn are unlikely to frequently visit. Placed within such an untypical and interesting milieu, Barton himself is swiftly sketched out as a 21st century version of Denny Colt, constantly baffled, beaten up and shot while goodheartedly attempting to do what appears to be the right thing. As a platform for a variety of genre tales, from rampaging robots to romance, from slice'o'life melodrama to street tragedy, Hawkeye's new status quo is enticing robust and auspicious, playing to the character's strengths as a superhero "fighting with a stick and a string from the Paleolithic era" without precluding the appearance of more fantastical challenges.
Equally impressive is the atmosphere which the book's adopted. Part Lumet, part Capra, the comic's mostly informed by a good-natured, wry, and almost fairytale-like moral tone. No matter how grim the surface of the story is on occasion, it's rarely self-pitying and never embarrassingly worthy. This is a world where gangsters shoot good men in the arm without impeding their ability to haul great dying hounds to the local vets, and where superheroes can fall at least seven stories to the roof of a parked car and suffer only a six week stay in hospital. What counts isn't the verisimilitude of events, but their meaning, and it's a relief to encounter a world in which the charming absurdity of the superhero is acknowledged without undercutting the drama of events. The deliberate artificiality of Fraction's good-versus-evil tale is balanced out by the grit and precision of Aja's art, and the result means that the comic's neither predictably cod-realistic or somewhat over-sentimental. In that, Hawkeye suggests the work of a team who've not only read their Spirit tales, but thoroughly understood the appeal of Will Eisner's work from the period too.
Matt Fraction's plot and script are often both delightful and quietly ambitious. Hawkeye himself is allowed to remain a none-too-bright and yet - mostly - ethical and ingenious knight of the mean streets. Loved by gangster's dogs and roof-barbecuing neighbours alike, he's an impulsive and vulnerable target for an endearing excess of misfortune. It's a delight and a joy to find Fraction concentrating on dense storytelling compromised of a sequence of involving and often touching character moments, and if the book's hard-edged surface fails to entirely conceal a heart of the purest mush, there's nothing wrong with what's largely a celebration of community and self-sacrifice. Although it's obvious that, as with most of Fraction's work, the story is stamped through with a host of specific genre influences, the human element binds the inter-textuality of it all together in a way that makes this a satisfying story rather than a collection of nods and winks to other sources. Matched to that is an admirable determination to present a solidly traditional, self-contained story stiffened by a series of productively unobtrusive and admirable innovations. Hawkeye's narrative switches cleverly between time-periods without traditional markers of scene transitions, for example, a choice which succeeds in charging up events with a series of enticing enigmas. (*1) Even the choice to show Barton's guesses as to the language being used by those around him in their speech balloons adds a touch of novelty and insight to conventions usually presented in a taken-for-granted fashion.
*1:- As most reviews have quite rightly mentioned, Matt Hollingsworth's exquisitely well-judged colours are used to differentiate between time-periods, which avoids the need for story-slowing exposition.
This conspiracy on Fraction and Aja's part to produce a comic which stands in opposition to the past dozen and so years of decompressed storytelling is perhaps the most immediately impressive aspect of Hawkeye. Aja's pages are joyfully dense in incident and detail, revelling in the potential of the comicbook to capture the specifics of time, character and place. Despite his own doubts on the matter, as expressed in the latest Decompressed podcast with Fraction and Kieron Gillen, Aja certainly does give the impression of channelling, though never copying or dumbing down, David Mazzucchelli's style as it blossomed during Born Again. (To take but one example, the scene of Barton's first appearance at the vets seems to playfully and sweetly echo Daredevil's dumping of Nuke at the Daily Bugle in DD#232.) But to note the fact that Aja's art can, accurately or not, be placed in a specific tradition isn't intended to suggest that his work lacks originality, character or quality. Quite the opposite is true, for his art here is undeniably something of a triumph. It's not just that he's fulfilled many of the essential qualities which a great many of today's artists struggle to, though his characters are all distinct and consistent, the emotional meaning of his scenes precise and moving, and the controlled dynamism of his storytelling persistently engrossing and frequently exciting. Yet in addition to that, his choices on the page always illuminate the narrative rather than celebrating his own skills or the conventions of the super-book itself. It is, despite the obvious distinction of these pages, a charmingly selfless achievement, in which the tale and not its teller is what's made to count.
Together, Fraction and Aja have produced a comic which - along with the rare likes of Mark Waid's Daredevil - serves as a satisfying, self-contained experience. Whatever qualifications might be added to such a judgement, their achievement is, in the context of today's all too often anoxeric and heartless super-books, genuine and creditable. Yet there are several problems with the comic which stand out all the more because of the quality of Hawkeye as a whole. And so, while it's laudable that Fraction has wanted to avoid portraying Hawkeye as a one-dimensional do-gooder, the scene in which Barton abandons a wheelchair in the street after having kicked out at it is a conspicuous and unfortunate misjudgement. It doesn't stand as a marker of his daring and impulsive nature, but rather as the brand of a selfish, self-obsessed egoist. "S'a little juvenile, I admit -- but I've wanted to do that for months", runs Barton's narration, as Aja's art shows the traffic blocked by the Avengers' public attack of entitlement. Worse yet is Barton's response to the nurse who quite rightly points out that "That's a two hunner dollah wheelchair y'just kicked inta traffic". An entirely unconvincing apology counts for nothing, since Barton makes no attempt to help in the wheelchair's recovery, while his closing "Bill me" is as complacent and uncaring a punchline as might be imagined.
The adolescent scorning of authority figures and the rejection of community values is not in itself a signifier of virtue, let alone heroism, despite what a great deal of the West's popular entertainment appears to transmit, and Fraction's decisions here leave Hawkeye looking like a profoundly unimpressive individual. No matter how the story tries to load the argument in Barton's favour by presenting the nurse as a foul-mouthed joy-killer, the villain of the piece remains obvious. (*2) It's one of only two moments when Fraction's habit of presenting intriguing ideas without apparently considering their wider meaning shows itself here, but it entirely spoils the flow of the book. The spoilt, callous brat who features in this part of the tale bears no relation to the Hawkeye that's elsewhere in the comic, and his anti-social behaviour undercuts the sense that he's a profoundly decent man. It very much isn't a scene which establishes Hawkeye as cool, and the points it attempts to establish could have been made in a far less disagreeable fashion. (*3)
*2:- It's not that Hawkeye isn't shown as insensitive elsewhere, but there the harm is limited and he acts immediately to put things right. His lack of empathy with his fellow residents, for example, over the matter of "the hassle of moving" shows that he can be obtuse, but that's a long way from the litany of self-righteousness which the wheelchair scene transmits.
*3:- Fraction also has Hawkeye declare that "he's wanted to" kick out at and leave behind the wheelchair for months. It's an example of what psychologists call a technique of neutralisation, because it's a way for the mind to obscure responsibility with a spurious justification. For one thing, Hawkeye's claiming his frustration has lasted months, but he's only been in hospital for 6 weeks. In that, he's over-exaggerating his own hurt so as to legitimize his childishness. Far more importantly, what he wants and what's good for the hospital, the nurse and the traffic are very different things.
Elsewhere, it's hard not to have qualms about "Ivan", the criminal landlord of the "big old building out in Bedford-Stuyvesant" where Hawkeye hangs his bow between Avengers missions. As a stereotype, he's as crude as the very name "Ivan" suggests. Not only is he is the typical pap-crime fiction representation of the Russian as gangster, but he's also the only character in the book who struggles with his English. In fact, he's your all-purpose criminal immigrant, and there's nothing elsewhere in the book to counter-point his brutality and selfishness with a less off-hand view of who is and who isn't an acceptable American. In fact, the community in Hawkeye is only returned to its status quo with Ivan's expulsion, which leaves the whole comic carrying a no-doubt unintended reactionary message.
Similarly, Bedford-Stuvyvesant itself does appear conspicuously, if of course not exclusively, White in Hawkeye, which, along with the matter of Ivan, points to a degree of insensitivity which just a few moments of self-reflection on the part of all concerned might have overturned. (We're shown 38 or so folks in its streets, tenements, gambling clubs and veterinarians, with only 7 of being Black, and only 1 of those - a victim - having even a brief speaking role.) It's a lack of attention to detail combined with a love of the Big Moment which appears again in the scene in which Ivan is apparently being exiled from New York, if not America, by Hawkeye. "I broke no laws, Bro", he declares, which is obviously untrue, given that assault, threatening behaviour and theft at the very least could be added to a charge sheet. But Barton isn't, it appears, concerned with the law at all, which leaves a dubious taste to the comic's conclusion. Here we are again, at the point at which the superhero doesn't just take the law in their own hands to catch the bad guy, but passes judgement and serves sentence too. If only Barton had been made to tell Ivan that he knows he's an illegal immigrant, and that he leave now with the money or else, then the scene would've sidestepped most of those concerns.
It ought to be said that I appear to be the only person in the entire blogosphere who's in the slightest bit worried about these matters, and I've no doubt that the charge of "overthinking" could well be applied to what I've written. And yet, one more pass over the story between all concerned could have eliminated these problems, and everything from the contemptuous business with the wheelchair to the worrying representational issues could have lost without the story suffering at all. That that either didn't happen, or that the issues weren't considered of importance, doesn't mean that Hawkeye isn''t a fundamentally impressive and enjoyable comic book. But it does mean that there's some notable flaws in what's otherwise a fine debut.
Will I be buying the second issue? I suspect I will. But I'll be hoping for just a touch more sensitivity too. Hawkeye's a comic which deserves to live up to own considerable potential.
Reader's Roulette Rating: Go buy, but prepare yourself for some speed-bumps on an apparently pedal-to-the-metal track.
Over-thinking? What else can expect from a blog with such a title?
.
