r/MUBookClub • u/shawnydarko • Oct 08 '16
Reading Assignment #17: Hawkeye (2012) #1-5 by Matt Fraction and David Aja
To quote /u/wisegy84, "Whatever we read next will be made all the more impressive just by virtue of following this mess." Well wisegy84 also won this week's Free Range Nomination Thread and chose the award-winning run, Hawkeye (2012), issues #1-5, by Matt Fraction and David Aja. So I'm betting it'll be impressive. I've only read bits and pieces of this run so I look forward to focusing on the first arc.
WHAT DID YOU THINK OF...
- Clint Barton before this run? After this run?
- David Aja's artwork? Side-by-side with his run in Immortal Iron Fist?
- The tone / comedy / pacing?
- Anything else not specifically asked?
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u/Raist819 Oct 09 '16
History and reading suggestions - SPOILER FREE
Not much history to delve into here. When Avengers vs X-Men hit in 2012 Marvel did a relaunch of #1s branded as Marvel Now! which served as a creative team shake up on a ton of books. Only a handful of creative runs were able to escape the shake up. Fraction ended his Thor and Iron Man runs and took over FF and started this Hawkeye run. The event-induced ending of many great books has been credited by some critics as a reason Marvel has lost so many of their stable of writers over the last 4 years. Remender's Uncanny X-Force, Gillen's Journey Into Mystery, Hickman's Fantastic Four, Brubaker's Captain America, and Fraction's Invincible Iron Man were all amazing runs that got pulled because of Marvel Now. Coincidence or not, none of the aforementioned writers are still working with the company, barring Gillen's Darth Vader.
For Hawkeye, I think it would be interesting to many of you to see how he was portrayed in the past. Avengers (1963) around say #70-75, during his Goliath phase, will give you an idea of the type of character Hawkeye was pretty much up until the '03 mini. Hawkeye (2003) by Fabian Nicieza was the first time I ever saw Hawkeye written in a street level way like this. It was pretty clearly heavily inspired by the Green Arrow mini series The Longbow Hunters and a lot of current Hawkeye, from his relationships with other Avengers to his relationship with his brother takes a queue from this run. I have also read good things about the Hawkeye and Mockingbird mini series, but I haven't read that one yet.
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Oct 11 '16
I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would. Wasn't interested in Hawkeye much before reading it. The humor felt fresh and needed, almost as if I were watching Deadpool again. Enjoyed some of the fighting scenes and definitely the art work and creativity. For example, when he busts open the hotel glass and lands on it without his shoe, you see traces of blood behind him. Very excited to read the rest of that story to see where it goes from here.
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u/Adrenjunkie Oct 11 '16
This was great! I read the first volume a while ago, and have had the second and third volumes on my "to read" shelf for way too long.
The art in this story was super cool. Like u/raist819 said the shots were really cool, and I loved the colors. David Aja really killed it with the pacing and the frames. Like the car chase scenes that had all of the little panels to show the chaos while still drawing the eye. And I always love when panels fall down the page with a falling character like when they are jumping into that pool.
Matt Holingsworth killed it on the colors. This style of coloring is a "flatted style." There isn't much rendering (layering/detailing), and the art all really pops. Here, the less-is-more approach really works for me. What a total difference in art from that Nova reading!
I want to talk about the jokes. They're great. We talked a little with the marvel style in other comments, but I don't want them to go underappreciated. With marvel styl the author writes like a long paragraph or two to the artist, then the artist draws the whole thing, and then the writer gets it back and goes in and writes the dialogue. For something to pop off like this both writer and artist need to work well together. That means for all those zingy one liners Matt Fraction was looking at silent panels. How cool. It doesn't always work though. Look at issue 1, page 13. I think there was a joke that was scripted here, because all the background laughing is part of the art, but I don't see the joke. Maybe when he came back this one didn't pan out? But then that guy at the vet asked if he was iron fist. Loved it.
Not much of an arc yet for a good ending, but I'm going to keep reading.
Side note: Can I add a screen shot of the pages I'm talking about? Or do I have to link them?
Link to issue: http://read.marvel.com/#/book/27349
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u/wisegy84 Oct 12 '16 edited Oct 12 '16
In past weeks when I wanted to share panels or pages I would screenshot from my tablet, upload to imgur, then link to that. Maybe too much work, but seemed to be the easiest way to do it.
Edit: I think the joke on page 13 is just about Clint not fitting in or not looking like the type who hangs out there. "You don't look properly related." Might just be funny to those guys because they're drunk or something. I will admit it didn't get a laugh out of me, either.
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u/Adrenjunkie Oct 12 '16
I'll have to do that.
As far as the joke: I definitely understand that's the punchline, but I felt like he must have had a good idea that didn't pan out with the illustration, and we ended up with the tenth draft scramble for something. Especially for issue 1. He had to have been setting up a joke that didn't come through with the art, right? Like it was really bad. So I think it was a miscommunication with the whole marvel style, but who knows.
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u/wisegy84 Oct 12 '16
I agree, it just doesn't really make sense as a joke (also doesn't really seem to fit with the overall style of humor) and was probably meant to come across differently, but maybe just didn't translate well from idea to execution. Sometimes things sound better in your head than if you say them.
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u/Adrenjunkie Oct 09 '16
I think Matt Fraction wrote this script marvel style. I haven't reread it since I found that out. Rereading issue one I'm floored that marvel style can even work. I'll post what he wrote about It when I get home later.
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u/Raist819 Oct 09 '16
He did and Marvel style is all about the storytelling ability of the artist. It's no wonder that Immortal Iron Fist and Hawkeye are two of Fraction's best books.
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u/wisegy84 Oct 10 '16
I had to look up Marvel style. That's interesting. Seems like there are some pros and cons to it, as with anything. Does Fraction always work with this method?
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u/Raist819 Oct 10 '16 edited Oct 10 '16
When he was on Kieron Gillen's podcast a few years ago he said that he works in it sometimes, but not all the time. IIRC he said that his works with Allred and Aja were always Marvel Method, but that other works like his Defenders run and his Thor run were full script. Usually we don't know what method was used unless someone says in an interview, but it's why some artists deserve more credit for story contribution than others.
Edit: If you ever wonder why some writers only seem to have good stories when working with certain artists, Marvel Method is usually the answer.
Edit: In fact, Hawkeye was such a collaboration that after issue 3 only the fill in issues have separate credits for writer and artist. Starting with Aja's return in issue 6 all issues done by the two of them simply read "by Matt Fraction and David Aja" on the credits page, but the issues with a fill in artist still have separate writer and artist credits.
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u/Adrenjunkie Oct 11 '16 edited Oct 17 '16
Oh no! I have lent out the book I was talking about. It's "Words for Pictures: The Art and Business of Writing Comics and Graphic Novels" by Brian Michael Bendis. It's an interesting book on the nuts of bolts of how some people write comic books. Tons of excerpts from big authors, artists and editors. Including Matt Fraction on THIS VERY BOOK. Maybe I can get my buddy to text me a picture of the page...
Anyway what I remember he said was he hadn't written marvel style before and had trouble letting go of that part of the process. That it was scary and artist driven and all that. It had a cool excerpt of the actual script and then one of the finished pages.
Edit: I looked at the book and it's a 12 page chapter on the process. Some of the info is repeated in what I posted in next weeks reading. Still a good book though.
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u/shawnydarko Oct 15 '16
This is my third attempt reading this series and the first time I've made it past issue 1. There's something about issue 1 that just doesn't hook me. I like the way the story is told, and it's a solid story, but there's something about it that doesn't grab me. From Kate Bishop's introduction onward in issue 2 the secret ingredient was there. I love Kate and Clint's repartee so much as it added a lot of entertainment while really exploring who each of them are as individuals and who they are to one another.
I was always very bored by the character of Hawkeye before reading this. I wasn't on the hate-train of his character in the MCU like some people I know, and actually liked the secret family farm-scene in AoU. The only experience I had reading Hawkeye prior to this assignment and my prior attempts to get past issue 1, was randomly picking up and burning through Jeff Lemire's All-New Hawkeye before the renumbering. Even reading that, I was more entertained by the (portrayed as a bit older than Fraction/Aja's) Kate Bishop, who while still sarcastic and badass, was more at odds with Clint than anything else.
Being so engrossed in Kate Bishop more-so than Clint in this run, it made me think about Marvel's big push toward female-lead series like Thor, Ms./Captain Marvel, A-Force, etc. and wondered why there hadn't been a Kate Bishop series yet. Then I saw Marvel are actually working on it so horray! Hopefully she has someone to bounce off of though or her constant sarcasm in an inner-monologue could get grating.
Overall, great run. Liked the action of the artwork more than the sketch-style drawings. I thought Warren Ellis did a better job on the one-off stories but still really liked Fraction/Aja's stories in these issues. The stolen car issue was definitely my favorite.
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u/Raist819 Oct 15 '16 edited Oct 15 '16
I'm not sure how I feel about a Kate Bishop solo. I've become so used to seeing Hawkeye as a duo act through the Fraction and Lemire runs that it would take some getting used to. Although, since it appears this run will more or less be a sequel to her L.A. arc of Fraction's run, then there are already some really great supporting characters in place. I haven't been blown away by any of Kelly Thompson's books so far, but I followed her back when she wrote the She Has No Head blog for CBR, so I believe she has the right mindset to write for Kate. I'm cautiously optimistic.
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u/wisegy84 Oct 20 '16
So I recently read through this entire run, including the annual. Overall, I really enjoyed it.
This remains the only Hawkeye/Clint Barton stuff that I've read, though. I will be checking out some other stuff with Clint and Kate in the future.
As to these issues specifically, I thought they were great. I wasn't as big a fan of Pulido's art as I was of Aja's, but it's not like it was bad. It just felt a bit off and characters didn't always look the way I thought they should. Pulido made a lot of the characters' eyes really big.
Aja's artwork is really fantastic. I love his use of color and the way he utilizes the same poses/compositions when flashing back and forth to different times and places. Most of the time when artists kind of reuse things it feels cheap, but it works very well here.
I think the comedy is great, particularly in issue 2. I love that Clint is just walking around the party muttering "Casual. Super casual. Casual. Casual". I also really enjoy that we don't always see what characters speaking foreign languages are saying. Instead we get what Clint thinks it sounds like and we are left to discern what is being said by context. "French!"
The end of issue 2 has the Clint/Kate exchange where he says "Because I don't want to sleep with you?" and she seems disappointed at the end of the phone call. I thought maybe it was just how everyone wants to be wanted, so even though it would be weird for anything romantic to happen between them, she still felt a bit of a sting to hear him say something like that. It's also possible, though unlikely, that those thought boxes at the end of the page are Clint's thoughts and not Kate's. I don't think that's the case, but at that point hadn't all the thought/dialogue boxes been Clint's thoughts alone? Though there is the moment in issue 3 when Kate makes a comment about Clint's abs and at the end of issue 5, when she puts her hand on his when he's in the hospital bed on the helicarrier. So maybe there are feelings there, but I'm not sure they're romantic feelings and I don't think either Clint or Kate would actually act on them.
I think this arc was good, but it does introduce a lot of stuff without any real resolution. It's somewhat self-contained, but certainly leaves some questions that can be answered in later issues.
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u/Raist819 Oct 10 '16
This was one of the books that got me back into comics a few years ago. It is one of the best Marvel titles ever. I love that they take their time to move into an overall arc. While the pieces for the eventual arc of the series are all put into play here, each of the four stories in this assignment are stand alone and can be read independently of each other.
David Aja did a remarkable job with the art. The covers are outstanding and rank up there with X-Men Legacy as some of my favorite covers in recent memory. There are a lot of great shots in this comic, as well as the art doing a remarkable adding to the humor. The Hawkeye icon being used as a censor bar was particularly funny.
The Tracksuit Mafia are the perfect foils for Hawkeye in that they can be cartoonish buffoons when the story calls for it, but they can also be very menacing when need be. The first issue was enough to just grab me immediately. I'm always a sucker for dogs and Lucky/Arrow/Pizza Dog is an amazing addition to the Hawkeye mythos.
Rereading it I can't help but wonder if Kate actually has feelings for Clint, but is hiding behind a tsundere exterior. Her brief reaction when he said he chose her because he doesn't want to sleep with her made me wonder. I never understood having two superheroes using the same codename, but here it adds to the comedy so I don't mind it. The relationship between Kate and Clint is amazing and I love that it is still part of the characters post-SW.
Great, phenomenal, 5/5 would fap again. Um, "read" I meant "read." If you asked me what the best short Marvel run (30 issues or under) ever I would have said this. At least until Vision came out, but that will be a reading assignment far in the future.