Have Arrow Will Travel!

I love the character Hawkeye.


When you say "Hawkeye" some folks of a literary bent think of Natty Bumppo from Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic "Leatherstocking Tales".


Perhaps others with a keener interest in pop culture might remember Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce from the fabled MASH television show.


But I always think of Clint Barton, Marvel's gadfly archer.

He's long been my favorite Avenger and when for whatever reason, the team stumbled along without the quixotic bowman they were lesser for it.


He debuted in Tales of Suspense #57 battling Iron Man.



Then swiftly he became a bit of an anti-hero alongside the Black Widow. He was then drafted into the Avengers and has been a stalwart for the team right to this day, despite his apparent death.

Below is a gallery of great Hawkeye covers tracing his career through the decades.


For a relatively short time Clint Barton became the second Goliath, adding power and not so much skill to the team.


But during the Kree-Skrull War he got separated from his allies and had to revert to his old habits. He returned from space with a new costume and a new attitude to return to his archer role.


He left the team soon after and traveled across the Marvel Universe getting mixed up in adventures with Daredevil, the Hulk, and others. He even spent time with a time lost Two-Gun Kid traveling the west.


But Hawkeye always returned to the Avengers.


And then in his first limited series he met his wife Bobbi, known as Mockingbird.


Hawkeye was then given the reins of the West Coast franchise of the Avengers and headed up things out there for quite a few years.


For a short time he had his own series giving us more detail on his origin among other things.


As the years passed and with the death of his wife Hawkeye became more detached and more violent.


But when he decided to become head honcho on the villains-turned-heroes bunch known as the Thunderbolts, he really came into his own.


Marvel has tried to make him into a peripatetic anti-hero a few times, an "Easy Rider" type but more deadly.


They even killed him off once. He blowed up good.


And then they tried to replace him with a lovely young girl.


But he came back from the gave (doesn't everyone), sometimes not even looking like himself or using his name.


There's even an Ultimate version of Hawkeye, a family man to the core and one of the very few characters in that universe who seems to have some grounding.


But the recent resurrection of his wife Bobbi (I told you no one stays dead) has seemed get the bowman back to his roots.

I don't follow Hawkeye anymore, new Marvel books generally give me a pain. (I think even they've had the villain Bullseye pretending to be Hawkeye for some months.) But he has had quite the journey over the decades, a hero true, but more importantly the one many in the Marvel Universe who seems real.

And since I'm on the subject of Hawkeye, here's something that cracked me up.


I well remember this iconic cover.



But it never occurred to me that Ant-Man might become a permanent part of Hawkeye's arsenal. The folks though who make the Marvel Legends toys were not so short-sighted it seems.


Sheesh.

Here's a link for a closer look.

Rip Off