You Should Be Reading: Hawkeye

   Personally, I'm not the kind of comic book fan that could sincerely start an article out with something like "Hello, True Believers!"
I guess that kind of inoculates me from ever having to write for any of the major comic book blogs.
I haven't really been that particular breed of comic fan, the kind who adheres to mostly superhero comics and is totally baited out by any books with his favorite characters, since I was a little kid.

   Don't get me wrong: I don't read comics, I completely devour them. It doesn't matter if the book is Sweet Tooth or the most recent run on Batman by Scott Snyder. I love the art form itself, I love watching stories change and take new shapes as they're retold and re imagined, too.

   I never grew 'out' of superhero comics, maybe like Alan Moore before he decided he hated everyone, I just wanted to see them actually get intelligent. Stop pandering, stop writing stories for the guy who's favorite take on Superman was played by Christopher Reeve or drawn by John Byrne.

   There's no doubt though that in regards to even the most tight-wearing motherfuckers, that specifically superhero storylines have become deeper and more complex.
Sure; it has taken them a long time to catch up with indie comics and alt-fiction kind of stuff, but what I started noticing is that complex almost never translated to being smarter.

   We can see the ultimate distillation of our standard dumb superhero tropes in both Marvel Studios' pictures and the very best of Christopher Nolan's faux-deconstructions of the Batman mythos.
Bigger fights, more fights, explosions, better actors - but it's the same 'will I or wont I continue to be a superhero' and 'do they save the love interest or go after the villain?' stories. This gets repeated over and over again until I want to drag a writer out of their cubicle and into the street.

   When you examine a lot of comic book characters especially superheroes, they kind of start to fall apart. Batman doesn't hold up to close scrutiny, so we happily turn pages and never ask for anything more from the character until someone finally delivers it.

   Even the industry has massive shortcomings, with comic companies focusing even more on massive events and taglines like "Everything changes here!" that have been getting used and re-used since comic book writers discovered that a tagline alone could sell a book in the sixties.
You want to complain about new articles with clickbait headlines? Fuck you, try being a comic fan.

  The Big Two are especially smart enough to know that the average Comic-Fan will buy just about anything that has their favorite character on the cover or if it says "Jim Lee" in the bottom corner.
Even if that character might only show up for a single page, even if that artist draws the same bodybuilder and supermodel physiques on everyone, forever.

   For every comic we get like Casanova there are ten Savage Hawkman comics, for every illustrator like Rafael Grampa that can't get a solo book to save his life, there's dudes like Rob Liefield who somehow continue to find work despite being human punchlines.

  This edition of You Should Be Reading focuses on one of those aforementioned good books.
This is about the story of what Clint Barton does on his days off.

  Hawkeye is a book that takes averting and deconstructing superhero tropes to the next level.
Why it works is because it's not a book about a guy who is a superhero, it's a book about a guy who sometimes wears a costume and gets way in over his head.

   Matt Fraction and David Aja spearhead the book - with other artists stepping in occasionally to fulfill guest art duties for one of the best writer/artist teams in the industry right now.
Hawkeye looks at the character of Clint Barton in a way that other comics haven't ever really done before, putting the man before the costume.

  I've been asked before by friends what they should read if they like superheroes, but don't tend to usually read superhero books. They want the character studies done on people larger than life, with most of the usual tedium cut out.

   Hawkeye is through and through, that book. What I like about it is that in just the first issue it reminded me that cape stories don't need a massive event or world ending cataclysm to make characters shine. Sometimes it's just the feeling that they need to do good - to save a dog, protect a kid on the street.

   By taking the book away from the rest of the glitzy and glamorous Marvel Universe and down to dirty streets, we get our tale in a way that's novel and entertaining without being a super hyped-up gritty deconstruction.

   Hawkeye's simple premise is showcase the life of Clint Barton when he's not saving the world.
Matt Fraction spares no thought in showing us that just because you've got a costume and one of your friends is the Norse god of Thunder, that you aren't necessarily a bit of a broken person.
This book wouldn't work if Clint Barton was a fully-functional individual, so instead it revels in his various shortcomings.

   Clint Barton is constantly pulled between running away and helping people, and that's sort of what gets him into every mess in the series - this is a guy who might be as much of a hero as he is addicted to thrill. Matt Fraction asks if we know what kind of superhero would start a fistfight in the middle of a strip club, and shows us exactly what kind of superhero that is.

   As this book is called Hawkeye, it's not just about Clint Barton, but Kate Bishop too.
Kate Bishop held the role of Hawkeye during her teenage years and a costume that looked like a cross between how he looked in the Ultimate universe and his classic costume.
Kate operates as a foil for Clint in just about every issue, and the two bounce off of eachother like brother and sister in a way that's played expertly by Matt Fraction.

   Kate and Clint have one of the few May and December platonic relationships in a comic that's not creepy as hell, even if Kate's not drawn like she's a teenager.
She's most commonly the level-headed one compared to Clint's look before you leap "Captain America called me once!" attitude.  Before you notice it, the two are starting to rely on each other
like the best buddy-cop duo's envisioned, and the book starts becoming as much a story about Kate Bishop as it is anyone else.

                                                 
   In a way, Hawkeye harkens back to the earliest Spider-Man comics by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko,
yet Matt Fraction still pulls from a larger body of works than just comic books. Fraction himself is one of the few comic writers I'd be willing to actually call an artist, he knows you don't get anywhere writing Iron-Man and just drawing inspiration from earlier Iron-Man comics.

  Tons of other comic writers drop the ball and it shows. I've written about this before, but mostly as it applies to videogames - really, it applies to every form of art. That anti-intellectual 'only write what the reader knows' philosophy is everywhere but it may be the most damaging to comic books.

  Fraction brings that touch to every book he works on but besides his own project Casanova, I think it comes through the most in Hawkeye. This book exists in a part of the Marvel Universe where 60's fashions are still sometimes in vogue. If it had a soundtrack it would be Miles Davis and Frank Zappa. Hawkeye is a 70's crime movie with a French touch if it existed only in the head of Guy Richie.

  Hawkeye is just as grounded and as much of a cynical black-comedy as Guy Richie's movies. In between gags that flow naturally as a part of the story and never feel forced, or fight scene that evolve out of situations that seem real enough someone like Clint Barton may be dumb enough to start them, the book isn't afraid to let you get attached to people other than the leads.

  This isn't a guy with a closed circle of friends like Peter Parker or Tony Stark, the people Clint knows drop in and out of his life, old faces with new ones. There's a certain (almost melancholy) mood to the life of Clint Barton as he struggles to just not be noticed one day at a time.
  
   David Aja's art, along with the rest of the fill-in artists, helps solidify that mood. Clint might live in
Manhattan but it’s not the gleaming metropolis that The Fantastic Four live in, or the backdrop for a fight scene like it exists in most other Marvel books. Clint’s apartment is a homely, small place in a larger decades old building that looks like it’d be the kind of place you’d see utilized in a movie like Serpico.

  Which makes sense, you know? If you were a guy with no superpowers who wanted to have a semi normal life when your day job is hanging out with SHIELD wouldn’t you want to live in a place as unassuming as possible?

  That’s sort of Clint Barton’s problem. In trying to live as standard a life as a Superhero possibly can, let alone one without a real secret identify (“I’m an avenger” He says, stepping out of a ruined building to a squad of police) he seems almost indebted to the world’s problems. As the people in his apartment building get mixed up with the most hilarious eastern-european crime movie caricatures I’ve ever seen in a work of fiction before, He takes it on his own shoulders to solve their problems.

   Why that works so well as a Superhero story without costumes or capes is that those circumstances continuall become larger and larger. At the point Clint Barton knows he's finally in over his head, it's much too far to back out.

  That idea is totally riffed from indie comics in a way that is spectacularly crafty.
Fraction takes us to some of the same places indie darling Kick-Ass does, without the overbearing violence and problematic elements.

  Where Kick-Ass wants to make your stomach churn while you watch protagonists who are too dumb to back out of what they've gotten themselves into, Hawkeye takes a different approach.
Other writers might even be able to take a page from it; give us human characters, and give them reasons to continue to do the things they do.

   Fraction isn't writing Hawkeye like a traditional superhero book and Aja definitely is going through great lengths to ensure that the book doesn't look like one either.
In many ways, Hawkeye could be seen as Marvel taking a shot at making an indie comic set in its main universe of stories.

    With the success that Hawkeye has rightfully earned, that effect is starting to take hold.
There's been kind of an effect lately of more alternative style artists starting to catch on in the Marvel hierarchy, like Francesco Francavilla and Javier Pulido. If that is because of what Fraction and Aja have done with Hawkeye, well then that's a good point for both of them to have in their court.

    What the book is most successful with and thank god we're starting to see it in mainstream comics more, is that Hawkeye doesn't have 'required reading'. You don't need to know who Hawkeye is before reading this book. I'd go so far as to say that it's a book perfect for people that aren't fans of mainstream comics, either.

   Of course, Fraction's biggest skill has been creating stories that can be enjoyed as standalone or as part of a larger framework. Kind of like a Grant Morrison if he wrote indie comics and didn't do a bunch of psychedelics.
  

Seasoned comics fans will catch things like Black Widow wearing a dress based on her classic 60's costume, whereas people who aren't familiar with it will just gloss over it because its inclusion is just a natural part of a story. We're prepared for some older iconography by the style of the issues before it shows up. 

  I want to see more comics like Hawkeye. Ones written with comic fans in mind, but not necessarily FOR comic fans. That’s the classic barrier for entry with mainstream comics: when you have six fucking Crisis On Infinite Readership Numbers going on and nobody wants to read comics because they don’t know which Robin died ten years ago or oh thanks-for-rebooting-canon-and-somehow-making-it-more-impenetrable happens.

   Matt Fraction gets it with Hawkeye, he shows a firm understanding of how to embrace a characters history while not entirely making the entire book for people who read the issue of Ghost Rider where Hawkeye worked as a ranch hand in the 80’s after a disgraced fall from The Avengers.

   Hawkeye’s going to be good if you want a Superhero comic that can’t be defined as ‘a mindless fun romp’ every issue and if you’re not too stuck on seeing the same battles played out over and over again. If this is the direction that the Marvel Universe is heading in, I’m all for it.
Let’s have more books like it Marvel, and start sending the message that it doesn’t always take an angry old British dude to make comics grow up.