Oh. This series.
Fraction and Aja's Hawkeye seems to get a lot of credit for Marvel realizing fans might enjoy books with consistent creative teams granted the freedom to tell their stories without being stuck constantly tying into Big Event stuff. Those couple of years of Marvel Now! that produced the Soule/Pulido She-Hulk, G. Willow Wilson's Ms. Marvel, so on and so on. I think the Mark Waid/Paolo Rivera/Marcos Martin Daredevil book that started a year earlier really deserves the credit, but Hawkeye sucks up the oxygen in the room because Fraction and Aja did an issue from a dog's perspective.
To be clear, I was excited for this book when it started! Expected Clint Barton to get to do a lot of cool stuff. And I maintained that excitement for the first 7 or so issues! Clint makes the impulsive decision to hand a bunch of Eastern European mobsters in tracksuits a duffel bag of cash for an apartment building so the tenants don't get kicked out, and this (among other things) puts him in the crosshairs of a bunch of crime families.
It's a solid premise, what Hawkeye gets up to when he's not being the best Avenger. Fraction filled it with a lot of snappy dialogue and banter, especially between Clint and Kate Bishop, the other Hawkeye. There's potential to introduce a wide cast of characters as tenants to get us more invested in the conflict. Aja knows how to lay out pages in a brilliant way, whether it's doing a series of quick panels of Kate speaking in slow-motion in parallel with Clint releasing an arrow, or weird diagrams to emphasize how Pizza Dog perceives the world.
Although I wonder if those pages are where Jonathan Hickman got the notion for all those text pages and charts he's so fond of. If so, it may have been a real Pandora's box.
But after they killed off "Grills" one of the few tenants given even the tiniest hint of depth, it started to slide. The book spent five issues essentially replaying the time before and after Grills' death, but from different perspectives. Here's what Kate was doing, here's what the sad clown killer guy was doing, here's what the dog was doing, and so on. Combined with David Aja's inability to maintain even an every other month schedule (Francesco Francavilla and Annie Wu drew some of the issues in that stretch), and the five issues of Clint Barton moping around and being useless dragged on for nine months. Contrast that with the Gruenwald mini-series from two weeks ago. Clint is out-of-sorts at the start of issue 2 over being played by his girlfriend, and even though he remains angry and distant with Mockingbird, he still gets off his butt and does something. It was exhausting and frustrating, and if I had any sense, I'd have pulled the rip cord.
The delays themselves were a whole other thing. The book started in August of 2012, and actually shipped 6 issues by the end of the year, though two of those were drawn by Javier Pulido. Counting the Annual that came out in 2013 (also drawn by Pulido, but lacking a splash page), the book shipped 17 issues the next 30 months before it concluded in June/July of 2015. The pace slowed the longer it went. At one point, Marvel shipped issue 16 (focused on Kate) before issue 15 (focused on Clint), because Annie Wu (Kate's adventures in L.A., which were pretty enjoyable) had been done for a while and there was no telling when Aja would actually, you know, finish issue 15.
It was difficult to square this version of Clint Barton with the competent hero we see in the Avengers. The guy who was a good leader for the Thunderbolts, who took down two Elders of the Universe, can't master the drawstring on his sweatpants all of the sudden. I understand this is supposed to be Clint during off-hours, and there's no team (unless you count the dog and his brother) backing him up, but I've seen Hawkeye handle threats a lot worse than a bunch of morons in tracksuits solo. I expected there would be some rough patches for the character in the book, but I also expected those to be interspersed with moments of him doing cool shit. This did not happen. In practice, it was other characters taking time out from yelling at Clint for fucking up to do cool shit.
(There was also the whole thing about Clint cheating on Spider-Woman, which is an Oliver Queen thing. Clint's the one who says dumb hurtful shit without thinking. Sigh, still better than Bendis repeatedly writing Clint as kill-happy, but that's a very low bar.)
The book finally wrapped up just as Marvel was (temporarily) canceling all their ongoing titles for a few months because of Hickman's Secret Wars. The ending was as satisfying as it could be, but by that point I was just glad it was over. It felt like a book that had been style over substance for a while. Very stylish, to be sure, but Fraction, Aja, and Hollingsworth proved they could still make it stylish while actually advancing the story, they just went through long stretches where it felt like there wasn't much interest in doing that.
The catch to a creative team being allowed to cook their way is, there's still no guarantee I'll like what they put on the table.
5 comments:
I got the first collection free from some Google Books promo and really liked it, but forgot all about it until Amazon did a sale in the run up to the Disney+ series, so I got the rest of them cheap.
And, yeah, it's a bit choppy. I was unprepared for the switch to Kate in California, as it came across as quite jarring. I was sort of expecting the comic to check back in with Clint now and then, but no, it was basically a whole new series with a new protagonist. Quite a good series, but the change was a shock, like the digital collections had missed out an issue or something.
And then it just stopped, just as suddenly as the earlier protagonist/setting switch. It was all good, but the overall feeling was very choppy and chaotic.
Was it set up so that there was one trade of Kate's adventures, then another for Clint's that were going concurrently? I could see Marvel doing that, although it would create the sort of disconnected feeling you're talking about.
I feel like if Madame Masque had been a factor in the conclusion once Kate returns to NYC, it might have helped, but otherwise, I'm not sure what the California stuff does other than Kate figuring out her dad's a crook. Maybe that, after she gave Clint a bunch of grief about giving up and thinking about running away, she also bailed on him?
Maybe the choppiness is just a Fraction thing? I remember Immortal Iron Fist kind of veering off what seemed like the course it was on, certain threads and story elements getting dropped.
The first two collections are Clint, and the third and fourth are Kate. It really does feel like two separate series clumped together under the same title.
I don't think I've read anything else by Fraction except Casanova, and that was so weird it was difficult to tell if the narrative was choppy or if it was all part of the plan.
Oy. When it was actually coming out as single issues, Kate leaves around issue 12-13, the Annual that Pulido drew is all about her, then it goes even issues focused on Kate, odd issues on Clint until the final one. Some sort of parallel journey thing that eventually dovetails. Maybe.
I read Fraction's Defenders run and was not impressed, but I don't know if that was just one of his weaker efforts or if his writing just doesn't work for me.
Oh, well that explains a lot.
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