Tag: clint barton

Uh, one night my dog leaned against a wall because his back legs decided that they were done. And those kinds of stories never end well and this one wasn’t going to be different. We put him down the next day.

I’m a writer and that is the first and easiest trick we all have. Uh, it’s true, so it’s not cheap. It happened. Lying is kind of the cheapest trick of all, but still to come out here and lead off with my dog died is uhm, about as courageous as taking a stand against child abuse. But I did it because I want you on my side and I only have 4 minutes.

His name was Captain Applejack because he spent for year in the dog navy and would not be called mister. And anytime a dog owner says, “Who’s a good boy? Who’s a good boy?” The answer is always Captain Applejack.

I was actually on a deadline so I did what writers do and I compartmentalized. I stuffed it into a box and put it next to the other boxes marked, like, dad issues, and high school crushes and then I got on with my day. Uhm. I write comic books and my career was ending so I wanted to meet my deadlines. My worm had turned in the way that the worm turns for people in popular entertainment. There’s no retirement plan where I come from. There’s just one day people stop calling and the work stops coming. You don’t get hired anymore.

I was launching a book called Hawkeye and if you saw the Avengers movie he was the guy… he was the first archer in the history of cinema to run out of arrows. Which is a very kind of true moment for him. He’s the regular dude in the avengers. And as a kid I always liked him because he was the regular guy. He came from Iowa. I lived in Iowa for God’s sake! It just seemed to make so much sense. He was a bad guy who made good. And he would like, drop his g’s when he spoke and he’d get so wrapped up in his thinking he’d get lost in like their super mansion and stuff. He was very human and he got to be an Avenger and that’s what I liked about him and now it was my chance to write him. This is before the avengers movie come out and they were looking for opportunities to make that cast of heroes a little more visible.

When you work for someone like Marvel it’s a shared universe where everyone is playing with the same toys in this strange imaginative game all at once. And because of the movie and because of a couple of other things, Hawkeye was everywhere as I was supposed to launch my book. And I could sense that there were people that wanted him here and wanted him there: “Well I’ve got him on the moon on Tuesday, and you’ve got him underwater on Wednesday, what is he doing on Thursday?” And that I decided would be my take. My book is what he does on Thursdays when he’s not an Avenger. It’s where he goes… my book was going to be about where he goes to change his pants. It was going to be very slice of life, small ball kind of stories.

It was supposed to last 6 issues and it’d be done. And nobody thought it would do better than that because it has never as a character ever done better than that. It was… and then I’m putting him, you know, in pants in an apartment building it was commercial suicide. But as my career was ending I had nothing to lose and everything to gain by writing books that I would want to read.

But my dog was dead and my first issue wasn’t happening and I wanted to cry and be alone and be sad and grieve and mourn but I had this stupid comic book that I had to write. And I had the ‘what happens’ but I didn’t have what it’s about. I knew in this Hawkeye story we were going to meet him on Thursday afternoon when he’s not an avenger and there’s a neighbor in his building who’s getting kicked out and what Hawkeye is going to do is he’s going to buy the building so she doesn’t get kicked out. Cause he had a bunch of… yeah I know, right? Dynamite, dynamite stuff!

And I came up with these kind of tricks, if I’m going to do this small ball stuff, like, there’s an issue where he just wants to buy tape. There’s an issue where he just wants to hook up his DVR and people keep bugging him. And he’s… so… Like, small things and I came up these different things I was going to do, we’ll tell the stories all out of order, and we’ll do this and that and in a way to kinda keep it compelling… and try to keep it compelling and keep it interesting a little more than just: “This issue Hawkeye buys tape.”

The honest truth was I didn’t care about the building or Hawkeye or the neighbor getting kicked out ‘cause of my dog. And then I pulled out my first trick. And I gave him a dog.

Yeah. So when Captain Applejack was a puppy I found him under a car. And he was so sick and so little and uh… so mangy I didn’t know if he was very young and very sick or very old and about to die. He was wrinkly. So I gave him to Hawkeye. I gave him this beat up mutt who was neglected and ignored. And as I started to kind of write and give him this kind of emotional thing he was connected to, like, the character’s anima appeared. That was it, it wasn’t a hawk it was a dog. And then I got the book. I understood what the book was. I knew what happens. I knew what it was about. And if I couldn’t save Captain Applejack, Hawkeye could save Lucky.

Spoilers, the dog lives.

So I wrote it in a single day. I wrote it… it was a very bad, very sad day, but I wrote it in a day. And it comes out, and the response is impossible to ignore. And I do my very, very best to ignore response at all, at all costs. But a fandom roared, or barked as the case may be, and like we started to immediately get fan art and crafts. While Hawkeye might not have the best sales in the world I’ve met literally everyone reading the book and they were dressed. Uh, but it’s he’s just wearing pants so it’s super easy, it’s pants and bandages. My editor said “People love the dog” so it’s the dog. And this entire corner in my career was turned.

If I said ‘miraculous’ it would actually insult real miracles but I don’t know what else to say. I was on my way out the door but it turned out the door was revolving and I was right back in and my entire life turned around. And everything in my career exploded off of this book. I tried to save my dog, and he saved me.

Matt Fraction (x)

I can’t stop crying.

(via merrilymacabre)

Aw, Fraction, no.

(via taibhsearachd)

colonelrogers:

Whenever you’re sad

just remember

Steve learned how to juggle from Clint

image

kath-ballantyne’s Nan can juggle oranges, one-handed, against the wall. When asked why, she just shrugs and says, “It was the War.”

I talked about it to an Australian lady who was in England during the War (she stopped to admire my knitting a few weeks back) and she shrugged and said, “Yeah, I did that too.”

So, during the War, it was generally normal behaviour to knit and to teach yourself to juggle when in bomb shelters.

I really love that Clint appears to be the one who does the most cooking in your fics, but it’s not something I’ve seen anywhere else (most people write him as a strictly pizza and take-out kind of guy until someone forces him to eat real food), so where does that come from? What’s your headcanon on where and why he learned to cook?

scifigrl47:

Childhood hunger haunts people.  It haunts people badly, and like a lot of other childhood traumas, it shapes the person’s whole life.  In my limited experience, people who grow up hungry have one of two reactions in life:

1. They do live off of pizza, take-out and convenience foods, because their relationship with food and how they get it is so irreparably broken.  They eat what they can get when they can get it, and there’s a desperate element to that consumption, because they cannot get past the ingrained thought that they do not know when they will next have access to food.  

2. They distance themselves from their childhood hunger by tightly controlling what they eat and drink, by developing an appreciation for food beyond what they learned growing up.  Their lives still, in many ways, fixate on food, but in a different way from the first group.  

Clint, for me, has a lot of control issues.  A lot of what he does boils down to control, what he maintains and what he’s able to give up.  It’s the control he did not have as a child, that he struggled to acquire, that puts him in the second group for me.  I do write him as being the survivor of childhood physical and emotional abuse.  Not to put too fine a point on it, but it’s body autonomy, it’s control over what he eats that scrapes against an eating disorder on occasion.  The only way to have (close to) complete control over what you eat is to cook it yourself.  

So it’s a couple of things:

-I do think that Clint had a good mother, who did the best she could to feed her children, as best she could with what limited funds she had.  What food he had was probably as good as she could manage, but there wasn’t much of it, and it wasn’t reliable.  But Clint does know what solid, home cooking was like, and he does equate it with what safety he had as a child.

-Cooking is a marketable skill, both in the job market and in personal life.  Someone who can cook has something to offer a group of people.  Food attracts people.  You have worth if you can feed people.  It’s necessary, but more than that, sharing a meal is something that connects people. 

-Cooking is a skill that rewards simple stubborn practice.  Sure, you can read a recipe, and follow it, and get something good.  But cooking works pretty well if you learn a few basics and then just do what you like.  You don’t have to have a lot of reference material.  You don’t need a formal education.  You can learn, little by little, here and there.  It’s an oral tradition in so many communities.  It’s done by eye and by taste, there’s no exact measurements, and no punishment is handed down if you add peppers instead of carrots or skip the caraway seeds if you don’t like them.  It might not taste as good.  Or it might taste better.  Or it might lead you to something else entirely.  Cooking rewards the brave, and the stubborn, and it can be made YOURS so easily.  A handful of secret ingredients and it’s now YOUR special recipe for spaghetti sauce.

 I like to make a lot of jokes about Clint living off of junk food, and the Avengers having bad eating habits, and I think, they do on some level.  But you don’t maintain that kind of musculature and that kind of strength and physical ability by living off of fast food. So I write Clint as someone who likes to cook, and more than that, who likes to cook for these people.  It’s his place, in this weird little family dynamic.  It’s what he can offer them, now that he doesn’t have to worry about money, about hunger, about being forced out.

I’ve also written Clint as having this kind of relationship with food. To date, the one fic I really focussed on it in is Lucky Pennies, and it’s something Coulson observes in the way Clint eats, but also, later, you’ve got Clint trying to feed Coulson, as this kind of apology/nurturing thing where he knows that Coulson’s mad at him and that him being there is probably making the situation worse, but his need to feed Coulson overrides it, and Coulson recognises that and lets Clint do it. I’ve also got a pretty intense thing to do with food between Clint and Bruce in my marvel bang fic, which will be getting published later this year, where Bruce and Clint talk to each other about how spending time in abusive households and care has affected their relationship with food.

when-it-rains-it-snows:

Confession: I am sitting here laughing so hard at my own fucking nonsense that I am gonna have to compose myself before writing a rambly artist note.

Will you even look at this.

Okay, so: This was a gag gift, you know it was a gag gift, obviously a very well-thought out one that took some planning, but the person who gave it was apparently unaware that while you can take the man out of Iowa, you cannot take the Iowa out of the man.  Even if you manage to surgically excise every trace of Midwest, you’d STILL have someone who used to wear a purple miniskirt to work.

Last statement here is that if you’re new enough to Hawkeye that you don’t recognise the GOSH I LOVE ARROWS thing, I am going to give you the pleasure of Googe-Image-Searching it yourself.  Enjoy!  You’ve picked the right Avenger to love, you really have.

animalker:

FIFTY FAVOURITE CHARACTERS » 5. Clint Barton, Marvel 

To successfully make a shot, you gotta follow and master basic steps. Your stance is the foundation. Where you draw your strength. Nock the arrow and grip. Realize you are wielding a weapon. Mindset. Focus solely on your goal, regardless of your surroundings. Be in the now. Set up and draw. Inhale and prepare for what you are about to do. Anchor and hold. There is no going back. Aim. All that remains is you and your target. Release and follow through. Master those and you hit every time. One last step. Feedback. Basically… take responsibility for the outcome. For every shot.