Reviews
„Hawkeye, Volume 1: My Life as a Weapon“ may be a romp for ingrained fans of both Marvel and graphic novels, but it has its difficulties in trying to win over graphic novel newbies. This graphic novel shows its readers what superhero Clint Barton is up to in his free time. To be more precise: it shows him falling, tumbling, slipping from one catastrophe to another. He’s a man who became famous fighting alongside people with superpowers, magic, armour, while he is “an orphan . . . fighting with a stick and a string from the palaeolithic era.” The stuff he gets himself involved in seems trivial when you compare it to what the Avengers were up against in the battle of New York. There is no magic involved in this graphic novel. It’s just a very messy man, chaotic, a walking human disaster who lives off coffee and… well, that’s it, trying to do the right thing and maybe not break his ribs every second week. New and old Marvel fans alike will have a blast getting to know Hawkeye on a more intimate level. You have to keep in mind that this novel was released the same year the first Avengers film came out, a movie in which we got barely more than a tease and whiff of Hawkeye’s talents. It’s understandable, then, that fans of the character have been clamouring for his on-screen version to be more comic-accurate since years before the release of the currently streaming “Hawkeye” Disney+ series. Here, Hawkeye is truly an unbothered king, walking out on the hospital staff only six weeks after contracting a shattered pelvis, three broken ribs, a sprained neck, a cracked tibia and a nearly-ruptured spleen. His “if I die, I die” attitude is highly entertaining. Plus, he has a knack for attracting trouble and saving animals (like Pizza Dog), which gains him the attention of the Track Suit Mafia. My problem, however, was this: the storytelling feels incredibly disjointed. It jumps from sequence to sequence, leaving me disoriented and with very little detail on why or how Kate and Clint got from place A to place B. Kate Bishop is suddenly “there”, there is little to no explanation how the two met other than “Kate took over for me as Hawkeye once upon a time when I was… well, dressing p like a ninja, sort of, this is the short version.” In the first story, she isn’t there, and in the second story, she is, and she and Clint are already best buds. Nearly all stories in this volume follow the same scheme: they open with a scene of Clint (and Kate) being in a really tight spot with Clint as the narrator saying something along the lines of: “okay, this looks bad”. Then, there will be a throwback to how they got into this precarious situation in the first place, and we’ll follow that story until we’re back in the present with Clint trying to save his ass while assuring the readers that “it’s only the third most-terrible idea [he’s] had that day”. Thus, while the stories gathered in this volume feel like they’re taken straight out of Hawkeye’s day-to-day life, they don’t make for a smooth narrative storyline. Instead, the reader feels left out because we only get glimpses of what Clint Barton is up to, dipping in and out of his life with the stories leaving out vital moments like Clint’s and Kate’s first meeting and how they became partners. The dialogue doesn’t help in smoothing things out either, given that the visuals accompanying it feel like you’re being presented with a selection of screenshots instead of being shown the whole film. Overall, I enjoyed this graphic novel, and it managed to make me want to read the other volumes in the series. There’s tons of stuff in the “Hawkeye” show taken straight from this first volume alone, and I can’t wait to rewatch the whole series, trying to spot all the references to the comics. If the films, which, until now, have always presented us with a cheap copy of who Clint really is, managed to get you interested in the character, you will get so much out of this graphic novel. If, however, you’re new to the graphic novel genre and maybe new to Marvel/the MCU in general, I wouldn’t recommend you pick this up.
meh. it'll take more than a cute dog to convince me...
Mind blown. I am so hooked on this series now.
