Hawkeye’s hearing aid is key to the story and a poignant Marvel tribute

HawkeyeClint Barton will bring some additional gear with him to Disney Plus. It’s not trick arrows, or a fancy bow, or a high-tech quiver, but it’s still something that Hawkeye comic fans have been waiting to see in the Marvel Cinematic Universe for nearly a decade.

[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for Hawkeye episodes 1 and 2 on Disney Plus.]

Image: Marvel Studios

The very first episode Hawkeye, the show reveals that Clint Barton has started wearing a hearing aid — and using it to tune out unpleasant auditory experiences, like Rogers, The MusicalBroadway’s musical adaptation of Captain America.

Why Hawkeye’s wearing the hearing aid now

This doesn’t seem to have much of an effect on Clint’s effectiveness as a bowman or fighter, though he does favor his left ear in conversation. And when vigilante-in-training Kate Bishop comments on his new disability aid, HawkeyeThis hilarious, quick, and succinct explanation explains how the changes occurred. The episode smash cuts to a montage of every moment in every previous Marvel Cinematic Universe movie in which Clint — who is just a normal, un-enhanced human being, with no superpowers, and not even secret Russian spy training — happened to be right next to an explosion.

To Marvel Studios producer Trinh Tran, Clint’s hearing disability just underscores the most important thing about Hawkeye as an Avenger. Despite all the time he spends adventuring with gods, geniuses, and super soldiers, he’s very human and vulnerable.

“[Clint and Kate]These are not superhuman beings. They’re just skilled at what they do,” Tran told Polygon. “[We wanted] to really hit at the idea that they can get injured, and they can get hurt during these missions that they go through, and to showcase that, to see him being taped up because he is feeling that pain, and he’s feeling that injury. The hearing aid is an acknowledgement of the possibility that this could happen, as he has seen it. And I think that’s one of the most relatable elements of the story that we tried to tell here.”

But Clint’s hearing aid isn’t just a realistic outcome of the wild Avenger lifestyle. It’s also got a history in Marvel Comics. It’s a wonderful one.

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Image: Matt Fraction, David Aja/Marvel Comics

Clint Barton’s stints with temporary hearing loss began in 1983’s Hawkeye #4, the final issue of the character’s very first solo miniseries. In the issue, written and drawn by Marvel legend Mark Gruenwald, Clint purposefully deafened himself to evade supervillain’s sonic brainwashing device — and got a hearing aid only a few pages later, fully “restoring” his hearing.

His hearing disability was an aspect of Clint’s character that was left to be used or ignored, remembered or forgotten by subsequent writers and artists, until 2001. That year’s Avengers Annual used the events of the Onslaught crossover (which we will not unpack for your own well being) to state definitively that the reality warping powers of young Franklin Richards (son of Mister Fantastic and the Invisible Woman) had restored Hawkeye’s hearing.

Image: Matt Fraction, David Aja/Marvel Comics

It wasn’t until much later, in the 2012 Hawkeye series written by Matt Fraction and drawn by several artists (but most notably and often by David Aja), that living with hearing loss became a more ingrained part of Hawkeye’s mythos. This series is often referred to as the first collection. Hawkeye: A Weapon in My LifeThe premiere of ) took place only two months following. The AvengersThe film had been released in theaters, and it sparked a new interest in the Avenger bow-toting superhero outside of comics. It’s also a story — set in New York City, with Clint Barton and Kate Bishop adopting a one-eyed yellow dog and facing off against a bunch of accented goons in identical tracksuits — that has most directly inspired the makers of HawkeyeDisney Plus

They are available at www.stackoverflow.com Hawkeye, Fraction and Aja turned Clint’s experience with deafness into a modern plot point, and a significant part of the design of the series. They Hawkeye was famous for its experiments in storytelling form, including an issue in which as much dialogue is “heard” from Clint’s deafened perspective as possible, rendered on the page in American Sign Language or only-mostly-accurate lip reading. The two established that Clint suffered hearing loss at an early age, as a result of the beatings he received from his father and Barney his brother.

Image: Matt Fraction, David Aja/Marvel Comics

Clint isn’t the only Deaf or hard of hearing character in Hawkeye, however. Echo/Maya Lopez, who appears at the end of the Disney Plus series’ second episode, is a superhero with a supernatural quirk (she can perform any skill she can see demonstrated, much like Taskmaster), and she is Deaf. Joe Quesada, David Mack and the Pages of DaredevilAlaquaCox (a deaf actor) plays the role of her in 1999. Hawkeye.

“We had a Deaf consultant that we did work with on the on the Disney team,” Tran told Polygon. “Because we also have Maya Lopez, who is coming into the fold, and she’s part of the Deaf community, and we wanted to make sure that that was going to be represented in the correct way.”

Fans — including deaf fans — have waited patiently for the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s version of Hawkeye to catch up to Fraction and Aja’s. This is Hawkeye on Disney Plus, it finally does, both with incorporating Clint Barton’s history with hearing loss, and casting a Deaf actress in the role of one of the vanishingly few Deaf superheroes.

These are the first two episodes Hawkeye They are available now.

Hawkeye

These prices were correct at the time of publication.

Disney Plus will air the series on November 24th