Hawkeye #8

"My Bad Penny"
written by Matt Fraction
art by David Aja with Annie Wu
colors by Matt Hollingsworth

Oh my, Clint.  You've done it now!  This is what you would call a Valentine's Day issue.  Cherry returns and, once again, she brings trouble.  This time she's shot—but not killed—her husband, son of the oxygen-dependent leader of the "tracksuit draculas" over a red safe, whose contents are (apparently) a matter of life and death.  She's stunning and she's got quite a hold on Barton.  So it's no surprise, especially to his ex-wife—"Clint Barton, ladies and gentlemen.  The ever-unchanging Clint Barton" (Hawkeye: Little Hits: 51 [8: 4])—that he agrees to follow her to a sleazy strip club, beat up a bunch of patrons and employees, and risk incarceration and losing his Avengers membership to retrieve said safe.  No big surprise, all those things happen.

The real surprise comes when Cherry (real name: Penny) admits that the comic books she's been sending Clint are the key to opening the safe, since she doesn't actually remember the combination.  And Clint, fool that he is, actually read the comics and got them out of order.  Exasperated and a little huffy, Penny leaves Clint to pick up the mess he created for her.

Part of that mess: Clint Barton has landed soundly on the criminal radar.  Penny's father-in-law seeks approval from Kingpin and an entire boardroom table full of Marvel's criminal elite to kill Hawkeye.  Reluctantly, they grant it.  Though, to be fair, they may be less intimidating than the other women in Clint's life:  Black Widow, ex-wife Mockingbird, maybe-girlfriend Spider-Woman, and fellow Hawkeye Kate Bishop.

As always, Aja's work on the title is amazing, but this issue's standout is Annie Wu, the artist responsible for Cherry's romance comic covers:  "Doomed Love," "Mystery Girl," "A Girl Like You!," "Love Crimes," and "Love Fugitive".  In addition to being technically gorgeous and giving not-so-subtle hints about Cherry's bad-girl past, they strike just the right balance between comical and pulpy.

[April 2013]

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