![]() ![]() It is one of the most entertaining and influential comic book runs of the 21st century. That Fraction-Aja run also quickly turned itself into a double act, with both Clint and Kate as mismatched buddies, perpetually on the run from a gang of tracksuit-wearing gangsters who use “bro” as verbal punctuation, and taking care of a pizza-loving golden retriever. Fraction turned Clint’s regular-guy status into a feature rather than a bug, generating ample comedy, suspense, and thrills from the idea of Hawkeye constantly being in way over his head. ![]() There had been good Hawkeye stories and awful ones (the less said about the reason his marriage to teammate Mockingbird fell apart, the better), but it wasn’t until a 2012 Hawkeye solo comic by writer Matt Fraction and artist David Aja that Clint truly came into his own. He even briefly died - at which point a wealthy, athletic teenager named Kate Bishop assumed the Hawkeye mantle - and when he returned to life adopted the ninja costume of the Ronin for a hot minute. (That said, he spent a good chunk of The Avengers as a brainwashed flunky for Loki, as if the creative team didn’t really know what to do with a master archer in a story about Norse gods and alien invaders.) He’s assumed various personas and identities over the years in the comics, from a hothead always questioning Captain America’s leadership to the founding leader of the Avengers’ West Coast spinoff team, a guy with trick arrows to the size-changing Goliath. Yet Clint has spent more time on the active comic-book Avengers roster than all but a handful of characters, and he was also one of the choices to be part of the team’s original MCU lineup. On paper, he should be the lamest Avenger of them all - a walking punchline like Aquaman used to be for the DC universe, and at least Aquaman is superstrong and can breathe underwater. In a world full of men and women with uncanny powers and fantastic origins, Clint is a guy with a bow and arrow. This has been Clint’s burden throughout a long fictional life going back to his days as a third-rate Iron Man villain in the mid-Sixties. “Your whole thing is that you’re low-key,” Kate Bishop tells Clint Barton midway through the second episode of Hawkeye. We’ll be recapping it for the next five weeks, starting with spoilers for the two-part series premiere, coming up just as soon as I have monogrammed butterscotch… Hawkeye today became the latest Disney+ entry into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. ![]()
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January 2023
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