Hawkeye: Blindspot 1

How many lousy ideas can you fit in the first issue of a mini-series starring one of Marvel’s finest characters? Not a challenge anyone should be taking up, but McCann seems to be having a good go.

1. It starts with what I reckon is the world’s crappiest fight scene ever (it’s the only action in the comic), despite featuring excellent characters like the Absorbing Man and Thor. The former gets to throw a truck, the latter does nothing. At all. We don’t see most of it. Hawkeye misses with one arrow, then the scene ends with him charging at Tiger Shark. Oddly he survives.

2. The title is a clue: we had a deaf Hawkeye for a while, which was irritating and rubbish enough. Now he is going blind, apparently. Marvel has one major blind hero, so I can’t see them giving us another, however well licensed the blind archer idea is by various SE Asian stories. So no he isn’t going blind, I am willing to bet. Since it was caused by a blow to the head, perhaps, like amnesia in cartoons, it will be reversed the same way.

3. Or maybe the day gets saved by the seeing-properly device Iron Man knocks up for him, for fuck’s sake, making the whole central theme of the story a dead duck from the start.

4. Using a third of the first issue for recapping a really well-known character’s back-story before he became a hero is never a great idea – and especially when it is as crappy and boring a history as Hawkeye’s, and even more so when you basically omit the part where he was a villain, and the one meagre hint in that direction (which you couldn’t work out if you didn’t know) blames it all on the influence of the Black Widow, which is kind of pushing it as well as simple-minded.

5. Write an intro page which waffles on about a whole bunch of things without giving you any of the key background (because that is already there, padding your story) but does talk at some length about a bunch of recent things that are not at all relevant to the story – except in that it raises the question of why Mockingbird seems to be absent in this.

6. Pick a villain who has been around for ages and decide his focus is on Hawkeye even though it never has been and never should be.

7. Create another villain who is a bad-guy version of Hawkeye, as if we need another super-archer enemy (there’s another one in the flashback stuff), or another story wherein the hero comes up against a dark version of himself.

8. End with a big reveal-style final splash page of the two villains gloating over what appears to be a non-existent plan. A standard enough closing, except the page is a pointless waste of space since we’ve been seeing them both perfectly clearly for the previous couple of pages. It’s as if McCann has found the device effective in other comics, but hasn’t grasped how it works.

To be fair, it’s not 100% McCann’s fault that this comic is dreadful and boring. Editor Tom Brennan has to take some responsibility, obviously, for letting this garbage through. A clumsily drawn cover (the signature says Perkins) featuring some flaming cars (not featured in the story at all) plus the Black Widow’s boobs and some characters not seen inside or only in brief flashback (the Swordsman) or standing around for no clear reason (Cap) kind of sets the couldn’t-be-bothered tone. Plasticky art in clumsily cluttered panel compositions throughout the story deadens the tone even more, though I suspect the immensely thoughtless and lazy colouring job makes this a lot more lifeless than it needs to be, since some of the sepia-toned flashback scenes look okay.

I wish I enjoyed comics like this more. I have a pretty enormous tolerance for superhero comics even when poor, and a deep love of loads of them featuring Hawkeye over the decades. He’s a character I like enormously, certainly in my ten favourite Marvel heroes, and he warrants something infinitely more interesting than this dismally dreary mess.