I think, though can’t say with 100% certainty, that issue 1 of this 4 part mini-series by the late, great Mark Gruenwald may have been the first comic I purchased. I certainly remember perusing the back issue bins at the long gone Dark Sword Fantasy comics shop in Guelph and eagerly pulling out this one with the cover depicting a garishly purple-costumed archer and knowing it had to be mine. So started my love affair with the archer-as-superhero and the pre-eminence for me of Hawkeye in that role. Hawkeye is an interesting character: two parts sheer hot-headed bravado and smart-mouthed brashness coupled with one part uncertainty brought on by a lack of superpowers and the constant need to prove himself. A stalwart member of the Avengers ever since Captain America’s ‘kooky quartet’ days, and initially thought to be a villain when he ‘introduced’ himself to the Avengers by breaking into their mansion and getting into a fight with Iron Man to prove himself, Hawkeye eventual became a stand-by and old-guard member of Marvel’s premier super-team.

This series finds Hawkeye, aka Clint Barton, trying to make his way in the world as a solo hero, out of the shadow of the Avengers. Currently working as head of security for Cross Electronics (ironically a major competitor for Stark Industries), Hawkeye’s apparently blissful life on his own soon falls apart. After quickly losing his lover, his job, and his self-respect all in one really bad day, Hawkeye is thrust into the midst of a supervillain’s master plan and must figure out how to pull himself up by his bootstraps before disaster occurs.

The three main villains of the series are a fairly ridiculous lot, even as supervillians go: Oddball, the strangest of the three, is an expert juggler who dresses up like a skin-tight court jester and lobs multi-coloured ‘trick’ pool balls filled with deadly substances at his foes; Bombshell looks like a 1980’s butch hooker who likes to throw explosives; and the master-mind of the crew, Crossfire a former CIA operative, has no superpowers at all, though he does actually have a fairly ingenious plan to thin out the ranks of the superheroes for which Hawkeye is required as a key element. Add to the mix the “mysterious Mockingbird” and you get a seminal tale of our archer hero as he encounters both professional and personal challenges and struggles with the desire to solve this mystery on his own without having to run back to Avenger’s Mansion with his tail between his legs.

Good old-fashioned super-hero fun with a dose of character development to boot.
( )

This 1988 trade paperback collects Hawkeye's first 4-issue limited series (cover dated Sept. 1983 - Dec. 1983), written and penciled by Mark Gruenwald (who would go on to far greater success as the writer of Captain America for a ten year run), and inked and embellished by Brett Breeding (in the first two issues) and Danny Bulanadi (in the second two issues).

While this mini-series is important to the history of the Marvel Comics character -- it pairs him with his first serious romantic partner since the Black Widow (Natasha Romanov), as well as definitively establishing him as a hero who can effectively operate on his own (far moreso than writer Steve Englehart managed to do in Hawk's feature story in Avengers Vol. 1, #109 [Mar. 1973] or in his guest appearance in The Incredible Hulk Vol. 1, #166 [Aug. 1973]) -- it's not nearly as good as it should have been due to the fact that Gruenwald had yet to come into his own as a writer and was, at best, a mediocre draftsman (as he candidly admits in his foreword). It's a toss-up as to which is stiffer: the writing or the art.

The plot finds Hawkeye -- who started out as a foe of Iron Man only to become a mainstay of the superhero group The Avengers -- as the security chief of a shady company called Cross Technological Enterprises in Long Island, NY (where he'd managed to acquire a job in the wake of the U.S. government's meddling with the roster of The Avengers in exchange for their continued "Avengers priority" clearance, in Avengers Vol. 1, #167 - 181 [Jan. 1978 - Mar. 1979; this mini-series more or less directly follows Hawkeye's solo story in Avengers Vol. 1, #189, [Nov. 1979] wherein he landed his job at CTE and faced off against former Ms. Marvel and future X-Men villain, Deathbird), who gets his props knocked out from underneath him (romance, job, apartment) immediately after battling a prowler at CTE, the former S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Mockingbird (a character that was quite heavily revised over the years...). The two adventurers reluctantly team up (the reluctance is far more pronounced on Hawkeye's end) and encounter the second string villains, introduced in this mini-series, the Silencer, Oddball and Bombshell (the latter two would be recycled by Gruenwald as part of a team of nefarious jugglers called Death-Throws for a story reuniting Captain America and Hawkeye in Captain America Vol. 1, #317 [May 1986]), who prove to be agents of the second-string mastermind and former CIA agent, Crossfire (introduced in Marvel Two-In-One Vol. 1, #52 [June 1979]), who has a diabolical plot against superheroes.

This mini-series would serve as part of the back-story to the formation of the California-based West Coast Avengers (who would first star in their own 4-issue mini-series as a tryout, and subsequently in their own ongoing series that would be canceled after 102 issues), a group that Hawkeye would lead for roughly half its run.

Another indication of how relatively early this mini-series came in Gruenwald's writing career are a couple of sloppy bits of writing: first, it is never made explicit that Cross Technological Enterprises was actually Crossfire's company; second, Gruenwald gives two different ages for Hawkeye's first taking up the bow: 13 (in #1, pg. 8, panels 1 & 4) and 9 (in #4, pg. 11, panel 2).

All in all, this mini-series is best recommended to die-hard fans of Hawkeye or Avengers completists; all others can take a pass. ( )