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If you’re a casual Marvel fan, odds are you associate the superhero Hawkeye with actor and ill-fated app subject Jeremy Renner. But over in the Marvel Comics, a new character has taken up the master archer’s mantle: Charli Ramsey, a non-binary and Two-Spirit member of the Lakota Nation tribe’s Oglala band.
Charli was introduced in the fifth issue of The Ultimates, a comics series that takes place in an alternate universe in which a villainous character known as “The Maker” has ensured that none of Marvel’s iconic characters become superheroes. In the meantime, Tony Stark (a.k.a. Iron Man) is working to set things right. In The Ultimates Issue 5, Tony attempts to reach out to that universe’s Clint Barton, the archer who usually takes up the Hawkeye mantle, offering him equipment. Although Clint declines, Charli eventually finds the gear and decides to become Hawkeye themself. Later, they team up with Captain America to take on mercenaries associated with the Roxxon Corporation, an oil company that has been wreaking havoc on the natural world.
To be clear, Charli isn’t the first canonical nonbinary character in Marvel Comics history. However, they are the first nonbinary “legacy hero,” a term that refers to a character who takes on an established hero’s name and skillset, like Sam Wilson becoming Captain America after Steve Rogers.
Shortly after the latest installment of The Ultimates arrived, Marvel writer Deniz Camp took to X to elaborate on Charli’s origins, noting that he had received “a lot of questions about Charli’s gender.”
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Camp explained that during the process of writing The Ultimates Issue 5, he researched water protectors and Standing Rock. This Indigenous-led activist movement is largely associated with the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota, whose members and their allies joined together from 2016 to 2017 to protest the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, its alleged violation of tribal treaty rights, and the threat it posed to the tribe reservation’s primary water source.
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“When I did my research into the water protectors/Standing Rock, something that was emphasized again and again was the importance of queer and ‘two spirit’ organizers to the movement,” Camp wrote. “I wanted to put that into the book.”
The writer clarified that Charli’s pronouns are they/them, although he doesn’t “want to make a big deal of it, because it’s not in the book itself, and because I don’t think Charli would make a big deal out of it in that context.”
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However, Camp promised that “we’ll make [Charli’s pronouns] explicit when it’s natural to the narrative.”
Charli’s introduction further underscores how far ahead Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) comics are when it comes to LGBTQ+ representation, as opposed to screen adaptations. In the past, Marvel has faced criticism for its live-action iterations touting its inclusion of queer characters whose explicit queerness was ultimately cut from the final product or glossed over entirely. For example, the 2021 film The Eternals introduced the superhero Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry) and his husband Ben (Haaz Sleiman), and even dared to show us a brief same-sex kiss on screen, but that movie also implied that Phastos was partially responsible for the United States’ atomic bombing of Hiroshima, so there’s a lot going on there!
More recently, the Disney+ series Agatha All Along has made some long overdue strides forward thanks to the inclusion of queer teenage superhero Wiccan (played by Joe Locke) and repeated allusions to a romance between protagonist Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) and fellow witch Rio Vidal (Aubrey Plaza). Will Charli show up on our screens someday? We can only hope!
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