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:

AXIS #2

As far as I know AXIS is the latest, and yet to be succeeded, Marvel crossover event. It has already run its course. But I am just catching up with it. Last weekend I got as far as AXIS #2. Rick Remender, who I often rave about on this page, takes his shot at scripting the hub storyline of a crossover. Adam Kubert provides the art. The narrative, as recapitulated in the second scan, seeks to tie up the AvX crossover, which concluded with the death of Professor X and a spontaneous outbreak of new Mutants. Red Skull has pilfered the super-powerful brain from Professor's X's corpse and used it to spread hate globally with the intention of wiping out Mutantkind. In AXIS, the Red Skull is reborn as Red Onslaught, a colossal mind-controlling telepathic demon.

All the action in AXIS #1 & AXIS #2 takes place in the Mutant homeland of Genosha, an island off the coast of Africa north of Madagascar. It has the feel of the climax of a Hollywood action blockbuster where the final fight scene always seems to take place in an abandoned warehouse.

To make a long story short, AXIS is a big disappointment. Maybe it will improve. I don't know. But the first two issues are extremely weak. Adam Kubert's art is juvenile; Remender's writing, exhausted.

Marvel's crossovers seem to be multiplying and getting weaker with each new iteration. The heyday, what really drew me back to reading comic books, was the strength of Brian Michael Bendis' Secret Invasion, Dark Reign and Siege crossovers as each led organically into the next. The storytelling was inventive and impactful.

And while there were one or two nice installments in Matt Fraction's Fear Itself, it has become increasingly apparent with AvX and Age of  Ultron that a commercial format is preceding any meaningful substance. Now Marvel appears to be committed to running two crossover simultaneously -- for instance, AXIS and Original Sin --  something which I don't think can be sustained.

The executives of Marvel seem to be of the mind that they can do it all: the crafty, compelling, fresh features of All-New Marvel NOW! as well as the bloated big ticket blockbuster like AXIS. I am doubtful. Eventually the reader's allegiance will evaporate.

In the scans below from AXIS #2 Iron Man battles Sentinels he secretly designed to exterminate all his brother and sister superheroes. Red Onslaught has acquired control of the Stark Sentinels.

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.

The Bourne Legacy

The studio apartment where I live has turned into a pizza oven. I am in a unit on the top floor of a 100-year-old building. For the most part it stays cool during the summer; only when the temperature reaches the mid-80s°F and above does it begin to bake.

It has been warm the past couple of days, warm and humid, and today it is forecast to be in the 80s°F again. Today the Gay Pride Parade takes place. Last night, the Saturday before the parade, I was expecting more noise -- the thudding base of dance music from the street party on Broadway -- but everything was surprisingly quiet. Festivities must be going on downtown.

Last night I finally got around to streaming The Bourne Legacy (2012), my first Hollywood blockbuster in several weeks. Recently there has been a marked reduction in new big Hollywood films available to stream from Amazon; that, and Amazon seems to be fiddling with their pricing. It used to be that pricing was very stable. All newly released big Hollywood movie rentals would be priced the same. Now it's all the over the map. Some, when first available, you cannot rent, only buy.

So I've grown tired with the process; hence, the three-week hiatus. But last night I was in the mood for a Saturday-night blockbuster, and I chose wisely.

The Bourne Legacy is directed and co-written by Tony Gilroy, who wrote and directed the refreshing thriller Michael Clayton (2007). Legacy is part of the high-quality Bourne franchise.

In Legacy we have Aaron Cross, played by Jeremy Renner, instead of Matt Damon as Jason Bourne. The secret government program is also different. The one Cross is member of is Operation Outcome, not Treadstone and Blackbriar, which were the black ops programs in the first three Bourne movies.

Outcome is a supersoldier pilot project. Through a combination of drugs and viruses, Operation Outcome engineers genetic enhancements -- an increase in cellular efficiency -- making its operatives faster, stronger, smarter. Think an updated version of the Captain America origin tale. In this case instead of earnest scientists working to discover a supersoldier serum to combat the Axis powers, we have a sprawling, opaque national security state with overlapping secret programs spewing out beta versions of super-assassins. (The idea of a warrior made superior by increased energy production at the the cellular level can be found in another Marvel comic book character, the villain Zeke Stane from the pages of Matt Fraction's Invincible Iron Man.)

This movie has everything. It is a Call of the Wild with missile-firing drones. It is a timely expose of our nefarious corporate national security state (Big Pharma in bed with high-ranking government intelligence officials). And it has a stupendous motorcycle chase in Manila. You even get the James Bond final scene -- the stud ends up with a beautiful, devoted woman on a boat on some exotic body of water. Cue the Moby theme song. Roll credits.

Iron Man #6 + Hawkeye #6

Seeing how this is the opening weekend of Iron Man 3 in North America, a few words on the latest Marvel Iron Man title, Iron Man Vol. 5. Below are two scanned pages from Iron Man #6, written by Kieron Gillen with pencils by Greg Land and inking by Jay Leisten:

Gillen is a capable writer. I enjoyed his recent boy-Loki run in Journey Into Mystery. And Land is a journeyman; his work on Uncanny X-Men, also written by Gillen, was solid. But the current Iron Man narrative, which casts Tony Stark as an intergalactic traveler in service of a huge Disney Star Warsesque production coming to a theater near you in the not-too-distant future, pales compared to the Zeitgeist-defining Invincible Iron Man, written by Matt Fraction with art by Salvador Larocca. (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.)

Working with masterful artist David Aja and colorist Matt Hollingsworth, Fraction once again has one of the best superhero comic books around, Hawkeye. It is at once both forward and backward looking. It taps into that sunny Stan Lee optimism of the middle-1960s but maintains a stylistic edge; afterall, Clint Barton (a.k.a. Hawkeye) lives in Brooklyn! Below are scans of the first four pages of Hawkeye #6:

Hawkeye #3

Here's a scan of the second-to-last page from Hawkeye #3, written by Matt Fraction and art by David Aja; the colors which are super are provided by Matt Hollingsworth.  There's buzz about this Marvel comic book.  I've enjoyed it.