Despite having been in the Marvel Cinematic Universe for a decade, it took a Disney+ show for Clint Barton to get the spotlight. Hawkeye leans into the archer's relative obscurity compared to his Avengers teammates.
Now that keeping up with the MCU involves paying attention to Barton, fans might have questions about him and his protege Kate Bishop. That includes the show's aesthetic, typified by its credits. While it's easy to see that it was taken from David Aja's artwork, that doesn't explain why it's so heavy on purple. The answer to that goes back to his earliest comic book appearance.
The color scheme of Hawkeye's classic comic book costume stands out from heroes like Spider-Man or Captain America. While they wear bright primary colors, Hawkeye is the rare Silver Age Marvel hero to wear a dark secondary color like purple, which was usually reserved for villains like Magneto. That's because Hawkeye wasn't a hero in his earliest appearances.
When Hawkeye was introduced in Tales of Suspense #57 by Stan Lee and Don Heck, he wasn't the heroic character MCU fans have always known him as, aside from his grief-induced stint as the murderous vigilante Ronin in Avengers: Endgame. Although he was driven to upstage Iron Man, Hawkeye wasn't portrayed as a particularly bad guy by Silver Age standards. It was more that he fell in with a bad crowd.
Hawkeye made his own costume. He patterned it after his mentors, Trick-Shot and the Swordsman Jacques Duquesne, who also made liberal use of purple. During his first outing, a botched attempt to stop a jewel heist led the police to believe he was one of the thieves. Assuming that they wouldn't believe he wasn't involved, he fled. He was rescued by the Black Widow, who at this point was a KGB spy and Iron Man adversary.
Hawkeye's partnership with Widow in the comics was more romantic than their platonic MCU status, albeit one-sided. Hawkeye was "smitten" with Widow, as Lee's caption put it. Widow initially saw him as a useful pawn in her battle with Iron Man. Hawkeye gave Iron Man a run for his money but had to abandon his mission when Widow was seriously injured. Widow later ghosting him caused Hawkeye to reconsider his priorities.
Eventually, Hawkeye and Widow both reformed and joined the Avengers, keeping the color-coding of their original costumes when they switched sides. Although his costume has changed over the years, Hawkeye's retained the purple color scheme. Even Matt Fraction and Aja's more grounded run, where he eschewed his superhero costume because he wasn't doing Avengers business, dressed Barton in a purple T-shirt.
Kate Bishop initially wore Hawkeye's mask when she created a makeshift costume to join the Young Avengers. She made a point of not wearing a carbon copy of it when she took up his codename after his (temporary) death in "Avengers Disassembled." She did keep his costume's color scheme, integrating it into a design that also pays tribute to Hawkeye's partner, Mockingbird. Like Barton, she wears purple out of costume in Fraction and Aja's Hawkeye.
Hawkeye takes most of its visual cues from Aja's work, but he isn't the only one who deserves credit (and compensation). Eisner Award-winning colorist Matt Hollingsworth is the one who added all of those purple hues to the comic. Even a comic that took a radically different look at Hawkeye retained his favorite color. The show has simply followed its lead, paying tribute to his brief villainous stint in the process.
New episodes of Hawkeye are released on Wednesdays on Disney+.