Warning: This article contains spoilers for Hawkeye episode 3.
After multiple appearances across three Phases of the MCU, Hawkeye finally referenced Clint Barton's original comics costume in episode 3 and it didn't quite work, because it should have come from Iron Man. Obviously, Tony Stark's untimely death during Avengers: Endgame's ending would have made that impossible, but his involvement in mocking Hawkeye's notorious mask - which has never appeared in the MCU - would have rescued it from being a little too insulting to the character's fans. And crucially, it would have fit with Iron Man's favorite quirk for his Avengers teammates.
In general, the MCU has done pretty well to adopt the comics-accurate costumes of most of Marvel's principal characters. It may sometimes take a long time, as Scarlet Witch's original costume did before WandaVision introduced it, but there does seem an intent to be as faithful to the comics as possible. The same cannot really be said of the way the MCU adapts seminal Marvel comics arcs - like Ragnarok, Age of Ultron, and Civil War - but at least a nod to the surface-level fan service feels right. The MCU's comics-accurate costumes extended to Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Vision, and Black Widow, and even more outlandish designs like Kang the Conqueror and Thanos were closely followed. Hawkeye, in contrast, never got his comics costume.
The MCU actually covered Hawkeye's lack of a comics accurate costume well, explaining in Hawkeye that his role in SHIELD and in The Avengers was as a "ghost" while establishing throughout the MCU that he shied away from ostentatiousness. His functional costumes always seemed to suit his understated demeanor, and while Hailee Steinfeld's Kate Bishop identified his branding issue and suggested he wear something more like a real superhero costume, he insulted the design. In insulting his original comics costume, Hawkeye also insulted his fans, which is far from the ideal cost for a throwaway gag, and worse, marketing materials have revealed that Hawkeye does adopt a version of his comics costume later in the series, which makes the insult all the more confusing. What the moment needed was Tony Stark, the Avenger who previously insulted other heroes for their looks and powers to great comic effect, to explain why Hawkeye would accept some of the costume but not the silly mask. Because Tony would never have allowed him to get away with that mask.
In his many MCU appearances, Robert Downey Jr's Iron Man made a thing of gently mocking both Avengers team-mates and world-conquering villains - often with exactly the same tone - and most of it boiled down to their chosen looks. Iron Man called Loki "Reindeer Games", Thor "Point Break" and "Lebowski", Hulk "Jolly Green" and Ebony Maw "Squidward", as well as asking Thor if his mother knew he'd stolen her drapes for his costume. It would have been perfect for Tony to have actually come across the designs Kate Bishop presented to Clint, and to have mercilessly mocked the mask to stop Hawkeye from choosing to wear it without the character having to betray his own comics past. That would have worked far better, even with Clint's natural cynicism, because now it'll be harder to accept why he suddenly starts wearing a purple costume that doesn't really fit with why he rejected the design wholesale.
Without that element of balance and the stronger narrative set-up that Iron Man being involved would have brought - even if it was impossible after his Endgame death - Hawkeye's comics costume insult basically just copied the same joke Hugh Jackman's Wolverine made in the first X-Men movie. It's similarly mean-spirited at the expense of the fans who love those original comics costumes, no matter how goofy they might seem, and with the buffer of Tony Stark, that would have been avoided.
New episodes of Hawkeye release every Wednesday on Disney+
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