Hawkeye #11 (HERE BE SPOILERS!)

I'm not sure what to think about this issue.  I mean, it's remarkably clever and well executed in an art sense.  Moreover, it's about Pizza Dog, who's pretty much my favorite character in comics right now.  But, it generally leaves me scratching my head, both from a plot and a story perspective.

First, it doesn't really do much in terms of the larger story that Fraction is telling.  It's still unclear why the clown killed Grills, whether it had to do with his obsession with Kate or with his association with the bros.  Given the fact that the old woman in the building is seen associating with said clown and said bros, maybe it's the latter?  But, to what purpose?  I'm generally assuming that it had more to do with Clint than it did with Grills, but why?  Are they trying to push Clint over the edge?  If so, it doesn't seem to be working.  Clint and Kate appear to go to Grills' funeral here, but Hawkeye seems too involved with his dispute with Kate and his troubles with the police to care that much.  (I'm still hoping that we'll get some sort of insight into how Grills' death affected Hawkeye in a later issue, but I might be hoping for too much.)  Fraction seems to want us to glean something about the ongoing mystery from this issue, but I'm not really sure what it is.

Second, I still enjoy this issue even if we didn't get a clearer sense of where the larger plot is going, but I also had trouble with the story itself in certain parts.  On several occasions, it felt like certain moments were happening outside chronological order, despite the issue clearly progressing in chronological order.  For example, Pizza Dog attacks the clown and the bros, who open fire on him, and he and one of the bros fall off the roof.  Then, suddenly, they're all in the old lady's apartment like nothing happened.  It seems unlikely that they would survive the fall and, even if they did, it seems even more unlikely that they'd just invite Pizza Dog into the old lady's apartment for bandages and snacky-cakes.  At first I thought that it meant that this scene happened before their fight, but then Lucky races downstairs to Hawkeye, who finds the bro's shoe, thereby establishing that it did, in fact, happen after the fight.  I'm all for experimental story-telling, but it helps if you're actually telling a story that makes sense.

I had high hopes for this issue, since, after all, Pizza Dog!  But, I have to say that I'm unfortunately disappointed.  I'm really looking forward to returning to Clint being the focus of the book again...