Mark Gruenwald (1953–1996)

Volume 29 is the fourth book to be released in the Marvel's Mightiest Heroes Graphic Novel Collection by Hachette Partworks and is a reasonably enjoyable jog through some of Hawkeye's best moments. Hawkeye has always been a slightly anomalous character; he's got no super-power to speak of other than a superior ability with a bow and arrow ( and a slightly misplaced confidence in his own abilities) yet he's been able to hold his own in The Avengers and in battle with any number of world destroying threats. What Hawkeye, however, represents is the power of redemption, forgiveness and rehabilitation; the character having started his career as a criminal. This collection therefore opens with the Iron Man story "Hawkeye, the Marksman" by Stan Lee and Don Heck from “Tales of Suspense” issue 57 (September 1964) in which Hawkeye falls for and becomes a pawn of the super-sexy Communist secret agent the "daring, dazzling, dangerous" Black Widow. The second story in the collection is "The Old Order Changeth" by Lee and Jack Kirby from “The Avengers” issue 16 (May 1965) in which Hawkeye turns up at the Avengers headquarters and asks to join the team. Suspicious of the bowman's motives he's eventually allowed to join on the recommendation of Iron Man. Both of these are good stories that establish the character and his misunderstood nature and give a feel for his motives. Lee's writing is bombastic, Heck draws some stunningly beautiful women and Kirby delivers the more of the marvellously kinetic sequences that are his trademark. The final story in the book is the four issue Hawkeye mini-series that ran between September and December 1983 by Mark Gruenwald and Brett Breeding. At the beginning of the story Hawkeye is working as a head of security for a technology firm. Through a series of mishaps he ends up losing his job, gets dumped by his girlfriend, battles three ridiculous assassins – Silencer, Oddball and Bombshell – before being captured by Crossfire, a loony tune out to kill the Avengers. Luckily Hawkeye meets Bobbi Morse, Mockingbird, who helps him defeat the loonies. So taken is Hawkeye with Mockingbird that he marries her by the end of issue four. Unfortunately this is a weak story, with far too many silly elements that fail to gel. The poor story by Gruenwald is hampered even further by the unappealing, slightly amateurish, rushed-looking artwork by Breeding. Unfortunately this is a very poor story to make the centrepiece of the volume. The book itself, however, is beautifully constructed – 160 glossy full colour pages on nice stock behind solid, hardback covers. Special features include a two page "Behind the Scenes: Defining Hawkeye" overview; a two page "Top 5 Hawkeye Moments" featurette; a nice six page " Brief History of Hawkeye" feature and a cover gallery. This is another good package from Hachette featuring two good classic tales from the early days of Marvel, but sadly let down by and weak and uninteresting central story.… (more)

Mark Gruenwald’s Squadron Supreme collects issues nos. 1-12 of the titular series that were published between September 1985 and August 1986 as well as Captain America no. 314 from February 1986. The team originally appeared as the Squadron Sinister in Avengers no. 70 as a pastiche of the Justice League of America, but here Gruenwald tells a story examining the logical result of a superpowered group dedicating itself to bettering the world. Hyperion, a Superman-like character, leads the team in creating a Utopia Program to assume control of the United States government and fundamentally reshape society. Nighthawk, a Batman-type character, votes against the plan and leaves the team, later creating his own superpowered group to resist the Squadron.

Over the course of a year, the Squadron Supreme institutes massive changes to American society, beginning with the public reveal of their secret identities in order to gain the public’s trust. They disarm the public and then the military, create behavior-modification technology to re-program the minds of convicted criminals, and, when genius Tom Thumb cannot find a cure for all disease, the Squadron creates a form of cryogenic preservation in order to preserve the dead until such time as a cure may be found. Gruenwald examines the temptation for his all-too-human heroes to exploit these technologies, with Golden Archer (Green Arrow) using the behavior modification device to make Lady Lark (Black Canary) love him. Nuke discovers that his parents’ deadly cancer was caused by his powers and dies fighting Doctor Spectrum (Green Lantern). When Nighthawk brings his group to confront the Squadron, the final conflict results in seven more deaths, representing the consequences of such ideological conflict.

Gruenwald’s miniseries appeared slightly before Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, though it remains overshadowed by that later work. Gruenwald engaged with many of the same issues and offered a similarly serious take on the superhero genre, portraying his characters with domestic lives, moral conflicts, sexuality, and capable of dying. His Squadron Supreme deserves the same level of recognition for how it subverted the familiar superhero tropes, in many ways dramatizing the transition of the Bronze Age of comics to the Modern Age. This edition of Squadron Supreme appeared shortly after Mark Gruenwald’s death and features tributes from Tom DeFalco, Mike Carlin, Alex Ross, Mark Waid, Kurt Busiek, Ralph Macchio, and Gruenwald’s widow, Catherine, who explains in her introduction that, per Mark’s last wishes, his ashes were “mixed in with the printer’s ink during the printing process” of this volume.… (more)