The Avengers’ archer Hawkeye gets a bad rap for not having a superpower, despite his incredible accuracy with a bow and arrow. Fans joke that Hawkeye’s usefulness ends the second he runs out of trick arrows and that his speed and strength doesn’t measure up to superheroes like Captain America. It’s gotten to the point where Jeremy Renner, who plays Hawkeye in the MCU, pokes fun at his character in SNL sketches and a song parody on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon (check it out below).
What fans don’t realize, however, is that after looking at all of Hawkeye’s feats in Marvel comics and MCU movies, Hawkeye does have the superpower of uncanny accuracy, allowing him to execute maneuvers that should be impossible for an ordinary man to accomplish. While many believe Hawkeye’s abilities can explained by extensive training, let’s take a closer look at his accomplishments in the comics and movies to see if this really is the case.
Why Does Hawkeye Use a Bow and Arrow?
First, it’s important to establish just why, in a world full of superheroes with advanced weaponry and gadgets, Hawkeye chooses to fight with a bow and arrow. Hawkeye’s comic book backstory reveals he was born Clint Barton and ran away from an orphanage with his brother to join a traveling carnival. Clint studied under performers (and secretly criminals) the Swordsman and Trick Shot to become a master archer and later performed under the title, “Hawkeye: The World’s Greatest Marksman.” Eventually, he made the move from circus archer to crimefighter (after being briefly mistaken for a super villain), and joined the Avengers in Avengers #16 (1965).
As a superhero, Hawkeye uses a variety of trick arrows, from exploding arrows to putty arrows to rocket arrows powerful enough to fly him and others away to safety. His years of practice as an archer have made him adept enough to string a bow and fire arrows in less than a second. He’s also unexpectedly strong (regularly using a 250 pounds-force draw-weight bow that many super villains can’t manipulate) and has received close up combat training from Captain America himself. And despite being injured multiple times on the job (including an encounter with a sonic arrow and stab wounds in his ears that left him largely deaf) Hawkeye is remarkably resilient and remains an expert marksman even with wounds that would cripple most people.
Hawkeye’s Superhuman Abilities
Just because Hawkeye prefers using a bow and arrow doesn’t mean his abilities are tied exclusively to them. Likewise, while Hawkeye’s archery skills may have originated from constant training, many of his trick shots and survival feats often seem aided by abilities that go beyond any taught skill. Take Hawkeye’s ability to manipulate his arrows into going wherever he wants them to. While firing arrows accurately in straight lines is difficult enough, Hawkeye regularly ricochets his arrows off other objects to take down unsuspecting targets.
In one storyline, he fires an arrow that bounces off of a wall and hits his opponent in the back of the neck, incapacitating (but not killing) him. Hawkeye also often improvises bows and arrows out of scrap metal, wood, and even a flagpole (showing he can never run out of arrows, despite the jokes). Although these weapons aren’t properly balanced or fine tuned like his regular bow and arrows, Hawkeye is still able to make his impossible shots with them. It gets even more impressive when writers and artists establish Hawkeye doesn’t even need a bow and arrow (or any conventional weapons) to be superhumanly accurate.
In one comic, Hawkeye casually flicks a coin that shatters through a moving car’s window, forcing the driver to veer away and avoid hitting a dog in the road. In combat, he’s been shown using playing cards and spoons to take down his enemies (much like Daredevil’s enemy Bullseye), but without killing or crippling them, revealing he can strike with surgical skill. In Captain America: Civil War, Hawkeye even jokes that he came out of retirement after shooting a perfect game of golf, quipping, “I can’t seem to miss.”
Superhuman Spatial Awareness
All of these feats suggest that Hawkeye’s archery skill is enhanced by a superhuman level of spatial awareness. Much like Daredevil’s radar sense, this superpower–something Clint was born with, acquired through training, or gained by losing his hearing–grants Hawkeye a heightened awareness of his surroundings, allowing him to line up his shots with pinpoint accuracy. The comparison to Daredevil is particularly apt, since, in the Avengers movies, Hawkeye tends to look away (or doesn’t bother looking at all) when he fires his arrows, suggesting he doesn’t have to see his targets to hit them.
Seen from this angle, Hawkeye’s superpowers go far beyond unnatural accuracy with projectile weapons. In Avengers: Age of Ultron, Hawkeye maneuvers the Avenger’s Quinjet beneath Ultron’s “Cradle” as it drops and catches it through the jet’s open cargo bay doors. While subtle, this reveals he knows how to position any object to go where he wants it to. Likewise, in the comics, Hawkeye pilots his Sky Cycle safely through a mid-air explosion by “fly[ing] between the shrapnel.” This suggests that, in addition to being able to hit anything he wants, Hawkeye’s spatial awareness helps him avoid being hit (as shown in the multiple times he’s dodged heavy gunfire).
Of course, since Hawkeye is still an ordinary human (albeit one in peak physical condition), he can be hit by bullets and be gravely injured. Yet even here, writers seem to temporarily imbue him other superpowers – in one comic story, he was riddled with multiple bullets, yet somehow made a full recovery in only six weeks. That’s enough to make even Wolverine raise an eyebrow. For all the ridicule Hawkeye receives for being a “mere archer,” those who follow his career close enough will realize his low-key approach to crimefighting actually disguises an extremely versatile (and dangerous) superpower. It’s possible Hawkeye knows how deadly his power makes him, and downplays his superhuman abilities so his opponents underestimate him, granting him an advantage.
With Jeremy Renner’s legal problems questioning whether or not he will appear in the upcoming Hawkeye show on Disney+, fans may or may not see Clint Barton in the Marvel Cinematic Universe again (or may see a different actor portraying Hawkeye). Nonetheless, this examination of Hawkeye’s hidden superpower does show the character and his abilities still contain a lot of untapped potential, which could still be explored (either through Hawkeye or his successor Kate Bishop) in future MCU projects.
Next: Will Marvel REALLY Recast Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye?
