Hawkeye #7

written by Matt Fraction
art by Steve Lieber and Jesse Hamm
colors by Matt Hollingsworth

Fortunately for the Hawkeyes, the only casualty of this violent late-October storm is Clint's 1970 Challenger.  Unfortunately, the 1970 Challenger is a casualty.  As a massive storm/probable hurricane nears New York and the New Jersey coast, Clint agrees to help his neighbor manage his stubborn and ill-tempered father down Long Island, and Kate must attend a wedding in New Jersey.

So much of the pleasure of Fraction's Hawkeye is its remarkably ordinary view of off-duty superhero life, and though their lives (perhaps inevitably) find themselves in peril, Clint and Kate's lives have yet to be so familiar as they are here.  If anything, Hawkeye #7 is a celebration of ordinary heroics, the solidarity of regular people dealing with crisis.  "Grills"—i.e., Gil, Gilbert—may not be the sharpest dude, and he may be humorously inept at Ramones history and call Clint "Hawkguy," but his unwavering willingness to aid his ungrateful and irascible father because "you gotta take care of your roots" (Hawkeye: Little Hits: 7 [7: 3]) is admirable.  The Jersey residents who helped out Kate may be armed only with gardening tools and give her the humorously gender-confused moniker "Lady Hawkman," but they interfere on her behalf against a trio of opportunistic drug-store plunderers.  This may be their stories, but the Hawkeyes are more spectators to the real heroes here, which sounds significantly more sentimental than it is.  Fraction's style may sometimes verge on the overly clever, relying on hipster barbs and irony—Kate and Clint's verbal scuffle over the relative merits of Jersey and Brooklyn, for instance—but there's no doubting his sincerity here.  And, quite frankly, it comes off all the better for its clever and ironic undercurrents.

[March 2013]

As collected in Hawkeye: Little Hits  (ISBN: 978-0785165637)