Age of Ultron is a B-plus, and here's why.

So I saw Avengers: Age of Ultron on Friday night and much as I liked most of it, and much as I thought I'd never need to say this—Joss Whedon, you need to move on.

I know, I know, Joss is moving on; this is his last contracted Marvel movie, and the Russo brothers (of Winter Soldier fame) will be taking over future installments in the Avengers franchise. But this isn't the sendoff I would have liked. I wanted to miss Joss when he was gone.

Okay. Time to put on my big-fangirl pants and deal. I had very high expectations for this movie and they weren't met, that's all. Most of my disappointment here is that I expected this movie to be as awesome as the first one and it was just kinda goodish. Goodish isn't so bad. It's only bad when you expected better.

For those who want the capsule description, Avengers: Age of Ultron mostly focuses on what happens when the ad hoc superteam of the first Avengers movie has to grow up and deal with the world in a systematic, adult way. Spoiler: it doesn't go well. When Tony Stark decides to use a little evil science to kickstart his world-defending AI system (because what could possibly go wrong with that?), the world pretty much goes to hell in a handbasket and the good guys spend two hours trying to fix it, with mixed results. I'm going to start with the good before I move on to the problematic.

Now, because this is me and I tend to dwell on the things that annoy me, I'll probably have more to say on the negative side of the balance sheet, so I want to establish right up front that as much as I dislike the problematic stuff, I consider AoU a pretty good movie overall. If the first Avengers was an A, this is a B-plus. It's good, okay? You'll have fun. It's just not without its problems, is all. And one or two (or three) of those problems are significant.

All right. Here we go. This is your last spoiler warning ...

The good:

1. This is a really darned good superhero movie. Seriously. Everything you look for in a tentpole popcorn flick is here. And it's all done really well. A lot of stuff blows up. There's a whirlwind tour of the endangered globe. There are moments of real excitement and humor. If there's a checklist for how to make a good superhero movie, this one checks nearly all the boxes. Anything involving the Vision, in particular, is damn near perfect (and gorgeous to boot). It's just a well-made superhero movie by the standards of what makes a good 'un.

2. Nice action sequences. That's an understatement. This movie doesn't just go for spectacle—it pays real attention to how the Avengers would function in combat after some practice together. They use their strengths and compensate for one another's weaknesses. Whether it's Captain America using a motorcycle as both personal transportation and blunt instrument, or Iron Man having a contingency plan for the Hulk losing his few remaining marbles, or Hawkeye doing his mere-mortal schtick in places where the superpowered gods can't go, this movie has everything you want to see in the way of the Avengers in action.

Early on, a bad guy asks his henchman why their defenses are failing, and his baffled henchman replies, "They're the Avengers, sir." And that pretty much sums it up.

3. Hello to the funny. It's a Joss Whedon movie, so this shouldn't be a surprise, but there are more than enough jokes. I'd guess I had to lip-read maybe fifteen to twenty percent of the dialogue because the people around me were laughing so loudly at what had just been said. It's funny, okay? There's plenty of funny.

4. Hawkeye! If you felt there wasn't enough Hawkeye in earlier Marvel movies, this movie will be your jam because he's everywhere. He gets a lot of the best action and the best snark. And as the movie delves into his personal life, including glimpses of his home (yes, he has one), he carries a lot of the film's emotional weight, too. And he does it well. Jeremy Renner, I would start a petition to give you your own solo film except that this movie kind of was that film.

5. Ultron is a hoot. James Spader is hilarious. If you've ever snorted a drink out your nose at something he said or did in The Blacklist, you'll be happy here. There's nothing quite like hearing him say, "Stop it!" like the annoyed parent of a toddler after Captain America tries to kick him in the face for the fourth or fifth time. Spader does for Ultron what Tom Hiddleston did for Loki—take a two-dimensional megalomaniac and turn him into something complex, sympathetic, and charming. I don't think Ultron will be getting a fangirl army any time soon, but it's not for lack of effort on Spader's part.

6. Sam Wilson is an Avenger. I repeat, SAM WILSON IS AN AVENGER. Yes. He makes it. Anybody who's been rooting for the Falcon to make it to the big show, you will be pleased. He's in the final roll call, with a new set of wings.

6. NEBBISH! This is a personal thing, but I was delighted (and actually screamed in the theater) to see the return of one of my favorite minor MCU characters. Remember the SHIELD technician who refused to launch the helicarriers? The guy who started the "captain's orders" meme? He doesn't have a name in the canon, but after I saw him in Winter Soldier he quickly became my personal Figwit. I loved the fact that he was obviously scared out of his mind, the last person who should be fighting somebody like Rumlow, and yet he was the first speaking SHIELD agent we saw resisting Hydra's takeover. While everyone else was looking at each other and wondering what to do, this little nebbishy guy proved himself more heroic than Captain America (and nearly got his brains blown out for it, in a nice touch of realism). It was established that a lot of SHIELD agents died when the Triskelion fell, and unlike named characters like Agent 13 and Maria Hill, Nebbish didn't get an epilogue in Winter Soldier. He wasn't important enough to be shown, alive or dead, at the end.

Well, it looks like Nebbish made it out okay, because he's shown (briefly) working for Nick Fury in the climax of the film. And that was probably my favorite part.

Yeah, Nebbish was the best. Because a lot of the other good in this movie was soured by ...

The bad:

1. It's too many movies in one movie. Maybe there's a way to do Ultron and the birth of the Vision and the introduction of Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch and the foundations of Civil War and build Hawkeye into a fully developed character—but this wasn't it. There was just too much going on—so much that it was hard to care about any one plot thread when the next action scene (however excellent) was barreling at you before you could process. This was about a movie and a half packed into only one flick, and not in the good way.

2. Wait, are there three SHIELDs now? And other plot holes. Let's just say there was insufficient attention to detail, which is a lousy thing to say about a Joss Whedon production. But there are plot holes you could drive a truck through. Like the part where Bruce finds Natasha in the oh-so-secret dungeon in the middle of Ultron's base. How? She was unconscious when she was brought there, so she couldn't have correctly described her location to Clint. How did Bruce find the place? How did he get in there? How did he find her inside a sprawling building? Honestly, would one shot of Bruce creeping down a hallway have been too much?

Similarly, when Nick Fury randomly shows up out of nowhere with a helicarrier, it's a little weird. Seriously, dude, where were you an hour ago? And does this mean that you have your own SHIELD faction now, to replace the two that have been squabbling all season on Agents of SHIELD? How did you suddenly become a slick and well-funded operation again at the end?

And perhaps most importantly, why does nobody notice that smashing robot bodies does absolutely no good in the age of cloud computing? There's nothing to suggest Ultron hasn't backed himself up somewhere online. Breaking the hardware shouldn't do anything of substance. So the movie ends with only token evidence that the bad guy has even been defeated, yet everyone relaxes like they won.

I could go on, but ... seriously, there's just a lot of plot holes. Enough to be distracting.

3. Why is there a romance in this movie? And why is it this romance? One of the things I liked best in the first Avengers movie is that there wasn't much in the way of romance. The whole thing happened over, like, two days, and there was just no time for it. I liked that a lot better than a typical action movie where the love story feels shoehorned in.

Well ...

The big romance in this movie is between Natasha and Bruce. And I don't care whether you ship that or not, but I have two problems with it strictly from a filmmaking perspective. First, Scarlett Johansson and Mark Ruffalo don't have that much chemistry together. Their scenes feel dull and forced. So you're adding a romance that doesn't work, from a strict filmmaking standpoint.

Second, the romance is pretty much all Natasha does in this movie. Seriously, even Bruce gets to weigh in on the creation of Ultron and how to defeat him. Natasha just gets kidnapped and turned into Bruce's damsel in distress. I don't care what your view of Joss Whedon's self-described feminism is—that is a waste of a good character. Why is Natasha even here if this is all she does? You could have swapped her for Betty Ross and gotten the same results.

4. Tony Stark is an idiot. This is the first of many signs that Joss Whedon hates his job. Tony was the darling of the first Avengers movie, the wisecracking scene-stealer who got all the best snark. That is a sign that Joss loves you right there. And he got to make the big dramatic sacrifice to save the world.

This time? Tony is still snarky, but it's pointlessly mean snark—lines like a joke about reinstating prima nocta when he rules Asgard. There were a million jokes Tony could have made while trying to lift the hammer, but somehow we ended up with a rape joke. And yeah, Tony then turns out to be unworthy, which has led a lot of online pundits to suggest that this was Joss trying to undermine Tony's jerkishness, but that's not what bothers me. What bothers me is that Age of Ultron makes Tony out to be the kind of jerk who would make a joke like that. Never mind his development over four previous movies—none of that counts now, because Joss Whedon needs a straw man to tear down.

And then there's the stupidity! In Age of Ultron we get a Tony Stark who is literally unable to learn from his mistakes, even in engineering, which is supposed to be his primary area of genius. Bruce even calls him on it, saying he's "stuck in a time loop" when Tony suggests countering an out-of-control AI with another out-of-control AI, effectively repeating an action and expecting different results. And yeah, it turns out okay this time—but not because of anything Tony did.

Apparently, this movie just couldn't get along without a version of Tony Stark who was so obviously wrong about everything that no rational person could agree with him on anything. That's a terrible way to set up an antagonist for the upcoming Civil War movie. What's the matter, Joss? Couldn't be bothered to write a little complexity and nuance into someone who had to be on the wrong side of the argument?

5. Steve Rogers is unrecognizable. I guess not, because Steve got an even rawer deal than Tony. I noted in my review of the first Avengers that my one major issue was that every one of the Big Six got a serious character arc except Cap, who just kind of piddled around until it was time to punch aliens. When the Avengers Blu-ray came out with a bunch of deleted scenes that appeared to show Cap's arc, all was seemingly forgiven. It was cut for time. Understandable.

I'm not so understanding now.

The Captain America we get in Age of Ultron is nothing like the one we see in the other MCU movies. He's the most hidebound member of the team, primly correcting Tony's casual profanity (and reacting with very little grace when ribbed about it later). This is just dumb. The guy fought through World War II (in the American infantry!) and casually says things like "light the bastards up", but he has a problem with Tony saying "shit"? That's so far out of character that it's a non sequitur.

In fact, there's very little of the Steve Rogers we've come to like in other movies. The guy who tried to drink an entire pub and cried himself hoarse when Bucky died in The First Avenger is now saying things like, "If you get killed, walk it off." The guy who dismantled an Orwellian intelligence organization in Winter Soldier ends up apparently running one. And even when Sam Wilson says he's happier not being an Avenger, Steve goes and makes him one (presumably because he knows Sam can't tell him no). There's no indication that he's still actively trying to find the person he nearly killed himself saving in his last movie; Bucky's not so much as mentioned by name. Even during the downtime on Clint's farm, Steve never seems to pause and reflect on his gaping emotional wounds. He's the Tin Woodsman to Tony Stark's scarecrow—no heart, no brain.

This isn't The Wizard of Oz, Joss. Heartless Steve Rogers is not what I bought a ticket for.

6. Natasha Romanoff is ... I don't even know what. All right, before the whining starts, I am going to be absolutely clear about what bothers me about Nat's role in this film. It's not what happens. It's that this is not Natasha Romanoff.

Let's discuss the elephant in the room—the "monster" line.

At one point, Bruce tells Nat they can't be a couple because he can't have children. Nat replies that she can't either—the "graduation ceremony" in the Red Room was a mandatory surgical sterilization. Okay, fine, bad people do bad things. But Nat then goes on specifically to say that the sterilization was done so she would be a better assassin (because having a hysterectomy makes you a better murderer?) and tells Bruce that he's not the only monster on the team.

And that is where I put down my popcorn.

I'm sorry, but "monster"? Let's be charitably dense and say this isn't what it looks like—this movie saying an infertile woman is a monster because she's infertile. Let's say Nat thinks she's a monster strictly because she's killed a bunch of people. Let's ignore the fact that she was discussing her infertility right before she switched to the topic of monsters, and that she explicitly said she was rendered infertile so she'd be better at doing monster stuff. Let's assume that Joss in no way meant to imply that non-motherhood equals monsterdom, that he never meant to say that a woman who can't have children should consider herself no longer human. Let's even assume that this is not a reflection of the movie's view, just a moment of character for Nat—that she holds this idea, true or not, because that's just how she feels and feelings don't have to be logical or popular with the audience if they work as part of a character's overall arc.

That still leaves the fact that Nat calls herself a monster, on a par with the giant green rage machine that just destroyed a city, and nothing and no one in the rest of the movie contradicts that point of view. Bruce never says, "I don't think you're a monster" (even though the Hulk is shown in a middling positive light in other scenes). No one is shown treating Nat like a hero, unless you count Clint naming his next kid after her (sort of), which was apparently the plan even before the M-word entered the conversation. Steve makes her his second-in-command, but since this is the Steve Rogers who tells hypothetical dead people to walk it off, he might as well be amending "monster" to "useful monster". Of the two people in the movie who appear to care about Nat, in the end, one leaves her and the other is understandably distracted by all the kids he's got.

This is a movie that pretty much lets Nat call herself a monster, entirely or in part because she can't have babies, and replies, "Yup, you are."

And that's about 50% of Nat's role in this film (the other 50% being her damsel-in-distress routine).

Sorry, but that's not the Natasha Romanoff I bought a ticket for. I want to see the version that's slowly discovering she isn't a monster—the consummate spy of Iron Man 2 who became a steadfast best friend in The Avengers and whom Steve Rogers explicitly trusted to save his life in Winter Soldier. I want to see the Natasha Romanoff who's never perfect, but who keeps growing. Who doesn't accept the "monster" label. Who takes her vicious, sexist codename (Black Widow, poisonous man-eater) and shoves it down the throats of everyone who dismisses or underestimates her.

Natasha Romanoff is not resigned to being a monster. And damn you, Joss Whedon, for implying that she is, or should be.

7. I just don't care. Maybe it's the movie overload, maybe it's the fact that several characters went off the rails, but I just wasn't emotionally invested in this movie by the end. I wanted to be. I was sitting in that theater in a superhero hoodie, holding a teddy bear dressed up as my favorite Marvel character, in a row full of friends who were doing the same thing. I wanted to like this movie. I expected to like this movie.

And it had its moments. The Vision was gorgeous and very well done. There were moments of joy and wonder and fear. But when it comes right down to it, a group of characters I loved—had come to consider my friends, in the way really good fictional characters become your imaginary companions—either didn't show up or were treated so poorly that they'd have been better off staying home.

It's a pretty goodish movie. If it were anything other than an Avengers movie made by Joss Whedon with the Avengers in it, it would be an excellent movie. But it's not.

So I give it a B-plus. And after I saw it, I went home and Googled Chris Evans' tweets about filming the next Captain America flick.

Maybe my imaginary friends will show up for that one.

Guardians of the Galaxy, Day 5: What to Read

DAY 5: WHAT TO READ

Well, if you’re still reading these entries on my fifth day of obsessive fangirling, you’re probably serious about digging into the world of Guardians of the Galaxy. So here you go—your dubious reward. The reading list. And if you’re in a big hurry to start reading, scroll down to the bottom—there’s two books that are both great starting points. If you don’t read any other GotG titles, read these.

One quick thing
This list is by no means complete. I haven’t read all of Cosmic Marvel, or even all the storylines that have come out since the mid-2000s, when things really started kicking into high gear. This list is based on my own collection and the bits I think you’ll find most helpful as you investigate this new-to-you corner of comicdom. These are the books I would lend to my friends—in fact, in many cases they’re the books I have lent to my friends. They’re good books.

But they’re not self-contained. Cosmic Marvel is big, it’s complicated, and its branches are heavily intertwined. Major storylines move from one comic-book title to another, and one book will often reference events in another book as if everyone in the story has heard of them. (Of course, that’s because those events tend to be big things—such as the destruction of a populated planet—that you’d expect people in the story to have heard about.) There’s some stuff you’re just not going to get unless you read every single issue of every single title, and unless you’re way more of a completist than I am, it’s not worth your time to do that. So expect to do a little Googling, and expect to leave a few questions unanswered. The stories are still good, and the books I’ll list are still ripping good yarns, but you will need to make your peace with incompletion here.

Still with me? On we go!

Early stuff
If you want to read the oldest Guardians of the Galaxy stories, be prepared to do a lot of digging. I’ve been collecting Star-Lord adventures since I was 13 years old, and not only do I not have them all, I don’t even have a complete list of them. The same goes for Rocket Raccoon, Drax, Groot, Gamora—everybody’s history is all over the place. But here are two good starting points, recently published, that will help to catch you up on two of the most popular Guardians.

None of the stories in here involve this outfit.
Thank God.

1. Star-Lord: Worlds on the Brink. This was a big fat comic book—cover price $4.99—that came out a few months ago, reprinting classic Star-Lord adventures. It includes the best version of his origin story I’ve ever seen (okay, it was the one I grew up on) and a couple of the better stories from the classic run. There was even a story I’d never seen before from the 1980s. All in all, it’s well worth your five bucks if you want to see Peter and Ship soaring around the cosmos before everything went wrong.

2. Rocket Raccoon: Tales from Half-World. Another reprint issue, also $4.99, this one reprints some of the better Rocket stories from before he joined the Guardians. At least, I think they’re the better stories. I didn’t actually read anything with Rocket Raccoon in it before GotG came along, so I wouldn’t know. They’re definitely good stories, though, if a bit weird. But come on, it’s a gun-toting space raccoon. You were expecting maybe a comedy of manners?

DnA kick off
If you’re going to dig into the stories that inspired the movie, learn the acronym DnA and the two names behind it: Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning. The two were a writing team for a number of years, though they’ve recently broken up, and their names appear together on most of the Cosmic Marvel titles that reinvigorated that whole universe and gave rise to the Guardians of the Galaxy movie. Here are the titles that will give you the best insight into how the Guardians formed.

1. Annihilation: Book Three. Yes, I’m starting with Book Three. I’ve read some of the earlier stuff. It’s nice, but if you want to know where Star-Lord becomes a player—and where his relationships with Richie and other characters lead to the formation of the Guardians—this is it. This volume covers the climax of the Annihilation War (remember, the one with the bugs?) and there’s a whole lot of shooting, blowing up, major characters dying, emotional trauma, and space cussing. Here’s a hint—“das’t” and “flark” mean about what you think they would …

2. Annihilation: Conquest: Book One. This book collects two limited series, one of which (Annihilation: Conquest: Star-Lord) shows the formation of Star-Lord’s first team, his spacefaring Dirty Dozen homage. It also marks the first meeting between Rocket and Groot, and one of the few comics where Groot says something other than “I am Groot.” In fact, he’s quite chatty; apparently the writers decided only later that he shouldn’t be able to say things like, “This will be a glorious death, as befits one of my stature.”

The main event: The Guardians of the Galaxy title
Obviously, if you want to know about the Guardians of the Galaxy, it’s a good idea to pick up one of the Guardians of the Galaxy collections.

1. Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 1: Legacy. This collection covers the formation of the team, including the discovery of Major Victory, the beginnings of their conflict with the Universal Church of Truth, and the revelation of a secret that very nearly causes the team to disintegrate. In fact, a bunch of people quit and Star-Lord goes missing. I won’t spoil the secret, though. It’s way too much fun.

Yes, it's the same cover layout.
But look! It's a gun-toting raccoon!

2. Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2: War of Kings, Book 1. This book picks up where the previous one left off, with the team in tatters and Star-Lord AWOL. Most of the volume is about Star-Lord getting involved in an extradimensional prison break (hello, Jack Flag!) and Drax and Phyla going on a quest to bring Moondragon back from the dead. Rocket is awesome in this book.

3. Volumes 3 and 4: War of Kings, Book 2 and Realm of Kings. Honestly, I haven’t bothered to pick these two up yet in trade form, though I bought the original comics. There’s more fun space stuff. People die. People come back to life. Rocket is hilarious. Peter is harried. Explosions happen. Time travel and magic continue to screw everything up. If you liked Volumes 1 and 2, then 3 and 4 will be your cup of tea.

Oh, and about the “War of Kings” / “Realm of Kings” thing you’re seeing in those titles … GotG often tied in heavily to whatever bigger storyline was going on in Cosmic Marvel. There are collections of the main War of Kings storyline and the like, but I didn’t buy those series and enjoyed my comics just fine. Seek them out if you’re interested; otherwise, don’t bother.

4. The Thanos Imperative. This is worth your time, I can pretty much guarantee. Besides being the storyline that ended the main Guardians of the Galaxy title (well, until it was restarted), it’s the storyline that exemplifies Cosmic Marvel under Abnett and Lanning better than anything else. There are about twenty different plotlines running at once, the cosmic abstracts get involved, and not one but two universes come crashing down around everyone’s ears … but ultimately, as you know, it all comes down to two guys in a crater, screaming into the face of Death. Epic.

5. The Annihilators and Rocket Raccoon & Groot: The Complete Collection. These two titles came out of Thanos Imperative, and they go in very different directions. Annihilators follows a team of high-powered cosmic superguys, including the Silver Surfer, the Quasar who’s not Phyla, and an alien version of Thor named—I kid you not—Beta Ray Bill. Basically, all the big guns who wouldn’t return Star-Lord’s calls jump into saving the universe now that he’s dead. It’s a fun punch-em-up, with a lot of humor from Cosmo.

Rocket Raccoon & Groot was originally a backup feature in Annihilators, a series about Rocket and Groot roaming the galaxy, starring in a horrible reality TV show, and discovering that Rocket’s origin story isn’t exactly what he thought it was … and just maybe Groot’s isn’t, either. Well worth your dollar if you’re interested in those two characters.

5. Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 1: Cosmic Avengers. This is the rebooted GotG title. It’s pretty much about the movie lineup of characters getting into trouble—most notably, trouble that results from a bunch of alien leaders declaring Earth off-limits to extraterrestrial meddling. This, naturally, attracts all the most determined meddlers, and trouble ensues. Subplots include Peter’s escalating war with his royal father and Tony Stark’s little space vacation, which starts out as a lark and ends in tears before bedtime. Not least because he sleeps with Gamora. Doesn’t anybody watch old sci-fi movies anymore? Stay away from the green girls! Long story short, this book is amusing and a good introduction to the current GotG series, but I’m still annoyed that it stars the dumbest version of Peter Quill I’ve ever met. It’s probably closest to the movie, though. Sigh.

If you’re interested in Thanos …
1. Thanos Rising. This series came out last year and purported to be the definitive origin of Thanos, exploring his twisted romance with Death as never before. And … yeah, it did. Thanos is one sick puppy. If you want to know what makes the purple guy tick, Thanos Rising is your book.

Two great books to get you started
You just scrolled down here from the top, didn’t you? Oh, fine. Here you go.

If it was worth using once, it's worth using twice.

1. Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 1: Legacy. This book is the best guide to the GotG oeuvre, in my humble opinion. You’ve got the big cosmic conflicts, the team infighting, the talking animals … it’s just bonkers and it’s great. If you can handle a story that doesn’t wrap up in one volume, this is your entry point. If you like it, read more. If you don’t, now you know.

2. Avengers Assemble Vol. 1. If you’d prefer a more accessible and self-contained version of GotG, perhaps in more familiar surroundings, check out this collection of the Avengers Assemble comic, which was designed to present self-contained stories featuring the Avengers that everybody saw in the movie. This story is mostly about Thanos messing around with Earth and trying to gain ultimate power. The Avengers fight him off once, and then the Guardians of the Galaxy show up to reveal the bigger plot and drag the whole team off into space for some true Cosmic Marvel insanity. The action and banter are dead-on, and the story’s not too concerned with continuity—which is probably why Star-Lord spends the whole story wearing his pre-Kyln costume and his team flies around in a craft that looks remarkably like Ship. Still and all, it’s a good story and a great introduction to the characters. Oh, and it contains one of the better “I AM GROOT!” moments ever.

Well, that’s it. I hope you’ve enjoyed this entirely-too-long magical mystery tour of Guardians of the Galaxy and my own minor obsession with the title. With luck, you’ve come away with a clearer understanding of how the story works and whether you want to see it on the big screen. If you enjoyed this series, let me know in the comments or on Facebook and I’ll do another on Captain America: The Winter Soldier before that movie comes out. I’m not sure I’ve got five days’ worth of stuff, but I can probably string together a few interesting entries for you.

Thanks for reading, and until next time, if Death ever comes your way and won’t let you pass, make sure you scream right back in his face.

But then, you really shouldn’t trust anything I say. Most of the time I just make stuff up.

Comic Books You Should Be Reading: Hawkeye (?!)

I’ll admit, I never expected to be recommending a series called Hawkeye in this feature, let alone recommending it after only one issue. But there it is. Marvel Comics’ new series featuring the breakout Avengers hero is a little gem with a lot of very sharp edges.

I’ve never liked Hawkeye. He’s always been the team loudmouth, way too full of himself, and too often played off Captain America just so there was someone to play off Cap. But I picked up Hawkeye #1, partly because I liked the portrayal of Hawkeye in the recent Avengers movie and partly because Derrick Fleece told me to.

Thank you, Derrick.

Here’s a quick recap for the civilians: Hawkeye is generally considered a B-list superhero, a member of most versions of the Avengers over the years but rarely holding down his own title. He was raised by carnies and became a preternaturally good trick shot with a bow and arrow (among other things, but mostly with a bow and arrow). He ran around as a villain for a little while before changing his stripes and applying for Avengers membership. Since then, it’s basically been his job to put an arrow in the bad guy’s eye, call Captain America an idiot when it’s necessary, and in some cases be the only member of the team who uses contractions and/or slang in his dialogue. Oh, and he wears a purple costume, thus dooming him to the fate of almost all characters who wear secondary colors—B-list at best. 

Leap BEFORE you look!

The first issue of what looks to be a new ongoing series by Matt Fraction and David Aja begins with Hawkeye falling out of a building and firing an arrow upward, a lot like that much-ballyhooed shot that made it into the movie trailer. Looks familiar, right? Like you know where this story is going?

Except this time we see Hawkeye land … very hard … on his back … on top of a parked car. Six weeks in the hospital for our intrepid hero. That’s your first clue that this ain’t your granddaddy’s superhero story.  

Hawkeye's physical-therapy regimen.

 As Hawkeye (a.k.a. Clint Barton) points out, he’s the non-super guy on the team of superheroes. He’s out there as backup to Iron Man and Thor, and all he brings to table is, in his words, “a string and a stick from the Paleolithic era.” (He’s quite proud of looking up the word “Paleolithic,” naturally.) The series follows what Hawkeye gets up to when he isn’t being an Avenger, and that seems to be a lot more interesting than what he does when he is one.

Hawkeye's neighbors are so nice, they ignore the purple shirt.

Once he’s out of the hospital, Hawkeye runs afoul of his scummy landlord, who’s trying to evict all the tenants from the building so he can sell the place. Hawkeye seems to like his neighbors (they’re apparently the only people he knows socially who don’t run around in spandex, and most don’t appear to know he’s an Avenger), so he sticks his nose where it’s not wanted and the story goes from there. The rest of the plot involves a run-down casino, a duffel bag full of money, and an incident with a dog that will darn near break your heart. 

Aww, he made a friend. Sort of.

There’s plenty of action and crackling dialogue, but what’s more impressive is what you won’t see in this story. Hawkeye never dons his costume, and there’s not an arrow fired after that first page, but you don’t miss it at all. This is a story about the man under the spandex, and he turns out to be a genuinely interesting and sympathetic guy. He’ll kick his wheelchair into a busy street and break heads in the waiting room of a vet’s office, but he’ll also ask Ivan the landlord not to threaten people with murder in front of their kids, screw up breaking a beer bottle with a penny, and bribe a guard dog with a slice of pizza. He doesn’t have much of a social life outside of the Avengers and this little group of people on a rooftop, but you find yourself wishing you could be one of the people at that barbecue with him. He’s just a fun character to be around, and the comic is all about him, so you know you’re in good hands.

Spandex-free face-punching.

With visual and dialogue tributes to everything from jazz music to seventies action movies, Hawkeye is a fast and stylish thrill ride that never loses track of its heroic heart. Even if you’ve never touched a bow and arrow, even if you don’t care about whether Kang the Conqueror gets a shaft through the eye, you’ll finish this comic caring about Hawkeye, and what he does, and why he does it. And you won’t miss the costume at all. How’s that for a trick shot?

One note to the creative team, though—we’d better see more of that dog … 

"It's okay. I'm an Avenger." Well, that just makes it all better ...

I never thought I’d like Hawkeye better than Captain America. Wtf, Joss?

Yeah, I know, a week after the rest of the country, I finally saw The Movie. I’ve been sleep-deprived, okay? And I wanted to actually enjoy seeing The Avengers.

The short review? I liked it … mostly. And I’m not sure which part of that statement surprises me more.

Joss Whedon, maker of things I like. Canceled things.

I’ve been a fan of Joss Whedon’s since the second episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (I didn’t see the pilot.) As soon as I read the words “spontaneously combusting cheerleaders” in the TV listings, I was in. I loved Buffy. I loved Angel. I loved the two minutes of Firefly I got to see while it was actually on the air (I was living in a place that banned television—yes, really) and all of it that I got to see in reruns and on DVD. I adored Serenity and Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. I even gave Dollhouse the old college try. I’m not what you’d call a hardcore Joss fan—I don’t read the message boards, or cosplay, or even stalk him on Twitter—but you slap his name on something and you will have my fannish attention. You slap his name on a comic-book movie the size of The Avengers …

And I will get seriously, seriously worried.

Really, Joss? You’re gonna go there? I mean sure, you write some great superhero comics—you wrote the only X-Men comics I truly enjoyed, and your run on Runaways wasn’t quite as good as Brian K. Vaughan’s, but you did include that bit where an eleven-year-old slugged the Punisher, and that was brilliant. But your stuff is very meta, and The Avengers is very … not.

So I walked into The Avengers prepared to be just a bit bored, and disappointed.

I wasn’t.

Honestly, I was surprised at how much it didn’t suck. I expected to be at least somewhat bored—by the Iron Man sequences in particular, because I’m probably the only person in America who doesn’t find Robert Downey, Jr. funny. And the Hulk? Nobody’s done the Hulk right since the Bixby/Ferrigno days. And the Black Widow in Iron Man 2 was just dull, so why should I expect more from this outing?

But Iron Man was actually kind of funny—mostly when he shared the screen with Thor, but still. I liked the very Whedonesque take on how Banner is controlling his Hulk side now. And the Black Widow got a personality transplant courtesy of her complicated relationship with Hawkeye, who is probably the last character in the movie I expected to like, but holy cow, I like him now. I’m very glad that Trevor’s going to be using a bow in an upcoming Masks story, because Hawkeye has officially made it cool again. I never thought I’d say this, but I’d buy a ticket to a Hawkeye movie. (Well, a Hawkeye/Black Widow movie.) More on Hawkeye in a minute.

See? Told you it was a silly hat.

For those who’ve read all the way through this blog post without any idea what I’m talking about, the basic plot of The Avengers is that Loki, Thor’s evil-ish half-brother from Thor, has teamed up with some generic aliens called the Chitauri (who are sort of like Skrulls, but less challenging) to use the tesseract from Thor and Captain America to take over the wooooorrrrld, all while wearing an impressively silly hat. Standing in Loki’s way is superspy Nick Fury, who has assembled a motley band of heroes to stop Loki—a group including Iron Man, Captain America, the Black Widow, and the freaking Hulk. Thor and Hawkeye come along a little bit later, because Thor’s working his own angle and Hawkeye’s busy at first being mind-controlled by Loki. Cue about an hour of infighting and various members of the team getting trashed because they can’t or won’t play nice together; then a key character gets jossed and they mostly pull together to kick the crap out of Loki and company.

[Side note for non-Whedonites: “to joss” means “to build up a beloved character and then unexpectedly kill him/her off somewhere in the last third of the story.” Yes, it’s a verb now.  Yes, you should be worried about that.]

Cap is okay in this part. Also: Hey. Thor.

99 percent of this movie is amazing. The plot, the characters, the action sequences, the snarky dialogue—all a lovely melding of good popcorn fare and vintage Joss. In fact, there was really only one part of the movie I didn’t like: its portrayal of Captain America. Because this movie picks up shortly after Cap comes out of the iceberg and happens while he’s adjusting to the modern world, it has to deal with what fans have come to call the “man out of time” element. This has been done about a billion different ways—everything from watching him visit a dead girlfriend’s grave to seeing him struggle to operate a cell phone. Joss didn’t have a huge amount of screen time to devote to it, so he mostly just had Cap suck it up and be all about the job. Joss also needed someone to call Iron Man out for being a smartass and an egomaniac, and Cap usually gets that duty in any story, so that was no surprise.

Not shown: Many, many Steve-and-Tony snits.

But I was a bit disappointed in how it was all handled. There were a few Luddite jokes at Cap’s expense, and otherwise he spent about half the story acting like a military grunt from Buffy, storming around barking at people who weren’t doing things his way. Yes, Joss, we understand that this is a guy dealing with loss by not dealing with it. Yes, Joss, we understand that you don’t get to play with a lot of Cap’s arc because that’s presumably being saved for his own sequel. But … I just wanted a little bit more. Making the military guy look stupid is part of your oeuvre. So is making a fool of the jock. But you’re at your best when you surprise us, and there was nothing surprising about this.

Mostly, though I think I’m just mildly annoyed that Joss Whedon got me to like Hawkeye—Hawkeye, for God’s sake, the lesser clone of Green Arrow—and didn’t give Cap a moment. And I think it only bothers me because the rest of the movie was so damn good. Loki was more fun in The Avengers than he was in Thor, and that’s saying a lot. The Black Widow did more than show off her butt, and yet didn’t take over the whole movie as powerful women tend to do in Joss’s work. We saw more of Bruce Banner than we did of the Hulk, and Banner was a genuinely interesting guy to watch. Iron Man made me smirk with some of his one-liners. Thor made me laugh and cheer. And the inevitable property destruction was actually entertaining, even though I usually find my mind wandering during fight scenes.

I really haven’t said enough about how much I liked this movie, and I think I can sum it up by explaining the Hawkeye thing.

Do you see a boxing glove? I don't.

Hawkeye is pretty much Marvel Comics’ version of DC’s Green Arrow—a non-superpowered guy whose superhero thing is that he’s a freakishly good shot with a bow and arrow. Don’t ask me how Movie Hawkeye developed that particular skillset—in the comics, he’s a former circus performer, but I doubt that’s the case here. Anyway, Hawkeye’s main job in the Avengers comics is to be a hothead, to mouth off to Captain America, and to unexpectedly make the perfect shot when it’s most needed and remind everyone that you don’t need powers to be a hero, blah blah blah. Not that interesting, although I don’t think he’s ever sunk to Green Arrow’s level and used an arrow with a giant boxing glove on the end. However, he tends to wear strangely designed purple costumes, which is just wrong.

Anyway, I scratched my head for the better part of a day over the fact that Joss got me to like this guy. It helped that Movie Hawkeye wasn’t the annoying loudmouth that Comics Hawkeye is—in fact, he was so closemouthed I was tempted to nickname him Captain Laconic—but he also spent half the movie as Loki’s sock puppet, so what’s to like? How does a sock puppet come across as simultaneously sympathetic and badass?

Yes, I'm showing the loner with his bestie. Shaddap.

Well, Hawkeye’s established early on as an interesting guy—he’s supposed to be watching a group of scientists work with the tesseract, but he does so from a ridiculously high catwalk above them because he prefers being high up and “sees more” from up there. He makes an observation about the artifact that everyone else seems to have missed, too. This character is clearly a solitary kind of guy by nature, unusual in big government organizations, and yet unlike most movie loners, he still works all right with others and is fairly perceptive. He’s also the first of the people Loki fights that he doesn’t kill—apparently Loki sees something interesting in Hawkeye, too, which is why he zaps him with the mind-control whammy. It’s always nice when a charismatic villain confirms our impression of a character!

Hawkeye doesn’t come across too well for a while after that, though, because he’s basically a sock puppet. So from there, the work of making Hawkeye cool falls to the Black Widow, a kickass super-spy who breaks off a pretty funny interrogation scene (she’s tied to a chair and yet getting the bad guy to tell her everything) because she hears that Hawkeye is in trouble. After one of the most impressive fight scenes of the movie, she’s off to join the good guys and rescue her friend. And throughout the flick, even when she’s playing manipulative mind games with Loki, it’s fairly clear that she respects Hawkeye more than just about anyone else on earth. There’s a bond and a history between these two characters that isn’t discussed too much, but is clearly the engine of their relationship.

Big friendship reunion. With shooting and a third wheel.

And because this is Joss Whedon, this relationship never involves Black Widow going all melty at the sight of Hawkeye or needing him to rescue her. She does her job, she kicks butt—and she’s simply going to drop Loki out of an airplane if she doesn’t get her friend back. Do you have any idea how hard it is to balance a strong female character with her own arc against an interesting male character who can’t talk? I do; I’ve tried it. It’s incredibly hard not to succumb to rom-com clichés, or action-movie clichés. Joss pulled it off. He made me like Hawkeye, and he made me like the Hawkeye/Black Widow combo even more. By the time Hawkeye gets his personality back (after a fight with the Widow, of course), we’re all rooting for them to work out whatever it is that they’ve got going on. And they don’t get a big kissing moment or anything like that—they just go back to work, and they’re uniquely fantastic together. That’s maybe a fifth of the movie right there, and it’s completely satisfying both on its own and as a part of the whole film.

This. This is how you do superhero movies. Especially team movies. Everybody gets an arc, everyone gets a storyline, everyone gets a moment, but no one takes over. The pacing was strong, the characters were solid, and it was a great ride all the way through. I’m actually getting excited about writing Volume 2 of Masks, which has a lot of team dynamics now that the kids are really working together. I’m getting some good ideas.

Not bad, Joss. But next time give Cap a moment, okay?