Hawkeye #18 – Review

By: Matt Fraction (story), Annie Wu (art), Matt Hollingsworth (colors)

The Story: Kate ruins her newfound sense of stability by adopting a cat.

The Review: With us heading into a year and a half’s worth of issues, and still no end in sight for what can loosely be called Hawkeye‘s first “arc,” I’d prefer Fraction focus on events with Clint and save the Kate stuff for later. Anyway, Kate’s adventures as a public detective in L.A. have been rather hit-or-miss in terms of quality. If anything, there’s an even bigger lack of direction on her side of this series as Clint’s.

That all changes substantially as this issue marks the return of Madame Masque, who sends two graphic reminders to Kate that her grudge isn’t over. One of those reminders involves Kate’s mysterious trenchcoated mentor, a.k.a. “Cat Food Man,” a.k.a. Harold H. Harold (“[W]hat does the ‘H’ stand for…?”—”Harold“). Even though it’s sort of ridiculous that Fraction waited until the last minute to give the guy a name and backstory, only to—spoiler alert—kill him off pages later, at least Harold unloads a real, overarching mission for Kate.

As with his previous appearances, Harold does most of the heavy lifting in the investigation department, saving Kate from embarrassing herself with further fruitless web searches. It’s his past as both a journalist on the “weird murder beat” and a Hollywood writer that uncovers connections between a Dorian Gray sort of deal from his publisher (“Impossibly young, impossibly firm and toned and beautiful forever[.]”) and Count Luchino Neff, “short for Nefaria,” and his daughter Gia, a.k.a. Madame Masque. As I understand it, Masque has a bit of history in the making of bio-duplicates and gene-manipulation; this is apparently the secret Harold finds in her home: “like they were trying to make copies.”