Random Back Issues #20 - Solo Avengers #6

And I'd have gotten away with nuking Algiers, if not for your meddling mercenaries and that damn carny!

Hawkeye's stuck helping Silver Sable on a job, so she'll intervene on is behalf with French authorities after he showed up in the country illegally because he was abducted by his old teacher, Trick Shot, who wanted to commit suicide via archer, rather than wait to die of his terminal illness.

The job in question is to bust into the hideout of the Red Skull. Which you think you'd want more than just Hawkeye and Le Peregrine, champion of France, to handle. Especially since the first operative Sable sent has gone missing. Well, I guess she tried one person and that failed. Now, she's trying two. If they botch it, then it'll be, I don't know, the Prowler, Rocket Racer, and Will O' the Wisp. After that, she'll call the Fantastic Four. Or the Power Pack. Not sure what her stance is on child labor laws.

(Also, I love that Le Peregrine chides Hawkeye for being too noisy, one panel after he loudly announces his name while not knocking out the goon before he fires off a bunch of rounds from his machine gun.)

But this is the crappy knockoff Red Skull, not the one that got a cloned body of Captain America or whatever. So it's really just a matter of beating up a bunch of cannon fodder and recovering a timing device for nuclear warheads the Skull swiped.

I don't know if Clint is tired from fighting assassins, Trick Shot, Batroc, and Silver Sable's goons over the last few issues, or if he's just pouting about having to jump through this hoop to get home, but he really seems to be half-assing it. He purposefully misses the Skull with a bunch of arrows to, as he puts it, add some excitement to Skull's humdrum existence. Eventually he throws a henchman through a glass container full of sand the Skull has, because he loves hourglasses, and whoops, it's Sandman, Sable's other operative. Might have been helpful if Sable told Hawkeye to be on the lookout for him. She's a pretty crappy boss, honestly, something Spider-Man could probably attest to.

Even with the Skull having an energy cannon strapped to his chest (why not use that earlier against the two essentially mortal heroes?), the fight ends quickly after that. Sandman takes care of the nuke the Skull armed as a last-ditch act of spite. Afterward, Le Peregrine tells Sandman that was a bad move, because they were supposed to return the timing device, not break it, and it'll probably come out of Sandman's pay.

Meanwhile, Hawkeye just wants to get home.

{2nd longbox, 42nd comic. Solo Avengers #6, by Tom DeFalco (writer), Mark Bright (penciler), Joe Rubinstein (inker), Janet Jackson (colorist), Jack Morelli (letter)}