Hawkeye: Kate Bishop #4 // Review
Kate is not having a good time. She's amid a reunion with her sister at the family mansion. It isn't exactly her type of place. The people who have her and her sister captured aren't exactly her type of people. What's worse: they have a fragment of one of the most totally powerful things in the whole universe. At least she's home in Hawkeye: Kate Bishop #4. Writer Marieke Nijkamp moves Kate ever closer to the climax of her reunion with art by Enid Balám and inker Oren Junior. Action hero clichés take on a fun playfulness between siblings.
It might not be a fake French accent, but Kate's pretty sure it is. She's going to have to listen to it as she is captured. The usual head games between a hero and a villain are perfectly normal. She's just waiting for the right time. And then she's going to have to save her sister. Thankfully, she's captured in her family's estate, so she kinda knows her way around. That's not going to be much consolation if the villains manage to access a fragment of the Cosmic Cube. But Kate's going to have to deal with one crisis at a time.
Nijkamp is working with interesting pacing in the penultimate issue in the series. The villain-confronting-the-captured-hero scene takes up a full third of the issue. It might feel like it's strong out for a little longer than it needs to be, but it establishes A certain amount of minutes before Kate is able to escape and search for her sister. It also allows for the issue to end with quite a lot of action. There's a sweeping sense of action for much of the issue, but the villain isn't nearly interesting enough to hold up her third of the installment, so it feels a bit flat.
Balám captures the dramatic tension of that opening scene quite well. Kate Bishop's distinctly appealing heroism looks suitably dashing through the issue, bolstered as it is with embellishment by Junior's inking. The kinetics of the action is hampered a bit by the art team's focus on interpersonal characterization. There's more of a focus on drama than the flow of action, but there's more than enough momentum to Carrie Kate and her sister through a swashbuckling action sequence at issue's end.
With Kate and her sister firmly unified, the series seems to be well set up for its final chapter. The action involving a fragment of the Cosmic Cube should be suitably impressive if Nijkamp manages to frame the story's climax with the kind of energy that she has managed to capture in the penultimate issue of the series. Kate's fun in her own series, but the specific trappings of her family's estate aren't proving to be quite the right stage for her energy this time around. It's been fun, but Kate will have to wait a bit longer for something that fits her personality a bit better.
