{"id":4034,"date":"2009-09-27T06:00:07","date_gmt":"2009-09-27T06:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/?p=4034"},"modified":"2009-09-23T15:49:09","modified_gmt":"2009-09-23T15:49:09","slug":"hawkeye","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/2009\/09\/27\/hawkeye\/","title":{"rendered":"Hawkeye"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"
\nBy Mark Gruenwald<\/strong>, Brett Breeding<\/strong> & Danny Bulanadi<\/strong> (Marvel)
\nISBN: 0-87135-364-4<\/p>\n

In advance of the Best of Hawkeye<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n

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!<\/p>\n

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<\/strong>, where he served with honour but always felt overshadowed by his more glamorous and super-powered comrades.<\/p>\n

In the first chapter here, ‘Listen to the Mockingbird’,<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

After some initial doubt he teams with the svelte and sexy super-agent in ‘Point Blank’<\/em> 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’<\/em>) 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\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6’<\/em> where the mastermind behind it all is finally revealed and summarily dealt with.<\/p>\n

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<\/strong>, gain his own regular series in Solo Avengers<\/strong> and later Avengers Spotlight <\/strong>and consequently become one of the most vibrant and popular characters of the period.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

But oh, the tension, the tension\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6
\n\u00c2\u00a9 1988 Marvel Entertainment Group Inc. All Rights Reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Hawkeye”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[94,79],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4034","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-avengers","category-marvel-superheroes"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s4AFj-hawkeye","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4034","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4034"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4034\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}