I'm Not Bad, I'm Just Drawn That Way: Hawkeye In the Comics

I used to read comics regularly back in the 80s, primarily The Uncanny X-Men. I was eventually driven out of the fandom by tie-ins with other series, like Spider-man or Iron Man, which required you to buy other comics in order to keep up with your story. When it got to the point that I was having to buy 3-5 comics a month in order to follow the X-Men (and yes, I had to, because I am a completist with an OCD diagnosis) my resentment and limited college-student budget overcame my affection for the comics, and I quit.

I'm amused to see that the comics that were driving me into the poor house cost 65 cents each:

My partner Raider was a serious collector in his childhood and youth; our basement still contains longbox upon longbox of DC Universe comics, each individually stored in a protective plastic sleeve.

So, when the Marvel Cinematic Universe became a thing, we were right there. Not only are Raider and I long-time sci-fi fans with fond memories of our comics-reading days, but we have three kids who love that stuff, too. The opening of a Marvel movie is a family event for us, one that Raider and I celebrate with more sincere enthusiasm than any other, including Christmas and Easter.

Because I always want more of a good thing, it was inevitable that I would discover fanfiction, and then, eventually, looking for something else we could share as a family, would look into the comics. So a week or two ago, I brought home Hawkeye: My Life as a Weapon from the library. 

This is a trade paperback collection of issues 1-5 of the recent Hawkeye standalone comics, as well as one issue of Young Avengers Present which features Hawkeye. Here's the intro:

Clint Barton, aka Hawkeye, became the greatest sharpshooter known to man. He then joined the Avengers. This is what he does when he's not being an Avenger. That's all you need to know.

All six issues collected in My Life as a Weapon were written by Matt Fraction, and I like Fraction's take on the character. Clint's good-hearted but impulsive; he never thinks things through, and it lands him in trouble. He's a bit hapless. He owns a crappy apartment building in Brooklyn because the old landlords were raising rents and planning to evict his neighbors, so he bought it. He has a one-eyed pizza-eating dog named Lucky because he can't stop helping; when he sees Lucky hit by a car, he takes him to the vet, and then home.

One story line starts with him deciding it's time to organize his trick arrows; he's got them all spread out in his living room when he discovers he doesn't have any tape for labeling them. He heads out to buy tape, ends up impulsively buying a car then impulsively sleeping with the women who sold him the car, who of course ends up kidnapped because this is a comic book. Ultimately, he and Kate Bishop end up fighting a battle with his unlabeled trick arrows, so they don't know what any given arrow will do until they shoot it ("Oh, hey, explosion!").

I like this Clint, though I understand it's enough of a departure from previous versions of the characters that some long-time fans have been unhappy with it.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about.

I want to talk about how the characters are drawn. The first three comics in this collection are drawn by an artist named David Aja; the next two by Javier Pulido; and the Young Avengers Presents issue is drawn by Alan Davis.

I was really liking Aja's way of drawing the characters. His Clint is a pretty regular-looking guy, not much broader in the shoulders than in the hips. Kate Bishop is a regular-ish teenage girl in both her dress and her build. They both spend most of their time in jeans and t-shirts. We get a bit of Naked Clint because he's the kind of guy who finds himself unexpectedly unclothed and without transportation, but Aja gives us absolutely no Kate cleavage or butt shots. Aja doesn't seem interested in drawing characters with the kinds of exaggerated physical features you tend to associate with comics. So you get characters who look more-or-less like people. A very narrow selection of people, sure, but people nonetheless:

I hadn't been paying attention to the artist, until I got into Issue 4 and things looked different. Apparently Clint's been really hitting the gym because his shoulders are now way bigger than his hips. If the David Aja Clint is a guy you'd see on the street and think, "nice-looking guy," Javier Pulido's Clint is going to make you think, "Whoa, that dude is built!"

Meanwhile, poor Kate Bishop gets a really bad case of Cartoon Girl Face, complete with Jessica Rabbit lips and ridiculous eyebrows:

And this is what she now looks like in a t-shirt and jeans:

Everything is just that bit exaggerated: big eyes and lips, tiny waist, breasts! and curvy hips on Kate, and Weightlifter Triangle Torso on Clint. Kate is also a lot shorter than Clint in Pulido's world, whereas you can see that Aja drew them within a few inches of each other. He's bigger and she's smaller, because the things that supposedly make a man a man and a woman a woman are being emphasized here.

Meanwhile, the less said about the action figures and Barbie dolls who populate Young Avengers Presents, the better:

There's been a lot of talk in the last couple of years about the way women are drawn in the comics, with a particular emphasis on physically-impossible poses women contort themselves into so they can show off their breasts and their butts at the same time. Who knew Wonder Woman was an invertebrate? It's the only possible explanation for this:

This little collection of six comic books are a good demonstration of greater variety than that, which suggests that artists aren't just following convention when they draw mostly-naked women with painted-on costumes, but making a choice. David Aja shows that different choices are possible. Pulido's got more stylized cartoonish style, which shows not only in characters' features and body shapes but in how they move and interact as well, as you can see in the body language in this panel:

But I'd argue that a cartoonier style doesn't require sexing things up. I find myself wishing artists were thinking about these things more, and making better choices.

The upshot of all of this is that I've now  read a sum total of six comic books published in the last decade, but I already have a favorite artist. David Aja, whose Clint Barton just can't ever catch a break:

Coincidentally, there's a fan campaign from a couple of years ago that sought to point out the ridiculousness of the way women are drawn in comic: The Hawkeye Initiative.  Artists recreate comics panels with Hawkeye in place of the half-naked buxom warrior women. It's fun to browse.