Review: “Hawkeye, Vol. 1: My Life as a Weapon”

Truthfully, after decades of comics, I’d gotten a little jaded with straight-up superhero tales, with sky-high stakes and failure not being an option.

Then, I came across “Hawkeye.” Like a lot of people, it took the recent Marvel movies (specifically “Thor”) to make me take a second look at the third-string Marvel hero. I’d read comics of his in the past, and they were more of the same, albeit with a terrible costume (and a wife with an even worse one).

Not Matt Fraction’s “Hawkeye.”

Here’s a book with stakes that shrink from the cosmic down to a single apartment building in an outer borough of New York City, where Hawkeye’s costume is the work uniform doffed when Clint gets home and where the stakes are having a good relationship with his neighbors or being able to set up his DVR.
The book is light, breezy, fits well into actual save-the-world Avengers continuity but requires no knowledge or caring about such things (the tagline is that this book is what Clint Barton does when he’s not off being an Avenger), and gorgeous to look at.

The best superhero comic book in years seems almost parachuted in from some other, better-written, more engaging future.

Whether you bleed in four colors, or don’t know your Earth 616 from your Earth-2, “Hawkeye” is a must-read for every sort of superhero fans.