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.

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