By Dr. Michael Robinson
From the genre’s very beginnings in the late 1930s, superhero stories have basically given us two kinds of crime fighters– the super and the skilled. With his fantastic resume of powers and abilities, Superman exemplifies the former. His tremendous success inspired many imitators. And while Batman was not the first ordinary man to heighten his skills to perfection while fighting crime, his own popularity pushed that mystery man archetype forward.
Hawkeye falls in the latter camp. Unlike many of his super-skilled compatriots however, the brash bowman is often ridiculed.
Take, for example, a bad Saturday Night Live skit from 2012 (called “Hawkeye Disappoints the Avengers” online). The story is basically a play on the final battle scenes with the Chitauri from The Avengers (2012). The bit is bad because it’s SNL at its least prepared, with under-rehearsed performers clearly reading cue cards. Host Jeremy Renner plays his Hawkeye role from the movie and much of the humor in the scene comes from the fact that Hawkeye has only brought eleven arrows to the fight.
Everybody knows that there are only so many arrows in a quiver. That’s the limitation put on Hawkeye. Nobody ever worries about Batman running out of batarangs. The assumption, one supposes, is that the Dark Knight will simply fall back to beating criminals up. When Hawkeye runs out of arrows, he’s suddenly worthless.
Sadly, there have been times when Hawkeye himself has bought into all this negativity. In fact, at one point in his career he even hung up his bow, borrowed Hank Pym’s particles, put on a terrible costume, and started fighting crime as the giant-sized Goliath.
That choice never made sense to me. Archery is a sport of tremendous skill and concentration. According to the “Sports Explainer” video on Olympic Archery page for the recent Paris 2024 games, the world’s best archers shoot at a target whose bullseye circle is only 12.2 centimeters (4.8 inches) wide from a distance of 70 meters (just under 230 feet) away.
As a character, Hawkeye is better than these real life champions. Plus, he is taking his shots at moving targets in the heat of combat all while choosing to hit his targets with trick arrow gadgets of varying weights. And he almost always takes non-lethal shots. Given this proficiency, the challenge the writer faces is how not to have Hawkeye take down anyone he aims at.
When he finally runs out of arrows (and believe me, he carries more than eleven), he can fall back on the hand-to-hand combat skills he learned from none other than Captain America. Archers need a lot of strength to use those bows too.
Hawkeye has also been doing this superhero stuff for a very long time. He was the seventh person to join the Avengers. While depicted as more of a hothead in the comics than he was in the MCU, Hawkeye is a capable leader, founding the West Coast Avengers and leading the Thunderbolts for a time.
This summer marked Hawkeye’s 60th anniversary in comics. There’s a reason this archer has lasted so long and it’s not the number of arrows in his quiver.
