Hawkeye-Kate Bishop #3 // Review
Kate is trapped in a dangerous situation with the only person who would ever call her Katie. It’s not a comfortable position, but she can’t walk away from it, and she can’t exactly tell her older sister to leave in Hawkeye-Kate Bishop #3. Writer Marieke Nijkamp continues to twist the mystery that Kate is caught up in. Artist Enid Balám and inker Oren Junior maintain the tensions in a largely emotional drama. Brittany Peer handles the colors. Action and family drama hit the page in a well-framed third issue for Kate as she falls deeper into a conflict with the Circus of Crime.
It doesn’t take long for Kate to maneuver around the guests. It would be really easy to hurt them, but...they ARE guests even if they’re being taken over by some weird form of mind control. Once she’s dealt with that, she really needs to have long conversation with her sister. There’s some concern that the whole estate has been taken over by The Circus of Crime, but things get considerably more dire when it becomes apparent that there’s a fragment of a Cosmic Cube involved. It’s a very, very delicate situation. It would be a lot easier for Kate if her sister wasn’t there.
Nijkamp has a really sharp handle on all the elements of stress in Kate’s current situation. She’s in way over her head in a number of different ways. Nijkamp manages to keep personal safety, weird mystery, and family drama together in an awe-inspiring juggling act. The relationship between Kate and her sister serves as to firmly ground the story in an earthbound emotional reality. The more abstract questions of strange mind control and powerful cosmic fragments and such...all of that feels that much more approachable as Kate deals with her relationship with her sister.
Balám and Junior are at their best in rendering the relations between Kate and her sister. There’s a subtle emotional interplay between the two of them that fits together quite well under pencil and pen of Balám and Junior. The action is capably handled as well. Peer’s colors continue to give the action a pleasantly pastel vibe that serves to counterpoint the tension. It’s a pleasantly engaging visual world that the art team is placing on the page. Kate’s world feels fresh and playful. The tensions seem quite a ways away in the visuals, but the family drama comes across with nuance and subtlety.
The middle of the five-issue mini-series is well-poised as Kate deals with family issues that happen to involve one of the single most powerful artifacts in the whole of the Marvel Universe. Kate can handle it. Nijkamp may have bit off a little more than she can handle in the final two issues of the series with a fragment of a cosmic cube involved. Still, she’s done a solidly exemplary job of putting everything together in the first three issues, so a satisfying conclusion is more or less assured.
