Purple-Headed Warrior: Hawkeye #1 Review
From one point of view, Matt Fraction’s and David Aja’s Hawkeye #1 is a truly crappy Hawkeye comic book. Hawkeye doesn’t appear in costume for more than five panels, and he is getting the shit kicked out of him for each and every one of those panels. Other than those five illustrations, Hawkeye never holds a bow, we never see an arrow, there are no other Avengers, and there is a cab ride instead of a bitchin’ skycycle run.
So yeah: as a traditional Hawkeye comic book, one could make the argument that this is a pile of shit, an experience akin to buying a porno with certain expectations in your mind (and pants), and finding you’ve taken home a 90-minute video of a fully-clothed woman repeating, “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.” The elements are there, but it’s not what one necessarily wants from an item of that type.
However, some dingbat could also make the argument that it would be a colossal disappointment to open a box of Cracker Jacks and finding a giant wad of gold bullion – just because it’s not what you expected based on your prior experiences doesn’t make it bad. Rather, Hawkeye #1 is a pulpy, character-driven, street-level crime story that not only made me care about the purple-headed warrior (get it?) for the first time almost ever, but which is arguably the best comic book you’ll read this week.
The title page to this issue states, “This is what [Hawkeye] does when he’s not being an Avenger. That’s all you need to know,” and that’s exactly what this comic book is: Clint Barton, out of costume, dealing with some scumbag Russian mobsters fucking around with his neighbors in his crappy Bed-Stuy neighborhood. The story jumps around in time, going from dealing with Ivan the mobster landlord (and if you have not yet tired of the familiar nickname, “Bro,” you are 20 pages away from being tired of it) to being at a veterinarian’s office trying to get them to save some dog’s life, until the stories wind up tying together.
There is relatively little action in this superhero comic book. We see Clint Barton getting out of the hospital after those five costumed panels (which is an area that is rarely touched on in non-superpowered hero books – the probable and inevitable extended hospital stays) and hanging out with his neighbors, negotiating with Ivan over a rent increase, and harassing the vet over this hurt dog. And other than a couple of pages of Barton trying to singlehandedly take out an illegal card room that’s frequented by Ivan, that’s about it. But that means that Fraction can focus on Burton as a real, human character, outside of The Avengers, and that is something that is bafflingly rare. I’ve been reading Marvel comics since I was five years old, and until this issue, all I could tell you about Clint Barton, other than the purple suit and the trick arrows, were that he was a mouthy hothead when he wasn’t busy fucking Mockingbird.
What Fraction gives us here is a well-fleshed character who is intentionally holding onto his blue-collar roots, making his way through the real world as best he can. There’s a sequence where he stops and tries to decide a course of action that won’t invalidate his health insurance that not only hits home to almost any American reader, but which makes utter sense for a non-powered hero to worry about. Fraction shows us a Hawkeye trying to solve his problems without the bow and arrow, through legal and regular channels as a regular person would do… and then falling back on his skills for violence when it goes wrong, as a mouthy hothead would. At least as he would when Mockingbird wasn’t around.
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