Hello, nerdlings! I hope you enjoyed the Matthew Sweet interview we here at Lovefool, Inc. painstakingly did not gibber our way through. I made JG,FE leave it up for a while so it would get a full week and the Monday Bump that I like to pretend exists, despite the fact that even my own friends are like “What? You write a column?” And, honestly, I'm okay with the fact that even my best beloved don't read this, for the most part, because sometimes things can get awkward around here. Actually, I kind of tend to get awkward all over my life and today was no exception. I had a brief drive to get to a gaming session over at a friend's and I spent it pondering what to write about now that the moment has come to actually write something and certainly not bellowing along with the Wombats. After all, I never stop thinking of you, nerdlings. And I'd been thinking of something the Metacrisis Lovefool had pointed out a few weeks ago for quite a while.

 

The Metacrisis Lovefool, as identified by a good friend of mine, is my buddy Dan-the-newly-British, who I completely adore despite the fact that he's getting a little lazy with the Caturday photos (and don't think I didn't notice) and the fact that we've never actually met. He and I tend to be on the same wavelength and I was thinking, specifically, about some observations he'd made about the new Hawkeye book Matt Fraction is writing. I got out of the car, hemming and hawing a bit about if I actually wanted to write about Hawkeye—because, really, I'd covered the Avengers quite thoroughly last summer—and popped up to my friend's apartment where I ended up sitting, I swear, next to a pretty solid ringer for a baby Jeremy Renner. I was expecting a nerdy dude probably a smidge older than me and ended up next to a tiny Avengers doppelganger. What on Earth? If there's such a thing as a sign from the columns gods, that seems to be one.

 

Naturally, I had to go ahead and blurt out why I'd been staring, bewildered, into his baby blues (“baby” is, in fact, the key word here) for a good minute or so and, once I explained who Jeremy Renner was and discovered that my new friend's 23-year-old ego was threatening to shove us all out of the room, casually threw in that comics-Hawkeye was veering dangerously towards Creeperdom. And, oh, gosh, is he ever. Brand-new Fraction-helmed, David Aja drawn Hawkeye is as good as can be expected from the combination of Avenger+Matt freakin' Fraction but, seriously, where's he going with this? Because we find out that Kate Bishop, Clint Barton's baby girl protégé and one-time replacement, is his sidekick on this slice-of-life madcap crimefighting adventure. No Avengers here, just Kate and Clint, Hawkeye and Hawkeye. Of course, he tells her that he wants her to work with him because, in no uncertain terms, hedoesn'twanttosleepwithherTHANKYOUVERYMUCH. He then goes on and on and on and on about how perfect she is whilst inner-dialoguing to us.

 

Umm. There's the thing, with the lady and the protesting too much? And while she says it might be creepy, echoing the Metacrisis Lovefool, the artfully crafted expression that crosses Ms. Bishop's face when Clint asks her to be his sidekick and tells her it's because she's great but, oh god, certainly not attractive to him tells us otherwise. We can, thanks to the mastery of Aja's carefully rendered expressions, see the vaguely despairing look on her face and Clint can't but it certainly says she might not really really think it's that creepy. It's early days, naturally, and Clint has a girlfriend but I suspect it's only a matter of time before the unresolved sexual tension makes things even dirtier than the conversation I was a witness to this afternoon. And, honestly, I couldn't make eye contact with people for hours at a time. I mean, really. Your Lovefool is a secret prude, after all, and goodness.

 

Throw in Hawkeye's aforementioned current actual girlfriend and sometimes ally, Spider-Woman, and things could get really interesting. I hear that happens in issue six, despite the fact that Fraction's already declared that he's not necessarily going to focus very much on the relationship between Clint Barton and Jessica Drew. Be that as it may, he's clearly invested in the fabulous Kate Bishop, moneyed heiress and total badass with a dark past, and where the creator goes, the creations often follow. Of course, he could ignore the romance aspect of it completely, leaving us with a buddy comedy superhero romp ,but sweet Katie's face when Clint tells her he's not interested makes me think otherwise. And I think, based on issues one and two, that I might be okay with that.

 

But the Metacrisis Lovefool and I would really like for Mr. Fraction to please, please, please throw in an obvious reference to her being 18. | Erin Jameson