Reviews

Hawkeye, Vol. 1: My Life as a Weapon by Matt Fraction

quietdomino's review against another edition

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3.0

Yep, this title is accurate. He is alive, and is also a weapon. This was entertaining and also took about 15 minutes to read.

jpark414's review against another edition

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4.0

Want allllll the Aja.

balletbookworm's review against another edition

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5.0

Hilarious. Great interaction between Clint Barton and Kate Bishop. I preferred the art style of issues 1-3 (David Aja) to issues 4-5 (Javier Pulido).

Tracksuit mafia. Ha!

davidchanza's review against another edition

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4.0

Empezando esta pequeña trilogía de Ojo de Halcón.

Un dibujo diferente, una historia diferente y un rollo totalmente diferente a lo que muchas veces estamos acostumbrados.

Mola.

xfajardo's review against another edition

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4.0

Was not expecting to really like this new direction, but it works out perfectly, it's just damn fun.

wbfreema's review against another edition

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5.0

i am a man who loves film noire, old spy films, and grew up on jack kirby. as an adult i've come to love jim starlin's cosmic marvel. this romp is right up my alley. Fraction is of course hilarious as ever. and David Aja has that whole spy game vibe on lockdown. i'm pretty sure Javier Pulido went to the Jack Kirby school of art on a scholarship provided by Paul Pope. but man, the colorist, matt hollingsworth, really impresses me here. i'm going to have to track down his other work on Tokyo Ghost and The Wake pronto. and no, it doesn't look bad.

bmurby's review against another edition

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2.0

I guess I am the odd ball out when it comes to Marvel comics. I just don't care for them. This story in particular is so disjointed and confusing that I actually kept wondering if I was skipping pages (I wasn't). Not to mention that the art style is pretty bad. The only redeeming part of this was the Young Avengers #6. The art and the story were much better.

rbreade's review against another edition

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I had heard lots of buzz about Matt Fraction's interpretation of the Marvel superhero known as Hawkeye--if you saw the Avengers movie last summer, you know he's the guy with the bow--enough to take a look at the first 11 issues collected in two volumes, titled My Life As A Weapon and Little Hits.

Impressive use of the form to tell engaging stories, though you must come to them with an some interest, even if slight, in the superhero genre. I especially like writer Fraction's work paired with the artist, David Aja's, thick pencils and heavy use of inks. Fraction's formal gifts are on display in the way he shuffles structure, making use of in medias res, looping back in time to catch a previous event from a different point of view, and presenting simultaneous events.

Fraction makes wonderful use of Clint Barton, a.k.a. Hawkeye's, role as the the "ordinary guy" in the Avengers, the least powerful and one most vulnerable to mortality. As a tagline for the book has it, "This is what he does when he's not being an Avenger." Running out of coffee. Trying to hook-up a high-tech home entertainment system. Providing interference with the shady Russian landlord on behalf of some of his less financially secure neighbors in the Bed-Stuy apartment building they share. Rooftop grilling with said neighbors. Getting into scrapes in the most accidental of fashions.

The voice is distinct and laced with wit. At some point in most of the stories comes Barton's laconic phrase, "Okay, this looks bad," always an ironic understatement given what the artwork is showing at the time, and inevitably leading the reader to ask, "How did things come to that, and how will he get out of the situation alive?"

Running through all this quotidia is a burgeoning menace involving what seems to be a relatively innocuous altercation with the Russian landlord, as if it were a thread Barton accidentally pulled and can't help but keep pulling--unknowingly--until he's neck deep in serious trouble, the exact nature of which he's still unaware.

medium_dave's review against another edition

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3.0

Cool series. It suffers from the last 2 issues, it's too...comic-y, too teenish. The art for the first 3 is great, the covers are amazing, and it's a fun hero to hang out with. He's got no powers, just trained really well.

treezus's review against another edition

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4.0

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