Dog’s Eye View: Hawkeye #11 Review

Hawkeye #11 is turning out to be one hell of a hard book to review in the way that I normally do it. Oh, I can hear you: “But Rob,” you’re saying, “You normally review comic books drunk, and you’re looking a little weavy right now. Plus, you smell an awful lot like a fraternity carpet.”

Well… yeah, Fair enough. But most of the time, the comics I review are about guys and women in tights, smacking the crap out of each other when they’re not trying to accomplish normal, human-type things. And Hawkeye #11 isn’t like that.

Because Hawkeye #11 is about a dog. Specifically, Hawkeye’s dog Lucky. Formerly known as Arrow, when he was owned by Russian mobsters. And known by Twitter as Pizzadog. And while I have seen comic books about dogs ever since I was a kid – Krypto and Rex The Wonder Dog from Steve Englehart’s old Justice League of America books leap to mind – those dogs were always presented as having human thoughts and motivations. Human thoughts and motivations that somehow elevated above, “I can lick my own sack! I will be busy for the immediate future!” but human thoughts nonetheless.

Hawkeye #11 writer Matt Fraction and artist David Aja try something very different. These guys are trying like hell to put us readers into the head of Pizzadog, and they do it with the full recognition that dogs don’t think in complete sentences, and they don’t think in terms like “conspiracy,” or “treachery,” or, “long-term goals.” They think in smells and in immediate motivations and in sounds and in vague memories, and their loyalties are based on a combination of simple and complex motivations that come from current need and prior treatment.

And the end result is a comic book that you don’t read so much as decode and experience. And while I don’t think the result is completely successful – show me, for example, a dog that can salute out of nothing but pride, and the next time you’ll see my fat ass will be on Letterman – what it is is one of the most interesting single issues of a comic book you’ll find, and one of the best books I’ve read all damn year.

Pizzadog is a dog. Which means he watches people without really understanding what they’re doing, wanders around smelling stuff, and sometimes coming across interesting things. Like a dead guy on the roof. Pizzadog can smell the cordite from the bullet, and smell another guy who was there who went down the fire escape, so he wanders after the smell to a dumpster and – hey, pizza! So anyway, then he hears a familiar sound, and sees some douchebags in tracksuits who say “Bro” a lot, and who call him by a name he kinda remembers… but he also remembers that they were douchebags, so, you know,fuck that, and he takes off. Then he sees some other stuff, and then – hey! Female in heat! And after that, he hears those bro-bags again, and this time maybe it’s time to get them the hell off his territory. Then his buddy and his girlfriend come home, and Pizzadog has to make a decision… but being a dog, he doesn’t exactly spend a lot of time thinking about it.

Look, this isn’t a book that’s about its story. It is a story about a dog, and therefore it’s a string of events interrupted by blackouts; dogs don’t spend a lot of time thinking about cause and effect. It is, instead, an experiment in visual storytelling, where Fraction and Aja try to put us into the head of a mutt. So we get a lot of abstract, black and white line drawings of spaces that look almost like blueprints, with strips of colored art to give us readers a more friendly view into Pizzadog’s world. Pizzadog recognizes names as words he’s heard before, and he knows that a couple of those words mean him, but the creative team shows us that Pizzadog sees people as a combination of smells, abstract faces and memory impressions, and they show us this with spiffy little flowcharts of shapes indicating those sense memories. It’s a cool way to put the reader in the head of a dog, and not a gimmick I’ve seen before.

The dialogue, such as it is, helps sell the illusion. Each human character’s dialogue bubbles are filled with scratches instead of words, with just keywords that Pizzadog has heard and has a context for in plain English. It kinda reminds me of that olf Far Side cartoon, where the dog only knows his own name while everyone other word is just, “blah,” but it works… and there’s a panel featuring Pizzadog’s former owners that, once you realize that the only words they say that Pizzadog knows are “idioto” and “bro,” will tell you more about why the dog hates them more than any combination of flowchart symbols. Overall, it all tells the reader all about Pizzadog without almost a single word, and it is really, really fucking compelling.

And the thing is, even these disconnected events that happen to the dog advance the overall plot of the Hawkeye series. Even with various interludes and almost no words, we see the Russians closing in on Hawkeye, Clint and Kate trying to keep some semblence of a relationship going… and the aftermath of those efforts. So the overall effect is really pretty remakable: a comic book with almost no narrative that advances the narrative. It’s a hell of an accomplishment.

But you don’t need to have any idea what’s been happening in Hawkeye to enjoy this issue… and you should enjoy this issue. It uses the comic form to fully use both the writing and the art to tell a unique story, and the experience of pulling it all together in your head to follow it was one of the most interesting and fulfilling experiences I’ve had reading a comic book in a long time.

Plus, Pizzadog is awesome. Check this one out.