Hawkeye: Little Hits - with Gillian Wiebe
Gillian Wiebe takes over Trade School to revisit Hawkeye: Little Hits, the comic that helped turn Matt Fraction and David Aja’s Hawkeye into a modern classic. From Hurricane Sandy and the Tracksuit Mafia to tragedy, community, and an unforgettable issue told from Lucky the Pizza Dog’s perspective, this volume shows just how much comics can do when creators fully embrace the visual language of the medium.
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Edited by Case Aiken
Scored by Bret Eagleston
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⏱️ Chapters
00:00 Welcome and Introduction
00:08 Meet Gillian Wiebe
01:00 Discovering Hawkeye in a Comics Course
01:54 Little Hits and the Art of Hawkeye
02:49 Hurricane Sandy
03:40 The Tracksuit Mafia
04:30 Clint’s Responsibility to His Neighbors
05:19 Hawkeye Saves Grylls
06:16 The Tragedy of Grylls
07:18 Lucky the Pizza Dog
08:18 Final Recommendation
08:38 Books That Promo
Transcription
00:00
Welcome to Certain Point of View's Trade School, where each episode a different host talks about a comic book trade paperback that they loved and why they love it.
00:08
Hi, I'm Gillian Wiebe, a fellow listener just like you, this is a story of Hawkeye Little Hits, written by Matt Fraction, Art by David Aja colors by Matt Hollingsworth When I was in university I had basically no free time. I I was a full time student, I was working to pay my way through school and I was volunteering to make my resume look good for when I finally finished school. If I wanted to have fun, I needed to enjoy my schoolwork. My biology degree had set requirements, but there were options and so when I found out that the English department offered a class on comics, it seemed like the perfect excuse to get credits for doing something fun. I loved it. It was exactly what I was looking for. It was the only course in my degree that I got 100% in.
01:00
The required readings for this course were mostly comics with a sprinkling of books about comics, and one of the readings was the first 11 issues of the Mat fraction Run of Hawkeye. Now anything that was required reading for a course was available in the university bookstore, but I didn't really want to get everything there if I didn't have to. While I couldn't easily find the latest revisions of textbooks with the homework software subscription at other stores, I knew I could find comics if I looked elsewhere. I ended up getting volume two of the trade paperback Little Hits at a local secondhand bookshop. It was the first comic I bought with money I had earned as an adult, and it was mine in a way that none of my previous comics had been. Volume 2 collects issues 6 through 11 of the run.
01:54
The arc follows Clint Barton, aka Hawkeye, and Kate Bishop, aka Hawkeye, through a series of little adventures that ends with one of the best issues of the entire run. Mostly I'm going to tell you about the story, the writing. However, the way a comic looks is integral to the medium. There are comics that I would otherwise love, except that the art is not to my style preferences, but that is not the case here. Aja's art is beautiful to look at and the color work by Hollingsworth is masterfully intentional. My copy includes notes at the end from Hollingsworth about the colour that are well worth a read and do a better job than I could to explain the intent. However, if there is anything I want to complain about this comic, it's how often there are guest artists.
02:49
I love Aja's work, but I don't always love the work of the guest artists when it comes to the content of the book. First we see the Hawkeyes deal with Hurricane Sandy something that the real world dealt with too. If you know that Volume two contains issue six, you might be confused when you first open the book. Strangely enough, the trade paperback starts with issue 7, then follows with issue 6. My best guess is that they were hoping to make chronological sense. People knew when Hurricane Sandy hit October and logically assumed that would take place before the Christmas special in issue six, the next hit. The Christmas special isn't a skip this if you're not reading at Christmas time sort of holiday issue.
03:40
This is the first part of the arc where we see the primary antagonists the Tracksuits, A crime family of perfectly human mobsters with an extreme fondness for the word bro. Clint Barton might be an avenger, but he is also a normal human man with no superpowers. He doesn't have the same great powers, but nonetheless he has great responsibility. Clint has come into money from places and owns the building. He lives in a building full of average, ordinary people. As the landlord and one of Earth's mightiest heroes, he has a responsibility to look after these people. We see him begrudgingly accept this, even though his first instinct is to leave town when things get hard. He helps a man get to his father in a hurricane.
04:30
He helps a family watch the Christmas show their kids are looking forward to, although it was his fault in the first place that their cable was out. And when push comes to shove, or rather when Kate Bishop comes to remind him that he's one of the good guys, helps defend his building from the tracksuits. I won't give you a play by play of the whole book because you should go and read it. But I have to talk about thematic bookends of the volume and the masterful work of issue 11. So massive spoiler warning the man Hawkeye helps in Hurricane Sandy. The opening hit of this arc is a guy called Grylls. That isn't his real name, of course, but he insists on calling Clint Hawk Guy, so maybe a nickname is fine.
05:19
Grylls and Clint drive out to Far Rockaway, where Grylls aging father refuses to take any precautions to prepare for the storm of the century. Grylls is hauling up sentimental stuff that used to belong to his deceased mother from the basement while Clint is sandbagging outside when he sees a massive wave of floodwater coming right towards them. He rushes to get everyone upstairs, but Grylls goes back to the basement to get one more thing, one last bit of his mother's memory. Clint dives into the now flooded basement to rescue Grylls and thinks to himself, don't want to learn your name at your funeral. And he doesn't have to. Hawkeye saves the day and rescues Gryll and asks his name. It's Gil, short for Gilbert. The house is destroyed. All the precious memories are waterlogged, but not everything that was Gil's mother's is lost.
06:16
He still has his dad. They still have each other. In the middle of this arc, we don't see Gil Grylls very often. He's barbecuing up on the roof a time or two, but there are other people to help and other threats to deal with. Hawkeye has the tracksuits to deal with, but when Clint was worrying about learning Grylls name at his funeral, that was Chekov's funeral for Grylls. He's shot and killed as a direct result of the conflict with the tracksuits. Clint fails to save him and then the Hawkeyes attend his funeral. The conflict with the tracksuits doesn't have a satisfying end in this arc. They aren't defeated. The book doesn't have a happy ending. The framing of this arc and its resolution is tragically symmetrical. It starts with Clint being there to save Grylls and ends when Grylls dies because Clint wasn't there.
07:18
The last issue in this arc is maybe not novel to all of comics, but it was mind blowingly new to me at the time. Throughout this arc, every now and then we see Clint's dog, Lucky. The last issue is told from Lucky's perspective. It takes on the challenge of portraying the logic and sensory experience of a dog. There is minimal text. Sure there are speech bubbles, but only the words that Lucky knows are intelligible to the reader. Words like up, good boy and most importantly, pizza. Thoughts are connected in webs and are represented by simplified pictograms. It's so good. It isn't just the best issue in the arc, it's one of the best issues in the entire series. I love the way it takes advantage of the visual medium and communicates an understandable story without relying on dying. So overall, read this book.
08:18
Read the whole run. This is excellent Hawkeye content. I don't really have anything to plug, but I hope you pick up this book. Happy reading.
08:38
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08:43
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08:54
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09:00
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09:06
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09:12
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