Hawkeye


By Mark Gruenwald, Brett Breeding & Danny Bulanadi (Marvel)
ISBN: 0-87135-364-4

In advance of the Best of Hawkeye trade paperback due at year’s end I thought I’d take another look at this little gem from 1988, collecting one of Marvel’s earliest miniseries – 1983 – and one of the very best adventures of Marvel’s Ace Archer, written and drawn by the hugely underrated and much-missed Mark Gruenwald, ably assisted by inkers Brett Breeding and Danny Bulanadi.

Much like the character himself this project was seriously underestimated when it was first released: most of the industry pundits and more voluble fans expected very little from a second-string hero drawn by a professional writer. Boy, were they wrong!

Clint Barton is probably the world’s greatest archer, swift, unerringly accurate and supplemented with a fantastic selection of trick and high-tech arrows. After an early brush with the law as an Iron Man villain he reformed to join the Mighty Avengers, where he served with honour but always felt overshadowed by his more glamorous and super-powered comrades.

In the first chapter here, ‘Listen to the Mockingbird’, he is moonlighting as security chief for an electronics company when he captures a renegade SHIELD agent. She reveals that his bosses are crooks, secretly involved in some shady mind-control experiment.

After some initial doubt he teams with the svelte and sexy super-agent in ‘Point Blank’ to foil the plot, gaining a new costume and a rogues gallery of foes such as Silence, Oddball and Bombshell (part 3, ‘Beating the Odds’) in the process. As the constant hunt and struggle wears on he succumbs to but is not defeated by a physical handicap and wins a wife (not necessarily the same thing) in the concluding ‘Till Death us do Part…’ where the mastermind behind it all is finally revealed and summarily dealt with.

In those far away days both Gruenwald and Marvel Top Gun Jim Shooter always maintained that a miniseries had to deal with significant events in a character’s life, and this bright and breezy, no-nonsense, compelling and immensely enjoyable yarn certainly kicked out the deadwood and re-launched Hawkeye’s career. In short order from here the bowman went on to create and lead his own team: the West Coast Avengers, gain his own regular series in Solo Avengers and later Avengers Spotlight and consequently become one of the most vibrant and popular characters of the period.

I’m unsure how easily you can lay hands on this specific, terrific tale of old-fashioned romance, skullduggery and derring-do, but since its scheduled to be the main portion of the aforementioned collection you shouldn’t have too long to wait.

But oh, the tension, the tension…
© 1988 Marvel Entertainment Group Inc. All Rights Reserved.