Tag: Clint Barton

You gotta make your own stuff work out. 

Writing is hard, even when you’re writing about things you love for nothing but yourself. It’s hard because writing requires something of you, from you. It doesn’t matter what. The act of writing is the act of self expression and vulnerability and frustration. 

Writing about things you love is not any easier because inevitably the things we love are busted and a mess and half- taped together. But you have to make it work. You gotta make your own stuff work out. 

Comics are broken and busted and exploitive and a mess. One of the most highly regarded superhero comics of the 21st century (Shelfdust’s 100 Greatest Comics of All Time list has fourissues appearing), Hawkeye by Matt Fraction and his primary artistic partner David Aja, is, at last, being adapted into a new massive Disney+ series with Jeremy Renner’s version of the character. The show isn’t shy about the inspiration, wholesale lifting Aja’s cover design and major set pieces. And it’s no criticism, the source material is rich and exciting. It’s a testament to the defining work these creators did that they are inextricable from the character. 

But comics and film, they’re busted. Fraction and Aja get little more than a thank you, no compensation for the work, no royalties on the tv show… it’s hard to love these things.

But we try, because to give up on it all,what do we close ourselves off from? We celebrate what is good in hopes that by so doing  these works of art and commerce can enrich and enliven us and others.

Fraction and Aja’s Hawkeye is about a broken man who does his best but can’t put the pieces together to be the hero in his personal life that he presents to the world as an Avenger. A blond carnie with an Errol Flynn obsession, Clint Barton is a mere mortal among superpowered beings. Throughout the series he is beat up, bandaged or otherwise in over his head. The series’ sixth issue, “Six Days in the Life Of,” is perhaps Fraction and Aja’s most important issue thematically, a thesis statement for Clint’s journey of self destruction and listlessness. No matter what he tries to do, he can’t stop hurting himself or others. His life is splintered around him and the weight of the mess of all his baggage—all his stuff—contorts around him and the page itself. 

At its most basic, the issue follows a week in Clint’s life between Avengers missions as he tries to make his normal life work in the apartment building he purchased at the start of the run, and tries to keep its residents safe from the Eastern European thugs that want to develop the land. The issue is presented nonlinearly, days flashing back and forth. Aja transitions the scenes expertly, finding points of visual similarity to connect disparate moments into a cohesive whole. 

The issue opens with a collection of tiny square panels, of colored wires tangled together as Clint and Tony Stark tensely stare them down. Clint cuts a wire to avoid having to untangle them. We’re led to believe it’s a classic bomb disarmament scene, instead it’s a gag about Clint’s disastrous technology situation. He can’t face the mess of his VCR’s knotted up wires and cuts them away.

Aja’s layouts throughout the issue are a contrasting array of meticulously designed pages and details  and a chaotic interconnecting patchwork of tiny square panels. The classic grid structure  is mostly non-existent and instead Aja embraces the white space of the page, leaving tiny moments hanging in the air as the events of these six days in Clint Barton’s busted up life sweeps him away.

At the start of the week, the tracksuit mafia, as Clint calls the Eastern European thugs, threatens the building and get the better of Clint in a brawl. His first instinct to help the residents is to run away, feeling no one would miss him and their problems would vanish along with him. He places no value on his own life, beat up and lonesome as it is.

It’s only after sending his young protege Kate Bishop his bow as a farewell present that the selfishness of his decision is made clear to him. By running away and assuming his life leaves nothing for others to miss, he discounts those around him. When Kate confronts him he is forced to reckon with the harder truth of his own fear that has isolated him. Ultimately, he decides to confront the tracksuits in a dramatic full page splash that shows no action but conveys the full story.

The issue’s preceding pages are important to understand why this penultimate moment lands and is as dramatically effective as it is. As noted, up until this point the pages have been cobbled together by small disjointed moments. The complex and crowded panelling, the jumping around out of order, all inform us of Clint’s emotional state. There is something deeply wrong with him that leaves him unable to embrace those around him, to piece together his daily life or even recall it properly. It is a morass of moments and experience that he can’t quite bring into a cohesive whole until the issue’s end.

Writer Matt Fraction, when he was active online before smartly disappearing, has been remarkably open with his struggles with mental health, depression, and alcoholism and it is all but impossible  to read Clint Barton’s passive self destruction as anything but a deeply personal catharsis. Even superheroes can be damaged. The trick is to keep fighting.

The time jumps and dizzying Tetris layouts are rarely confusing thanks to Aja’s meticulous design, but they reward a close reading and rereading. The shifts are not random, instead focused on events or items that overlap and relate. Clint’s neighbor’s busted tv is because of his first skirmish with the tracksuits. Kate’s lecture is a direct response to his wrapping up the bow and handing it off to a bike courier in his apartment. The opening scene where he is setting up his home theater is a direct result of both of these events. 

Reading this issue, knowing how Clint gets to the point that he has asked Tony to help him set up the tv, having been challenged by Kate to stay and fight for the life he wants to have, in order to help his neighbors watch their Christmas specials, makes his brief speech to Tony about making due with what you’ve got even more powerful. On first blush it reads as a single outburst, a frustration with an out of touch billionaire. 

But it’s something more–a man trying for the first time to make an effort to make his messed up little life and all the busted parts of it just work for once. Because you gotta make your own stuff work. It’s the only way through the damn week.

Which takes us back to the splash page at issue’s end. The only glimpse of that Sunday is him stepping out in front of the apartment building in the snow, an arrow nocked. The apartment rises above him, the windows of the building echoing the traditional comics grid structure, tenwindows and a door echoing a twelve panel grid, the bank of snow separating the page into three distinct horizontal moments in time. 

It is a classic heroic moment. The dramatic catharsis of Clint’s nonlinear journey to stand up and put some effort into his life for once. It echoes a classic comic layout, but instead of big bombastic action, the apartment looms over Clint. It is the only thing that matters to him in that moment. The windows and their rectangular resemblance to comic panels guide our eyes across and down the page, forcing us to sit with the time and weight of Clint’s action. After a full issue of small panels representing rapid individual moments, the empty window panels expand the pause into different moments of dramatic tension.

But the emotional end is what follows, as he hosts his neighbors to watch Christmas specials. He’s decided to make this place with all its problems–all his problems– home. No more running.

I read “Hawkeye” for the first time when I was fresh out of college, in Los Angeles far from home and constantly feeling like I had made a monumental error, that I was in over my head and unqualified for what I was doing, and doing it poorly. I was in month four of  a new relationship that was now long distance for a full year, none of my friends or family around to lean on. I didn’t know where I would be in a year or two years or five. At the time, Clint’s speech felt familiar because my life felt a shambles, a broken patchwork of things I couldn’t connect after four years in safety as a student.

Now life is much different, married to that woman whom I left behind for a year, a new father in a home of my own, but I feel the pain in Clint’s attempt to make his broken stuff work no less. 

How often am I reminded that my body, with its inflamed intestines and scarred torso, is a broken thing itself? How often do the anxiety and depression that llurk within the confines of my mind threaten to overtake the things I have accomplished, whisper that I am worthless and i’d be better off hiding away forever where I could never bother anyone again? 

No, I’ve gotta make my own stuff work out. 

What Hawkeye reminds us, this issue particularly, remind us, is that life requires the courage to fight for the things we have that are important to us, even if they’re busted. Even if we have no idea how to do it, even if we can’t really see why they matter or why we matter to anyone else. We make the effort to reach out to a friend to help fix our TV set up, we help a neighbor with their Christmas decorations, or just sit with our dog for a moment at home.

It’s bittersweet to be a comics fan. Because like our own personal lives the business is a mess. I’m excited to watch the new show, to see how it spins the source material with a much different Clint Barton. But it is hard and disheartening to consume these books and shows, even deeply personal ones like Hawkeye issue 4, and know the unfair business practices behind it. But I guess that’s why I keep writing, to try and make these broken things mean something. Because comics, they’re ours, and we gotta make our stuff work.