Bittersweet ending here, as Matt Fraction’s run on Hawkeye comes to an end, but it’s a good end.
It’s been almost a month since I read this, so this review will not be great. Additionally, I read it and five other comics as part of the Dewey’s Read-a-thon, and fading real fast into the night. I was loopy and barely remember most of what I read during that period.
But with that disclaimer out of the way, this was a good last volume.
The first issue was called “Winter Friends,” and is a stylistically experimental departure, where Clint is asleep on a couch and vividly dreaming about being a dog superhero, and it’s all very correlative to his life in the Avengers as one of the only members without powers. It was fun to read, but also pretty weird.
The next issues are where the story really started. Clint finally deals with the Tracksuit Mafia, and his brother comes to town. There is also another bad guy who I’ve forgotten almost everything about, except he’s scary, and shit gets real, real fast. Oh, and Clint is injured and becomes temporarily deaf, like he was as a child, and the entire issue is silent from his perspective. There’s even sign language panels that I kept trying to look up so I could know what’s going on.
It was absurdly well done.
I miiiight consider continuing this series if somebody whose taste I trust says it’s good, but my guess is with Fraction leaving, it’s really going to lose something.
