Hawkeye #22

Time marches on. Looking back on the last four years of domestic politics what jumps out is the failure of the Obama presidency, coupled with a complete failure on the right to put forward any coherent counter narrative other than the eternal virtue of rapacious greed.

Hence, we are left with a failed political system. There are no heroes in this world. The main players are corrupt and untrustworthy. The good that is being accomplished is being done at the local level. Bigger is not better; small is beautiful. We see this reflected now in comic books with the rise of the anti-hero and the proliferation of female champions. A title that reflected this shift if not paved its way was Hawkeye, by writer Matt Fraction and artist David Aja.

Hawkeye, issues 1-22, featured longtime Avenger and marksman nonpareil Clint Barton as a regular guy who lives in a Brooklyn apartment building that happens to be the target of a hostile acquisition by Slavic thugs in track suits. Barton is a hunky, perpetually bruised and battered slacker who is joined by a female Hawkeye, Kate Bishop, a friend and protege.

Hawkeye meandered over four years moving to its own beat; it followed Bishop out to Los Angeles and became entirely devoted to her exploits there (Annie Wu provided art for the West Coast issues). The whole time Hawkeye emphasized community -- whether with the tenants (black and white, young and old) of Barton's Brooklyn tenement or Bishop's black gay neighbors in California. Real regular people, not Thor wielding his mighty hammer or Captain American tossing his mighty shield. And along the way Fraction even tossed in an Occupy Sandy story arc.

I posted in 2013 on Hawkeye #6 and said about the Zeitgeist-defining Invincible Iron Man, written by Matt Fraction with art by Salvador Larocca, that:

Hopefully when historians study the United States from the 2008 McCain-Obama presidential election campaign to the 2012 Romney-Obama presidential election campaign they will consult the amazing, consistently excellent, four-year Fraction and Larocca run in Invincible Iron Man. A lot would be revealed.

Now historians can study the Fraction-Aja-Hollingsworth Hawkeye to understand what went on from 2012-2015. To move forward we have to go back to the basics. To women and men. To people. The real heroes.

Below are 14 scans from the last issue, #22, of the Fraction-Aja run on Hawkeye. The track suits and a harlequin assassin are bested by the residents of the apartment building working together with the Hawkeyes, Clint and Kate. Community action:

The Defenders #10

Recently I read all the issues of The Defenders, Vol. 4, which kicked off at the end of 2011 and then was cancelled at the beginning of 2013 with issue #12. Matt Fraction authored the comic book throughout its run, and I'm sorry to say that for the most part -- and by this I mean something like three out of every four issues -- were tired, distracted, emotionless loops around the superhero comic carousel. Don't get me wrong. I'm a fan of Matt Fraction. I loyally read his Hawkeye, Vol. 4, a brilliant, refreshing, cutting-edge book. And I said before on this page that his Invincible Iron Man will go down in the history books as synonymous with the period of hope and change (it turned out to be delusional) that Obama's 2008 campaign and first years in the White House ushered in. But what I have also noticed is that Fraction is willing to pimp himself out to the point of overextension. His work then tends to the overly sarcastic and thin. I'm thinking here of his run on The Mighty Thor.

The Defenders when it first appeared in the early 1970s was unique in spotlighting a team of outcasts. This was Marvel's answer to the recently spawned "One Nation Underground." The social upheaval of the late 1960s might have been checkmated politically by Nixonland, the "Silent Majority," but at the end of the day in the United States you still had an enormous counter culture, a massified bohemia that had its own newspapers, grocery stores, film and music -- and those tastes were coming to dominate the mainstream majority.

Roy Thomas, like so much that he did for Marvel in the early '70s, was just being a shrewd businessman when he stuck a Greenwich Village beatnik (Doctor Strange), with a Gamma-powered Frankstein monster (Hulk), a cosmically-juiced master of the spaceways (Silver Surfer) and last but not least, Marvel's founding anti-hero, the underwater Tecumseh, Namor the Sub-Mariner. This was a group that could speak to the Hippies.

Below you'll find five scans from Fraction's The Defenders #10. The cover, by Joe Quinones, is a wonderful homage to the early Bronze Age. The four stunning interior pages are by Jamie McKelvie with Mike Norton; Jordie Bellaire provides the color. The final page pictures Red She-Hulk wiping out a crow.