I pored through my stacks looking for any stray bit of manga or graphic novel that might have escaped my notice for the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge‘s Graphic Novel or Comic category, but I could not find anything. So given that I had a little time between dinner and the beginning of a Springfield Lutheran School basketball game, I stopped in at Hooked on Books for the second time in a month (the first was for some fruitless Christmas shopping where I bought a book for myself anyway) and looked over their supply. I grabbed this volume because I remember Hawkeye from the West Coast Avengers series from the 1980s.
Ha! The joke is on me. This book is about the female Hawkeye. It’s from 2019. Who is the female Hawkeye? Bloody heck, I don’t know; I have barely read any fresh Marvel for thirty years. Apparently, she knows the Clint Barton Hawkeye, who is something of a mentor to her (and who appears on the last page as a cliffhanger), and a running joke is that she is the other Hawkeye, the girl Hawkeye. Apparently, she was a member of the Young Avengers before she got her own book, wherein she has moved to Los Angeles and has set up a shingle as a private investigator (she’s working on getting a license when she gets the capital).
The book collects the first twelve issues of the series which includes three story arcs which have some interrelation. Apparently, her mother is missing (or dead); her father is missing (or dead); and a group of white Nationalist types are doing bad things (at the behest of a supervillainess who is apparently cloning people for some reason which might be known to people who were fans of this Hawkeye before this series). The style of the art changes a bit between arcs, so I wonder if the artists got shuffled (and maybe why).
So if you’re looking for a comic like the old Ms. Tree comics but with a protagonist who is also an expert archer featuring a modernly diverse set of sidekicks and a bit of a girly focus (a lot of How do I look? kinds of panels and whatnot), I guess this is a book for you. I mean, it’s not bad, and it’s a little more story rich than some 21st century comics that I’ve read, where the art is the point and the words/plot are just there to support the drawings. But I’m not sure why it’s necessary to call the character Hawkeye.
Oh, and if you’re wondering, no, a female Wolverine does not appear in the books. Two do.