Hawkeye 7

I feel like this is a really stupid thing to open with, because OBVIOUSLY the people who do the pictures in a comic do as much as if not vastly more than the people who do the words, but man – this is David Aja’s comic.

I like Matt Fraction’s writing. I will defend his Mighty Thor against all comers, I genuinely enjoyed and howled with grief at the end of The Defenders and I periodically reassess The Order as having had some good ideas (largely related to Pepper Potts) amongst some very bad ones (largely related to hiding these good ideas inside what I would only tentatively describe as “structure”, preferring “a laundry basket where each delve inside was likely to bring you into contact with at least one pair of crusty undies”), and I even, in a radical break from canonical opinion, enjoyed Fear Itself. What? I like hammers.

Anyway, so, I like Matt Fraction. Matt Fraction writing Hawkeye was the reason I decided to start reading it. No part of me went in thinking “sure, I like Matt Fraction but is he going to do this thing where he has loads of good ideas, slightly forgets about them, gets carried away and somehow between issues six and seven fucks everything up in a way that’s almost imperceptible at the time but later becomes jarringly annoying?” No, I was excited and eager because I wanted to read Matt Fraction making my “favourite Avenger to see shirtless 2012” do some cool stuff.

What I hadn’t anticipated was how very, very cool that stuff would be. I had not anticipated David Aja’s art. In the words of Tumblr: my body was not ready.

Don’t get me wrong: there are some very awesome words in this comic, there’s some clever, efficient plotting and there’s brilliant, character-loaded and word-conservative dialogue. There’s an awful lot of stuff to love; this is the Matt Fraction that both hardcore, blinkeredly persistent, only-slightly-bitter-about-him-forgetting-Namor-for-the-last-four-issues-of-Defenders fans love, and something that absolutely anyone with the capacity to enjoy comics should love, too.

But. The real revelation here, for me, is how astoundingly well David Aja has done the art. This is a series about 2012’s Most Stand-Up Dude,* and making the things Hawkeye does when he’s not being an Avenger look both convincingly Clint-ish and convincingly awesome is a fairly difficult recipe. Fraction loves writing domestic but Clint’s not, like, a house proud guy; his home will never be Stark Tower’s technological paradise or the sort of mildly disturbing bolt hole you can only imagine Black Widow lives in, or even Bucky’s simple-but-expansive apartment. But if you get between Clint and his stuff, whatever that stuff is and regardless of whether anyone else could want it, then god so help you.

Clint’s probably one of the least normal Avengers – not in the Hank Pym sense of damaged, at least, no worse than anyone else, but in the sense that there’s not really a place for him in the world if he’s not an Avenger. Most of the others (although by no means all) could go to some “normal” version of their functions as scientists, spies, soldiers, engineers, gods of thunder, etc., and have a sense of purpose, but Clint doesn’t quite fit into any world where he’s not a superhero. So what does he do when he’s not doing that?

And the other Hawkeye, Kate Bishop? Well, she’s my favourite character in comics. So not fucking this up is important to me, but also, she’s a character who’s got the same Stand-Up Dude qualities as Clint Barton but in the body of a very rich teenager, who’s probably got more options for things she could do if she wasn’t a superhero, but none of them ones she could accept except with deep resignation. And for all the fact they’re Stand-Up Dudes who occasionally have their own or each other’s lives sorted, this could have been interpreted, artistically, so so differently.

Take the Black Widow: The Name Of The Rose arc. That has gorgeous, stylised art that’s all fraying lines and depth and endless distance. That wouldn’t have been an unreasonable way to frame a comic about two archers, always looking into the distance, reaching another shot, round corners and from above, blurred motion lines and microsecond glimpses of surgically precise information.

But no. ‘Cus’ that’s how Natasha sees the world, maybe even how Tony Stark does – schematics and facts – but Blindspot aside, that isn’t Hawkeye. For him the world is all rough and fuzzy and instinct and the secure whip of the bow against your forearm and the familiar strain and the breathing and the focus-beyond-thought. It’s the beautiful, minimalist, almost flat drawings that David Aja’s given this.

The tiny, rapid motion and expression panels, the jarred together locations. Everything is seen through Clint-vision (another perfect touch, whenever a headline or a fancy party invite appears) and Clint-vision is lots of shots. Not calculated angles or situations, but polaroids and shapes and fundamentals, and this beautiful stylised world brings it to life perfectly. All comics are crafted, of course, but this one feels like an exceptional meeting of great ideas and delivered concept. And it’s funny, thank fuck.

Anyway. Before I ramble on for another thousand words about how much I want to somehow put this comic in my mouth and snog the print off it, the issue at hand.

#7 was supposedly a rush job. The proceeds are all going directly to Hurricane Sandy relief and the story centres around it. It sees the Hawkeyes split up, Clint going to help out his neighbour, Grills, and Kate going to a high-falutin’ engagement party, and it sees them vulnerable, literally out of their depth. As Clint says at the start when he’s asked why he’s not out in the storm with the Avengers – not much a bow and arrow can do in this.

Probably for reasons of speed, #7 is actually drawn by Steve Lieber and Jesse Hamm, who have adhered to Aja’s style perfectly. The art in this issue is really beautiful, from swirling aquamarine tempests to the stonewashed feel of the street scenes the morning after and it’s an enormous credit to both artists to have worked so quickly and with so much care

The moral of the story, that it’s not superpowers that make the difference against unstoppable forces, is a great fit for the Hawkeyes, of course, and to see them both out of their comfort zone – Clint in difficult family wrangling and Kate not having the means to defend herself (although apparently having a head on which you can open cans of baked beans) is something that suits their characters without having any inherent humiliation lesson to it.

The Hawkeyes’ good-humored approach to loss throughout the comic, pragmatic in a way that’s the privilege of the very rich but funny, is very welcome – from Kate’s muttered apologies, like a rosary recital, to fashion designers as she slashes her dress and tosses her heels, to Clint’s “aww, car” as he sees a tidal wave blow his transport away. The sympathetic, emotive art lets the comic talk about Sandy, about looting a pharmacy shop and an old man who wasn’t able to move, about Queens being “on fire and underwater”, and about the bravery of normal people, and put lots of jokes in. Because jokes are what work, at a time like that, and not every character, certainly not every writer/artist combo, could do it with such recent events and feel warmly placed into them, rather than tasteless.

Tasteful is definitely what Hawkeye is, extremely classy, even, despite the fact Clint himself would probably protest that. Its episodic (although arc-connected) stories are perfect or near-perfect capsules of some essence of character, in this case, the East coast under a storm, and the stories knit beautifully into their environment, funny and thoughtful and touching and kick-ass and great at boats.

*According to a panel in the Jack Horner, Tottenham Court Road, December 2012.