Hawkeye vol. 5: All-New Hawkeye

For everyone who enjoyed the Fraction/Aja run on this series, new writer Jeff Lemire and artist Ramon Perez are here to let you know that the party is now over.  The new guys are smart enough to know that they have to take things in a different direction than the previous creative team.  Problem is that the new direction they’ve picked isn’t all that interesting.  I place most of the blame for this on Lemire as his work here feels like a combination of phoning things in while rehashing ideas and stylistic tricks that worked better on his signature series “Sweet Tooth.”  Take the volume’s main plot device:  the mutant kids that Clint Barton and Kate Bishop rescue from a Hydra installation.  They’re weird, creepy, and possessed of powers that can explode and/or liquefy a human, but they’re still kids and have a right to live like normal ones.  Right?  Not if our heroes’ plan includes subsequently rescuing them from S.H.I.E.L.D., having the kids live in their apartment for awhile, and THEN LETTING HYDRA TAKE THEM BACK because they’re really really dangerous and one of the jobs of Hawkeye is to make the hard decisions.  Great work there Lemire.  I’m feeling a lot more confident about your upcoming run on “Extraordinary X-Men” now.

To his credit, Lemire at least offers up some decent banter between the Hawkeyes as well as a serviceable look at the childhoods of Clint and Barney Barton after they ran away from their abusive father to join the circus.  The flashback scenes also serve as a great showcase for Perez’s skills — particularly with the watercolors — and feature consistently more involving layouts than in the main story.  I’d be more impressed with his work if he didn’t appear to be dead set on channelling previous artist David Aja’s style in the present-day sequences.  That just serves as a distracting reminder of how much more fun and energetic the Fraction/Aja run was.  I’m not saying that Lemire and Perez should have given us a series of done-in-one issues with a comedic bent that slowly bled into drama, but what they’ve given us here certainly qualifies as missing the mark.

The volume ends with the indication that time travel will factor into the story from here on out because the Hawkeyes have made a BIG MISTAKE.  So did Marvel in choosing to continue this series.  I wasn’t expecting it to be as good as what came before.  However, I was expecting it to be better than this.