Writer J. Holtham on Marvel's Wastelanders: Hawkeye

J. Holtham on writing Marvel's Wastelanders: Hawkeye

2021 was a big year for Hawkeye. Clint Barton had a debut chapter in the Marvel's Avengers video game in the spring, a Disney+ series arrived on November 24 and a ten-episode audio drama, Marvel's Wastelanders: Hawkeye, began on October 4 on the Marvel Podcasts Unlimited feed and the SiriusXM app. The audio drama is set in the Old Man Logan universe, with Stephen Lang as an aging Clint and Sasha Lane as his estranged 17-year-old daughter, Ash. Rachel Chavkin directed it.

The writer of the audio drama is J. Holtham, a screenwriter whose credits include Cloak and Dagger, Jessica Jones and the final season of Supergirl. In an interview, Holtham explained how a playwright became a Marvel writer, what the Old Man Logan setting asks of its characters, why Westerns shaped the story and what redemption costs.

The short answer to the last question is that it costs a lot, and it does not always look like what the character expects.

From the stage to Los Angeles to audio

Holtham lived in New York for a long time, writing plays and working in theaters. Around 2012, he moved to Los Angeles to pursue television and screenwriting, and ended up on staff at a string of comic-book shows. A Marvel podcast project, he says, was a natural marriage of his material and his ideas.

Audio drama, however, is a different craft. The learning curve is steep, because the writer has to communicate what is in his head without anything visible. The audio team taught him which sounds the brain recognizes and which are distinctive, noting that an arrow being knocked sounds less distinctive than you might think. He also had to unlearn a rule from the stage and television worlds. Show, do not tell becomes, in audio, show and tell a little.

How the audio drama was made

Wastelanders is Marvel's audio epic set in the Old Man Logan universe, and Hawkeye is its second installment, following Old Man Star-Lord, which launched in June 2021. Sound design for Hawkeye was handled by One Thousand Birds, and James Harrison Monaco and Jerome Ellis composed the score. The first episodes were available exclusively on the SiriusXM app and Marvel Podcasts Unlimited on Apple Podcasts, and reached other platforms about two weeks later.

The working title was Old Man Hawkeye, but the styling was dropped when the title was announced in September 2021. The supporting cast also includes Jess Barbagallo, Bobby Moreno and Michelle Hurd as Bobbi Morse, the character Holtham calls Ash's mother.

The Old Man Logan setting

For listeners who do not know the setting, Holtham explains that the Old Man Logan universe begins thirty years before the story, when the villains of the Marvel Universe banded together and killed almost every hero in a single day. The villains then split the country into fiefdoms. Clint Barton is one of the few heroes who survived V-Day, the day villains rewrote history, and he now lives in King Zemo's territory in the western United States, where most of the story takes place.

Holtham says he loves comics because they were where he first learned about storytelling, beginning as a ten-year-old reading New Mutants. As to why he writes strong women, he says the more natural question is why anyone would not. He adds that, as a Black writer who grew up as one of the few Black kids in a mostly white suburb, reading the X-Men as an outsider meant a great deal to him, and he wants to tell stories that do the same for someone else.

Clint, Ash and the question of rebuilding

The relationship between Clint and Ash was the heart of the project for Holtham. He wrote the series in the middle of the pandemic and in the shadow of the previous year's uprisings, and a question kept circling in his mind: after something terrible happens, how do you rebuild? In the story, Ash, Clint and Bobbi argue about what each owes to future generations, what justice looks like and what it means to let go of personal vendettas for something larger.

Hawkeye is known as a relaxed and optimistic character, so putting him in a hopeless, cynical place and then pulling him out of it mattered to the writer. Ash, who is on the verge of vengeance at the start, is watched over by a father and a mother who are trying to keep her from the path they took. Holtham says he put his own sense of breaking a family cycle into those relationships.

Marvel's Wastelanders: Hawkeye at a glance

• Format: ten-episode scripted audio drama, released weekly on Mondays from October 4, 2021.
• Writer: J. Holtham. Director: Rachel Chavkin.
• Voice cast: Stephen Lang as Hawkeye and Sasha Lane as Ash, with Michelle Hurd, Joe Morton, Tracie Thoms, Lea DeLaria and others.
• Setting: the Old Man Logan universe, in King Zemo's territory in the western United States.
• Main theme: that redemption is necessary, and that it comes at a cost.

What Holtham says about blind archery, Westerns and redemption

Asked how a blind archer works, Holtham is cheerful about the lack of research. He made it up, he says. There is a glimmer of Daredevil in the echolocation, and the version he settled on has Hawkeye partially deaf and using Stark-tech ear implants. It is comic-book logic, but he likes the image of a blind archer who is still good at it, and if anyone can be that, it is Clint Barton.

The Western is the genre that shaped the project most. Holtham dug into the genre once he settled on the setting, naming True Grit, which he watched in both film versions, and Clint Eastwood's movies. He did not rewatch The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford but says it influenced the way he built the Ringmaster's show. The attraction, he explains, is the feeling of Monument Valley and the desert, the genre that has always been used for grizzled old warriors pulled back into a fight.

Redemption is the theme he hopes listeners take away. It is important and necessary, he says, but it comes at a cost and it will not always look the way you think. He wanted every character to find it by the end. Ash is the fulcrum of that idea. Holtham drew on his own teenage angst to write a character at the point in life where you ask what kind of person you will be. At the end of the first episode, she wants to kill someone, and the question of whether she will go through with it, and what it does to Clint, is what the series keeps returning to.

The pandemic shaped the production in practical ways. The hardest part, Holtham says, was the switch to audio storytelling and the work of finding the structure. Production was complicated, but the team was comfortable with video-call tools, and casting benefited, because many actors could record from home. His advice to aspiring writers is simple: write a lot, write about what matters to you and get comfortable sharing as much of your authentic truth as you can.

Sources

• Marvel's Wastelanders, Wikipedia — cast, crew and release details