If this issue needed a different title than "Girls," it would be "Clint Barton and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day."
For most of this series so far, Fraction has played up Clint's charming ability to screw up his life while trying to help other people for laughs. Although we've certainly had some serious moments, this series has mostly revolved around Clint's ability to get himself involved in someone else's trouble and his inability to resolve the problem in a strategic way. Instead, he usually storms buildings full of mobsters or gets himself captured by femme fatales. He usually finds a way to win, but he leaves a lot of loose ends in the process. In this issue, Fraction shows that Clint's charm doesn't always mean that the loose ends just fade into the background.
First, before we get onto the rest of the issue, I love how Fraction just has Clint be an asshole to Jessica. (I'm just going to ignore the somewhat unbelievable way that Jessica discovered that Clint was cheating, when Penny just happened to plant one on him when she appeared at Avengers Mansion last issue. I'm going to give Fraction that pass.) He doesn't give any sort of complicated defense for Clint's actions. We don't see some version of Peter's endless justifications to Mary Jane. Nope, he just flat out cheated on Jessica. I've possibly never seen a more emotionally honest scene between two characters ever written in comics. Fraction really conveys Jessica's devastation not over Clint's cheating but over the idea that Clint wouldn't have even thought of it as cheating. It's an extraordinary adult moment and Fraction uses Kate's presence in a really brilliant way to stress that, given her adolescent response to Jessica. It's damn near perfect. Moreover, Fraction establishes that Clint feels something down there in his soul when it comes to Jessica, but, being the emotionally stunted kind of guy that he is, he fails to convey that to Jessica. Grills gives him the great idea that he should write Jessica a letter...shortly before someone kills him.
We'll get to Grills in a minute. But, I just wanted to stress how Fraction really lets the reader feel the reality of Clint's life in this issue. It's not all fast cars and fast women. In fact, it's rarely that. It's usually Clint feeling like he's in over his head, scaring away vans full of regular people from his building because he's so panicked that it's a van full of Russian mobsters come to take out their revenge on his neighbors. It's usually Clint not acting like a mutant superhero with some sort of healing ability, but a regular guy with a lot of fresh bruises and old scars, a point stressed by "Darlene" when she asks Black Widow if she knows what Clint does when he's not with the Avengers. It's Clint not being strong enough to handle his emotional baggage and not hurt the women in his life, like Bobbi and Jessica. It's...a lot. In fact, Fraction really goes to Clint's origin story here, since you really do get the sense that the Avengers are the only thing that keeps Clint on the straight and narrow, from falling into a really morally ambiguous pit. I feel like you really get that here, how sad Clint is, how overwhelmed Clint is. It drives this whole issue and it's a marvel to see.
But, man, he's really going to go off the rails when he learns about Grills. You could feel the moment coming and I felt it in the pit of stomach. When it happens, it just makes a sad issue all the sadder. Sorry, Grills. You deserved a lot better.
Seriously, it was an outstanding issue of an amazing series. I'm starting to feel the way I did about it that I did about Jim and Pam in "The Office," where I almost dread reading the next issue given how badly it can go for Clint. I guess we'll see.
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