Everyone loves Hawkeye. Its regular artist, David Aja, just one a couple of Eisner Awards as one of the best pencilers in the game, and it’s the book everyone will recommend to you when you ask what’s good in comics right now. Somehow, it manages to maintain its rather amazing aesthetic even when someone steps in for Aja, be it Francesco Francavilla or, as in the case of Hawkeye Annual #1, Javier Pulido. It’s really quite impressive that an artist so notable can nevertheless meld with others to create a strongly cohesive indie-comic sensibility. Every time I pick up a Hawkeye comic, it has the same vibe.
This story is a Kate Bishop story, taking a flippant series of events from several issues back and landing the consequences of crossing Madame Masque squarely onto her entire life once she decides she’s sick of watching Clint Barton screw up his life. She heads out to Los Angeles to figure out her next direction in life, to be a West Coast Avenger of her own, but not without butting heads with her wealthy father who pays all of her bills and has skeevily married someone only three years older than his daughter. So she sets up shop in a hotel to figure out her next move when that move is figured out for her by one Whitney Frost, a movie-star gorgeous woman who seems to take a compassionate shine to Kate – even moreso when the young Avenger finds herself sans car, sans credit card and sans superhero gear after a series of bad breaks. Of course, she eventually gloms onto the fact that Frost is secretly Masque, and not only does it become apparent that Masque’s mask doesn’t hide any grotesque deformities anymore, but the supervillain is also behind all of those bad breaks – engineered to leave her resourceless as Masque plans her painfully torturous revenge.
What follows is Kate relying on her wits alone – well, and the dog she took from Clint – to work her way out of the jam she’s found herself in, and then start the long bounce back from penniless pauper to standing on her own two feet – her own, this time, and not her family’s. It’s a great story about how and why Kate differs from your average spoiled socialite. “I’ve never had a job… but I’ve worked hard.” She may get nervous, she may get scared, but she never despairs at the loss of her wealth. She takes the bull by the horns and begins the climb back up. While there’s still a part of me that doesn’t want to like her – probably the part of me that strenuously objects to the advent of the word ‘totes’ – the fact is that she’s pretty damn kickass. Just don’t ask how her conversation with her father in this issue ties into the Young Avengers storyline where none of the team can get near their parents without them getting possessed, Kate included.
Pulido’s artwork here is fantastic. Pop-art styling, funky layouts and even taking the time to illustrate Kate faces in her own dialogue boxes, which makes it feel like an indie-comic auteur’s work, not the combined efforts of letterer VC’s Clayton Cowles and colorist Matt Hollingsworth alongside Pulido. The artists that work on this book are mightily thorough and anything but workmanlike. I don’t know what Hawkeye did to earn this treatment, but he’s got it, and it works for him. And her. It works for all the Hawkguys.
