All-New Hawkeye #2 Review (Jeff Lemire, Ramon Perez)

The flashbacks continue as a young Clint and Barney live the cliché, literally running off to join the circus! Meanwhile back in the present Clint and Kate are battling their way through HYDRA guards to investigate/sabotage their secret new weapon. But Project Communion is not what they think it is – the weapon is a who, not an it!

If you missed the first one, Jeff Lemire and Ramon Perez’s Hawkeye series uses the same characters we saw in Matt Fraction and David Aja’s Hawkeye (still waiting on that final ish, guys!), like Kate Bishop and Barney, but it’s different in other ways.

Lemire’s script splits the story in half so we spend equal amounts of time in the past and the present, from Clint and Barney’s rotten childhood at the hands of abusive foster parents, to the life of a superhero Clint currently (sort of)enjoys. It’s not as funny as Fraction’s writing and there’s more pathos here, though it’s a fine mix.

Perez’s art mirrors this duality with two different art styles. The past is drawn with gorgeous watercolours, mostly purple (of course), though bleeding over to red when the vicious stepfather appears, like Clint is thinking this memory. The present is drawn in a style similar to Aja’s with thick ink lines and solid colours.

This second issue is essentially more of the same that we saw in the first with some minor developments. Clint and Barney are now free of their latest violent foster parent thanks to a heroic swordsman and have fallen in with the circus. Meanwhile, in the present, Clint and Kate have discovered the creepy kids behind Project Communion and have decided to set them loose. I say creepy because they seem a lot like the warped psychic kids from Akira who’re possibly more unstable. Neither storyline seems likely to end well!

Lemire’s script is fine but again nothing spectacular and definitely not on the same level as Fraction’s writing. There’s a corny line towards the end where Clint spots a pocket knife on the floor that someone’s dropped who tells him that he’s a real “hawk-eye”. Groan. Perez’s art, with colour assists from Ian Herring, is the star of the series. Glorious watercolours rule everything, like the circus splash page, and I like the Aja-lite pages too.

All-New Hawkeye #2 is a good issue in this promising new series. While it can’t help but be compared to Fraction/Aja’s Hawkeye and come off the worse as a result, compared to the rest of Hawkeye’s solo books, it’s easily one of the character’s better appearances. Hawkeye fans won’t adore this issue but neither will they dislike it.