Hawkeye is not a character who immediately springs to mind as needing his own title.  Aside from a couple of miniseries, the closest he's come before was his run as the lead feature in Solo Avengers back in the 1980s.  For the most part, though, he's been used as a team book character.  He used to be the one who squabbled with the leader.  Then they cast him against type for a while and made him the leader.  But he was always a team book character.

Last we saw of Hawkeye, he was leading the Thunderbolts just before their title was unsuccessfully overhauled.  Like this series, those stories were written by Fabian Nicieza.  However, Nicieza takes a very different approach to the character here.  Thunderbolts was a traditional, old-school superhero title of the sort that Marvel have now virtually wiped out (but which appear to be making a comeback of sorts).  This is a totally different approach, stripping the character and his world of his superhero trappings and playing it as a straight thriller.

That strikes me as a sensible way to go.  Hawkeye is a low-powered character who tends to look somewhat overshadowed in a superheroic world.  He looks a lot cooler if you put him in a real world where infallibly accurate archery becomes something out of the ordinary again.  Nicieza uses the character here as a sort of wandering western hero, and it's a perfectly good role for him.

Moving out of the superhero genre also helps Nicieza shake off his habit of writing tortuously elaborate plots.  Thunderbolts and Gambit both suffered on occasion from macguffins so incredibly complicated that readers spent more time on trying to work out what they did than on following the plot.  (A Thunderbolts villain could never just use a mind control ray when he could scatter the world with nanites that could be enabled as a mind-control device using a particular control programme hidden in a device... and so on and so on.)  Nicieza writes much more simply and directly when he moves out of that genre, and it improves the work.

Nicieza and artist Stefano Raffaele worked together on the recent Dark Horse series Blackburne Covenant.  This work strikes me as a little bit scratchier than Blackburne, but that fits with the tone of the book.  Raffaele is going for the real world look, and the key with this approach is to make Hawkeye's impossible tricks look lke something that could conceivably work in the real world.  I'm not entirely sure he always manages it - some of the movement looks a little awkward - but it's close.

I'm still not entirely sold on the need for a Hawkeye series, but this is certainly a perfectly enjoyable story, and it does take the character in a direction that plays more to his strengths.  Given that this is yet another Marvel ongoing title launched with negligible publicity, I have to wonder about it's commercial prospects.  But that's another matter.

Rating: B

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