I've been reading some articles and commentaries online about Hawkeye vol. 4 #11, the Pizza Dog story. Now, I'd see a lot of good things in that comic - obviously - people are bringing up points I overlooked.
Maybe that's the thing about the really good comics: different readers see different points and bring new insights too them. Comics are extraordinary enough as solitary entertainment, but shared among fans: they can be amazing.
Looking at a few sites:
Rachel Ededin at Comics Alliance - she says "Hawkeye vol. 4 #11-- which could be the best single issue of comics you’ve ever read."
"Hawkeye #11 is from Pizza Dog's point of view, and it's pretty damn close to perfect. ...Man, you will never care this hard about another story. And while you're caring, it'll sneak up on you that Matt Fraction and David Aja are doing things with comics that you didn't know could be done.
"At some point you realize that, without noticing, you've started to think like Pizza Dog."
Maybe because we haven't seen it done before; or, more accurately, haven't seen it so successfully done. Or so ambitiously, but I don't think Fraction and Aja are trying to be ambitious. They're trying to make the comic as good as they can, and their success is spectacular.
There's another interesting review from The A.V. Club, where Oliver Sava asks: "Is Hawkeye's Pizza Dog issue the future of superhero comics?" Which I think is an absurd - though eye-catching - and then he annoys me even more with the initial statement: "Superhero comics are predictable and repetitive." I can't say it is entirely untrue; but I've heard it too often to take it seriously. Yes, most superhero comics are formulaic. Television, novels, and all mass-market entertainment are by their nature predictable and repetitive, but in every medium and in every genre, the quality material manages to become unpredicable and original. Superhero comics are not, by nature, inferior any more than "war comics" or "romance comics" are inferior. This sounds to me like the snobbery of the critics who extol mainstream novels and scorn genre fiction. When the comics creators succeed in producing outstanding originality, it is not because they are transcending the genre, but because they have fresh ideas and high creativity.
Oliver Sava looses me entirely by listing the current Captain America as a 'must-read' book, while I think it is as close to unreadable, and by far the worst work I have ever seen from John Romita, Jr.
But Sava has an interesting take on the Pizza Dog story: "The story doesn't break from the detective mold too heavily -- Lucky meets a beautiful bitch that leads him to a case, he tries to solve it, sleeps with the female, then discovers and fights the perpetrators -- but the execution is incredibly imaginative and visually striking." And he calls the use of icons "a wonderfully immersive reading experience" - which it is. He speculates that the vagrant in the alley might be Clint's brother Barney.
"It takes a while for a new issue of Hawkeye to hit the stands," says Sava, "but the wait is always worth it." There, we agree. And I applaud his statement that "any character can be a captivating lead with the right creative team." Lucky Kate: She has two sets of creators at present, the Kieron Gillen/Jamie McKelvie team on Young Avengers, and Fraction and Aja on Hawkeye. The best of the best.
I note that many reviewers have used this comic as incentive to talk about their own dogs.
I liked the one-sentence review of fourteenacross on tumblr: "What is this devil magic that fuels the brains of Fraction and Aja and where can I get some?"
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