All six of MCU Clint Barton`s fans can rest easy today, having seen their favorite archer finally return to the big screen in the Avengers: Endgame trailer--but it seems like his time away from the spotlight has left him a changed man. Gone are the days of the bow and arrow and the purple(-ish) costume. Hawkeye is gone. Meet Ronin.We`ve known Clint was going to get a codename change up for a while now, thanks to some leaked set photos featuring Jeremy Renner in a new costume, but the trailer provided all the confirmation we could hope for: a dramatic scene in the rain on the streets of Tokyo, Clint wielding a katana, not an arrow to be found. It`s all pretty on the nose, and something the MCU is lifting directly from the source material.Clint`s transition from Hawkeye to Ronin over in the comics actually happened following Clint`s death and resurrection around the House of M and Civil War events in the early 2000s. It`s all a little messy (and involves Scarlet Witch literally deleting Clint from existence more than once--don`t worry too much about it) but the end result of his brushes with morality and non existence were, unsurprisingly, a bit of an existential crisis. Rather than jumping back into the fray as if nothing had changed, Clint took on a new identity and went off on his own for a while, adopting the name and costume Ronin from the original Ronin, a woman named Maya Lopez, who had since started going by Echo.Clint operated as Ronin with the New Avengers, keeping his identity secret from most everyone for a not insignificant amount of time, before he eventually came clean, unmasked himself, and allowed Kate Bishop to take over as the new Hawkeye officially--think of it as a sort of codename musical chairs game, if that helps. He stuck with the Ronin identity through the Dark Reign and Siege events, before finally returning to his old archery-themed self during The Heroic Age, circa 2010.So what does that mean for the MCU? Well, possibly a couple major ...
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