Snap Into Marvel! — Kate Bishop Looks To Be An Exciting & Enthusiastic Card

Real Name: Kate Bishop

First Comic Book Appearance: Young Avengers #1 (April 2005)

First Multimedia Appearance: Hawkeye (2021), played by Hailee Steinfeld 

Powers: Kate possesses no superhuman abilities, but is an accomplished and highly trained archer, martial artist, fencer, and all around athlete. 

Comic Book Chronicles

Kate Bishop is an example of one of my favorite character archetypes: the “normal” person who despite a lack of superpowers ends up as the leader and/or moral center of a team of superheroes. Like the original Hawkeye, Clint Barton, Heather Hudson of Alpha Flight, or powerless mid 80s Storm, Kate Bishop doesn’t possess superpowers. She is an accomplished athlete with a particular knack for combat sports like archery, fencing and martial arts.

After crossing paths with the nascent Young Avengers and coming across a stash of old Avengers weapons (including some of Hawkeye’s trick arrows, Mockingbird’s battle staves, and Swordsman’s, uh, sword) she leverages those skills into a place on the team, adopting the name of the then-deceased Hawkeye for her own. Despite her lack of superpowers, Kate quickly becomes a decisive voice on the team, leading or co-leading alongside her on-again/off-again boyfriend Patriot while using her family’s wealth to help headquarter and kit out the unofficial team. 

Eventually, the original Hawkeye comes back to life (comics!) and gives his blessing to Kate to continue using the Hawkeye name. This sets up a fun partnership that played out in the pages of Matt Fraction and David Aja’s mid-10s Hawkeye series, with Kate periodically dropping in to play the responsible little sister to Clint’s man-child bigger brother (this is the series which gave things like the Tracksuit Mafia and Lucky the Pizza Dog to the MCU).

In the course of the series, Kate runs afoul of Madame Masque (who would become a recurring antagonist for her) and experiences something that most comic book characters experience eventually: the revelation that her seemingly normal parents are actually deeply involved in comic book hijinks, with her dad eventually putting a hit out on Kate and Clint. 

After the second superhero Civil War, Kate moves out west, starting up a PI firm. After crossing paths with Gwenpool, the pair launches up a new version of the West Coast Avengers. As part of that group, Kate learns that her mother is a vampire (comics!) and that both her parents were part of Madame Masque’s Masters of Evil. Though Kate’s comic book star has dimmed a bit in recent years, she remains a consistent part of the Marvel Universe, popping up in various stories, while making the leap into the MCU in the Disney Plus Hawkeye series and a cameo appearance in The Marvels, further laying the groundwork for an eventual cinematic Young Avengers. 

Fit & Finish

Kate Bishop’s initial comic book look featured a mishmash of different character looks (including Mockingbird’s mask and Black Widow’s belt), and it would be neat to see that reflected in a Marvel Snap card. Both her main card and her initial variant hew closer to her later “Marvel Now” redesign (circa her role in the Fraction Hawkeye series), a more utilitarian look with lots of purple. Thankfully, like Cassandra Nova, Kate Bishop is a character whose MCU counterpart is visually similar to her comic book counterpart, meaning we can get Marvel Snap cards that are comic book accurate but still familiar to more casual MCU fans. 

Form and Function

On paper, at least, Kate seems like she’ll be an incredibly fun card. The ability to add two cards, each with one of four different abilities, makes her a kind of cross between the random spell casting of Nico Minoru and the “play a card to make cards” of Snowguard. The four arrows she can add to your hand cover a wide range of abilities, all for 1 cost.

The -2 energy acid arrow switches sides like White Widow’s Widow’s sting. The grapple arrow pulls your next card into the arrow’s lane, making it a 1/3 Ghost Spider. The basic arrow is essentially like adding the original Hawkeye card into your deck, a 1/1 that becomes a 1/4 if you play a card in the same lane next turn. And the Pym arrow is like adding an Ant-Man to your hand, dropping at 1/1 but increasing to 4 power if the lane fills up. 

The random nature of the arrow draw means Kate can’t be automatically slotted into specific archetypes that could benefit from her arrows (like using her in Junk for the acid arrow or Move for the grapple arrow). That is, ultimately, her biggest drawback. But just like the similarly-random effects of Nico Minoru, any of her arrows can be useful in many decks, which immediately makes her a versatile card.

The fact that her arrows are one drops also gives her immediate synergy with Marvel Boy, the first Spotlight Cache card of the season, and the larger Zoo archetype Marvel Boy will almost certainly be reinvigorating. Adding a couple cheap cards into your hand also gives her synergy with Mockingbird and Sasquatch. All in all, she seems like a versatile, fun card. Which is the kind of thing a Season Pass card should be. 

Obviously, the connection between Kate’s card and her comic book schtick is pretty obvious (she’s an archer and her card gives you arrows), and it’s impressive that Second Dinner apparently didn’t worry about making her a much better card than the original Hawkeye (who made it into the game earlier and serves a purpose as an early game card for players starting out). But beyond that, the sense of fun that is built into the card seems to fit Kate’s characterization.

This is a card that begs to be played not because it’s a key part of an archetype or a strategically important one, but because it can do fun stuff. Like Nico or Sersi, it’s a card you want in your deck as much to see what random elements you get to work with and how you adapt your game play accordingly as for the advantage it gives you. Like the comic book Kate Bishop, it grabs some random elements, jumps into the fray and says, “let’s do this!”.