Today, Jack and Shelby are discussing Hawkeye 5, originally released December 5th, 2012.
Jack: Not for the first time, we begin an issue of Hawkeye with Clint Barton falling headlong out of a freshly smashed umpteenth-story window, privately conceding that this situation is, perhaps, suboptimal.
Today, Drew and Jack are discussing Hawkeye 4, originally released November 21st, 2012.
Drew: Back in issue 2, Clint assured us that “work’s work.” The very notion of considering the Avengers a day job says a lot about his character, but the notion that he could separate his personal life from his professional one is laughable. Hell, my mom can’t even do that, and her job doesn’t involve killing people, saving the world, or supervillains bent on exacting revenge (at least, I don’t think her job involves those things). The first three issues of Hawkeye have brilliantly explored what a guy like Clint might get up to when he has nothing better to do — fighting local crime and righting small wrongs just for the hell of it — but issue 4 brings reality back to Clint’s doorstep. It just so happens that, for Clint, reality comes in the form of a floating aircraft-carrier filled with superheroes. Continue reading
Today, Patrick and Shelby are discussing Hawkeye 1-3, originally released August 1st, September 5th, and October 17th, 2012.
Patrick: My Improv 101 teacher, used to stop our scenes all the time to give the following note: “Today’s the day.” What he meant was that today was the day these characters confronted the thing that was already weird about their relationship: everything comes out into the open, and friendship may not survive the encounter. It’s fantastic advice for making a short narrative infinitely more compelling – we all have routines and we all inherently understand the drama that unfolds when one of our routines is broken. As superhero comics have grown in such cultural importance, the need to express the routine of a superhero has gone the way of Blockbuster Video. There’s so much implied crime fighting between the issues we actually read, that they tend to focus on gigantic, world-shifting EVENTS. And those events are grim. Somewhere between the Rotworlds and Deaths-of-Families, among the Third Armies and H’els on Earth, I forgot that comics can speak the language of fun. Hawkeye not only speaks that language, it’s a master dialectician, artfully deploying the most elegant fun you’re going to see printed on the page.
Retcon Punch 