Wrapping up June's books with the final issue of a mini-series, and the midpoint of another mini-series.
In the present, Black Widow shows up to rescue Hawkeye, Damon Dran hits both of them with hypersonics, but Natasha's able to pull through long enough shut it down so Hawkeye can shoot Dran with arrows made of the symbiote. Seems weird that would do anything, since Hawkeye shoots him with an exploding arrow in the Silver Age flashback and Natasha says that won't stop him. Maybe the symbiote's eating the guy from the inside-out.
The flashback ends with Iron Man smashing into the Soviet embassy to arrest Hawkeye and the Black Widow both for treason. So Natasha stabs herself with an arrow to exonerate Hawkeye and makes her escape. In the present, Hawkeye explains he realized during the diplomat's speech that the guy had been poisoned sometime earlier, so it was too late to stop the assassination. All he could do was kill the guy himself so it wouldn't be pinned on the U.S. government and used as a pretext for war.
The point being, rather than Hawkeye following the trend he and Natasha usually do, where one of them sacrifices themselves to protect the other, Clint asks if she'll accompany him back to the U.S. to help him face the consequences.
In theory, I like the idea of them breaking this cycle of alternating martyrdom, but does it really do any good here? Unless Black Widow found proof of Dran's plan we don't know about, there's nothing to exonerate Hawkeye. All he's got is his word, unless someone did an autopsy and found traces of a poison. Without proof of Dran's involvement in the poisoning, that brings about the result Hawkeye's trying to prevent.
The last remaining samurai squares off against four of the new shogun's men. He gets three before the fourth throws snow in his eyes and slashes him across the torso. Which brings us to where the first issue started, him on his knees, looking about to be executed. But as he tells a vision of his wife and daughter he'll see them soon, they become some angry shadowbeast that demands he fight.
So he does. He makes it home, but home is on fire. His wife and daughter are dead. The shadow insists he kill them all. Which he'll get to, once he's made a funeral pyre. More samurai arrive, and promptly start dying. Is it the last holdout doing the killing? The samurai's definitely around, cutting off horses' legs and a man's head, and by that point, Lancho is drawing him mostly as a shadow. Maybe a few places that aren't shaded so heavily to offer a hint of a nose or cheekbone.
But at least one of the enemy sees a small girl at the edge of the forest, who then vanishes. That guy winds up getting dragged into the forest by something we don't see clearly. It's on the edge of one panel, the outline of either long hair or tentacles, and in the last panel we see of him, there are two barely visible dots - probably eyes - above him further in the background.
2 comments:
It's too glaring a plot point to not be addressed, but how do hypersonics work against Hawkeye, who is 80% deaf?
He definitely still had some of the symbiote inside him after it dealt with the poison, because it's being an obnoxious shit for half the issue, but I think it was because of his hearing aid, which he may have turned way up at some earlier point to overhear a distant conversation.
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