Minus the occasional solo spotlight issue, Hawkeye was an ensemble character for the first 20 years of his existence. I almost typed "team player", but given his role as team irritant, that wouldn't be entirely accurate. In 1984, he got a 4-issue mini-series, written and drawn by Mark Gruenwald.
At this point, Hawkeye's not part of the Avengers, instead acting as Head of Security for Cross Technological Enterprises. Things are going pretty good until a certain blonde ex-SHIELD agent shows up following rumors that Cross is working on a sort of mind control weapon. In less than an issue, Clint loses his job, his home, and his girlfriend, the latter making sure to twist the knife on the way out. With nothing better to do, and too much pride to go crawling back to the Avengers, Hawkeye teams up with Mockingbird to help uncover the truth of what's going on and runs into a string of third-tier villains.
The mini-series sets up a lot of things that have carried through for Hawkeye over the last 35 years. The relationship between Clint and Bobbi (which also continues Clint's tradition of dating women involved in espionage work). Crossfire becoming an arch-foe to Hawkeye (he targeted Hawkeye for his villainous scheme because he consider Clint the weakest, most vulnerable known crimefighter, which ouch.) Although of all the villains Hawkeye faces, I liked Silencer the best. Sound-deadening outfit, with kind of a Dominic Fortune look to it. Professional, not annoyingly chatty. Sadly, this was apparently the only appearance of that version of the character, and they re-used the name a few years later for someone in Strikeforce Morituri.
Clint losing his hearing is established here, as he defeats the mind control weapon by jamming one of his sonic arrowheads in his mouth and setting it off. The sky-cycle Hawkeye would use for a lot of years, I think at least until Bendis killed him in Avengers Disassembled, is introduced as something one of Cross' engineers made for him. Clint's tendency to take setbacks poorly and slip into a funk, something certain writers took to exasperating lengths later on.
Prior to reading this, I had no idea Gruenwald drew any comics, since I really only knew him as the guy who wrote Captain America for most of my childhood. His style seems similar to a Bob Hall or some of the other Avengers artists of the time. Brett Breeding is inker/embellisher on the first two issues, before it switches to Brown for issue 3 and Danny Bulanadi for the final issue. The issues with Breeding as inker look the best; more fluid and subtly expressive than Brown, less heavy-handed with the shading than Bulanadi.
Gruenwald seems to really like pages with one panel that stretches top to bottom at either the right or left edge. Uses them mostly as establishing shots, either introducing characters or the setting for a scene, but some of them don't work with the overall layout as well as others.
2 comments:
Huh, I must admit that I thought the hearing loss had been part of the character since the beginning, although now I think about it, it's never mentioned in his early Avengers appearances, so I don't know why I thought that.
I think Matt Fraction retconned Clint to have hearing problems (possibly as a result of his dad beating him?) when he was a kid during his and David Aja's Hawkeye run back in the early 2010s. There's definitely some flashbacks to Clint and his brother Barney as kids, Barney trying to communicate with Clint via sign language and Clint stubbornly refusing to respond.
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