Hawkeye: My Life as a Weapon (2013) Review

 Hey everyone! Welcome back to the Geek Cave. How's it going? I'm doing pretty well. Today I'm going to be taking a look at the first trade paperback volume of Matt Fraction's run on Hawkeye, My Life as a Weapon, which collects Hawkeye (2012) #'s 1-5 and Young Avengers Presents (2008) #6. So let's get into it.

Even though I did a mini-review of this book in the last Comic Book Wrap-Up that I did over on The Review Basement, I wanted to do a full blown review here because of the new Disney+ series that started yesterday. When I originally read it back in 2017 or 2018, whenever Brad first lent it to me, I didn't like it all that much. It was fine, but I'm not a big Marvel fan, and outside of Jeremy Renner's portrayal of the character in the movies, I was completely unfamiliar with Hawkeye as a character. And even though this book is the first in a series, it has all of the baggage of the character's previous history in the comics, including his time as Ronin and previous Avengers stuff. All of which I'm not familiar with because I haven't read any of it. But when I read it last month for that Comic Book Wrap-Up post, I found myself enjoying it more than I did when I initially read it a few years earlier.

Clint Barton is an absolute mess at the beginning of this book. Like just a straight up mess. Literally, because he falls out of a window or was thrown out of a window, or whatever. The point is, he's falling from a window and even though he tries to save himself with his grappling arrow because that's what heroic archers do when they're falling from a high place like a building or cliff, he fails and lands brutally hard on a car below him. And it's just fun following him and Kate as they go up against someone who was trained by the Swordsman, who isn't actually in the book, but is mentioned.

Speaking of Kate Bishop, there's more about her in the earlier issue of Young Avengers Presents than there is in the five issues of Hawkeye that are collected in this volume. Which is fine, because Fraction was trying to reintroduce the previously established dynamic between Clint and Kate, and he didn't waste Kate Bishop in this book. Far from it, it's just Clint is the character whose head we're in through all five issues, and we mostly follow him while he and Kate fight the Tracksuit Mafia. It's a very different dynamic between Clint and Kate than it is between say Batman and Robin or Batman and Batgirl or Batman, and anyone else in the Bat Family. Clint and Kate are actually partners in pretty much every sense of the word. There's no superiority coming from Clint, and there's no feeling of being intimidated by him from Kate. In a way it's kind of like the partnership between Dick Grayson and Tim Drake when Dick was Batman during the "Prodigal" storyline from the mid '90s. 

The one big negative about these first five issues is that the first three are pretty random in a way because they aren't one large story arc. They're three standalone issues and so they're both easier, yet harder to follow because there's no clear storyline through the first three issues. So it feels more episodic than most comic books even back in 2012 when these issues were coming out. They read okay, and would work best in single issue form, or in an omnibus of Fraction's entire run, but in this singular trade paperback volume, they don't work as well in terms of reading all three issues in one sitting. The fourth and fifth issues were fine though in that regard. I just didn't care about the SHIELD stuff.

If I had to choose my favourite issue in this book it would have to be the last issue to be collected in this volume. 2008's Young Avengers Presents #6, which focuses solely on Kate Bishop and her first encounter with Clint Barton, who is still Ronin at this point. The story doesn't actually require you to have read any Young Avengers before this, because there's a few things here that are completely taken out of context if you've never read the series before. My sister and I have actually been looking for some Young Avengers trades because they do sound interesting and I am a huge fan of the various incarnations of the Teen Titans so Young Avengers feels like it would be right up my alley.

Overall this is a really good volume to start with if you've never read Hawkeye but loved the first two episodes of the show. It's also really good if you want a break from the high stakes stories that you get from the Avengers, the X-Men or the Fantastic Four (to name a few). The artwork is solid for the most part, though I prefer David Aja's art in issues 1-3 than I do Javier Pulido's art in issues 4 and 5. I also love Alan Davis's artwork in Young Avengers Presents #6 as well. 

Alrighty that my friends is going to be it for me for today. I'm probably not going to put out a blog post tomorrow, but you never know. If not have an awesome weekend and I will talk to you all later. Take care.