Hawkeye - Kate Bishop #5 // Review
Kate is a really, really cool person. There’s someone who DOESN’T think she’s very nice. A whole grudge/revenge thing is going on. It’s not nice. There’s a fragment of one of the most totally powerful things in the whole universe involved to make matters worse. So it’s going to be a very tricky finale for Hawkeye - Kate Bishop #5. A fun, sometimes witty, little mini-series comes to an end as Kate and her sister are brought just a little closer together, and Pizza Dog makes use of a rather interesting chew toy. Writer Marieke Nijkamp concludes her story with the aid of artist Enid Balám, and inkers Oren Junior & Roberto Poggi. Colorists Brittany Peer and Rachelle Rosenberg give the finale a nice pastel sort of a feel that is consistent with the rest of the mini-series.
Kate’s infiltrating a place she’s had a lot of experience infiltrating, before her family’s mansion. She’s not doing so alone. She’s accompanied by her sister, who also knows the place well. And she’s accompanied by a couple of friends, including America, Stinger, and her pet dog. All of them are going to have to work together to retrieve a fragment of the Cosmic Cube from people who REALLY shouldn’t be taking ownership of such a powerful artifact. It’s not going to be easy. Things are going to get weird.
Nijkamp slides through the final, climatic mansion-based confrontation with a respectable fluidity. The adventure doesn’t quite live-up to the potential weirdness of a group of low-level thugs getting ahold of the Cosmic Cube fragment. Nijkamp’s charmingly witty dialogue makes the series finale more than charming enough to keep everything moving swiftly to the final panel. The strange juxtaposition of the cosmic power against petty crime in a place of great wealth doesn’t really resonate the way that it should, though.
Balám is given the opportunity to nail a few really interesting and trippy moments of cosmic power that come across a bit like a. funhouse in comic panel format. The potential for trippy misdirection never quite comes through, though. The action is presented with a clean impact that seems to lie relatively flat on the page. Peer and Rosenberg’s colors are just so aggressively pastel that they mute any serious problems with the art, lending the series finale a sort of pleasant vacation kind of a vibe that keeps everything quite sedate.
A tumble with Kate Bishop and friends really SHOULDN’T be sedate, though. A tumble with Kate Bishop and a fragment of the Cosmic Cube? THAT should be a crazy, unhinged leap through bizarreness that this series never really manages to accomplish, which is really too bad. There’s a real missed opportunity for something much more intense in this series, but the wit of Nijkamp is fun and breezy amidst some pleasant color and occasionally impressive artwork. This creative team could find a more integrated dynamic with a subsequent series given the right momentum. There are the embers of something that could be much more appealing if the story matched the art team’s strengths a little bit more.
