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ah, the perils of sending messages asking for drunk answers: if you send them a bit too late you don’t get drunk thoughts, you get hungover thoughts.
but. my hungover thoughts on how important hawkeye was:
personally, to a certain definition of “important”, it was the most important comic to me. it’s not quite the first comic i bought (that’s phonogram, or dial h for hero if you’re going by floppies) – but it’s the first marvel comic that i read, and it’s the one that got me actually reading comics on a regular basis.
the storytelling in it was a revelation to me – its often non-linear nature, the way at different times it relies on different techniques. techniques that work super well in comics but also feel novel, new – the dog issue, the ASL issue (and the callback to it in #22 – because ASL isn’t just a “special” thing to cover once and never again, it’s part of clint’s life).
and then: the way the colouring works with the rest of it, too. as a teenager i’d sometimes look at mainstream american comics when i went to the comic shop to look for manga, always thinking – i might like it now. but i never did. this was the early 2000s, and it felt like everything i looked at was hopelessly macho, and badly-coloured in a way that went hand-in-hand with that. like. everything was coloured in a soft, computery way (i like a lot of digital art! but i like it to have texture), in a way that like – it existed to depict the male superhero body in one way, the female body in another way, and the actual art and the story was buried beneath it. it was hard to read – i still have trouble now with comics that are drawn/coloured in this way. hawkeye’s colours are – sure, limited palette, and flat, but they are also doing everything right. you should look up the stuff about matt hollingsworth’s process, because MAN. the colours!!! they’re beautiful, and clear, and they direct the eye perfectly. the art/colours are great in the francvilla issues, too – i’ve talked elsewhere about how in the barney issue (#12) tells the story through barney’s body/state of mind, and the warm/hot colours and expressionistic style is really – great. it does that. it does it so well.
so: the thing about hawkeye is that they were allowed to finish it in their own time, right. none of it feels like filler (the early story about the tape doesn’t quite fit with the rest of it, but it’s not filler, it’s just a road not taken/a dead end, and it’s still worth reading), except probably the holiday cartoon issue, but it’s so joyous and so FUNNY and so obviously filler that it kind of… isn’t filler, in the end. it still tells you a lot about clint, and his world.
and so of course hawkeye’s not PERFECT but it’s always interesting, and it was all done with such – care. it’s never slapdash, or thoughtless. it treats superhero comics like – stories about actual people. in the period of time that i’ve been reading hawkeye, i’ve struggled with mental health stuff, as my tumblr friends know. i read issue #13 so many times. i stared at clint lying on the sofa, holding a bottle, cursing the phone – and it was like, you know. seeing myself in something. and yes, hawkeye is also very important because of kate, and if kate wasn’t there it wouldn’t have been nearly as important to me. because kate is hawkeye, and kate is great and there are times when she’s not so great and that is all – i need that. she feels as real as clint.
but it’s clint who was the most important to me, because of these moments of like – seeing a truth that i needed to see. talking about clint as a kind of disaster area has become a tumblr thing, especially in response to the weird version of ults-clint that turned up and ruined everything in AOU, but it sometimes kind of buries the truth, which is – sure, he’s a nightmare. he’s depressed, and for a long time he’s not dealing with it, and he’s pushing other people away, and they have every right to decide that they want to get away from him. but like – there is more to him than drinking from the coffee machine, than the broken trousers, than the bandages.
there is – there is when barney says to him, you can get it all back. there’s clint getting up. there’s clint asking for help, and jessica listening. there’s “guess what.” / “chickenbutt.” there’s him practicing his sign language, wearing the hearing-aid (NOT some super-powered magical hearing-aid designed by tony stark, but a recognisable, purple hearing-aid). there’s – clint going to see grills’s dad in person, because he doesn’t want him to be alone, he doesn’t want to give him that news over the phone. and so, there’s the message at the start of the issues, even before we get to the “this looks bad” – this is what he does when he’s not being an avenger. what does he do when he’s not being an avenger? he has to live. and it’s not like, easy? but they constructed a world from the ground up. with diagrams of DVD player cables, and beaten-up dogs, and a shady cabal of people who are trying to kill him as surely as his brain is trying to self-destruct. but he, and they, are not going to let – either of those things happen, right? “this looks bad” is how the early issues start, but the comic ends with kate puffing her cheeks out, standing next to clint, taking the perfect shot, because they’ve won, of course they’ve won, even when they lose (clint loses the money, barney wins his life, but then barney is hawkeye too). david aja’s style manages to be both minimalist, and so, so expressive. in the faces, in the bodies. wu and pulido are great, too, but man – when aja’s on his game, with hollingsworth colouring him he’s untouchable.
and of course, there’s all the other stuff, about the possibilities it seemed to open up in mainstream superhero comics, about the shattering of the house style, but that’s all capitalism inside-baseball industry commentary which i want to care about less. let’s just look at the fucking art, friends. and there’s none better. there’s none that has meant so much to me. the writing just hits me so much, every time. the tossed-off jokes, the fucking RHYTHM, has anything ever been so devastating as the two times we hear the line – “i told you, i came from hell”? just so fucking incredible. no word out of place, every panel exactly right. i talk a lot of shit about comics & poetry but: it feels precise. and it feels overflowing with stuff. there are so many details that i feel like i could read it over and over and spot something new every time. but it’s never precious. it’s not afraid to really feel stuff. to make me feel stuff. to hold out a hand and dust you off.
and – and. “it comes back to you in the end.”
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