The Marvel Universe was radically – if briefly – altered by the events of 2008’s Secret Invasion. Relationships were fractured, the baddies gained control during the following Dark Reign event, and things were altogether bleak.
For all that doom and gloom, the most unsettling repercussions of the Skrull invasion came and went with remarkable ease. 2010’s Heroic Age publishing initiative promised a shiny return to a less grueling narrative, and the distrust and angst of the preceding years were seemingly swept away.
But one character couldn’t be squared away so easily.
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Bobbi Morse – Mockingbird – had, perhaps, been the character most impacted by the events of the invasion. She had not only been replaced by a Skrull; she had been replaced for almost two decades. Back in 1992, she and her emotionally clueless then-husband, Hawkeye, had been headed for divorce when, without warning, they rekindled their relationship. The reversal felt sudden and a little pat even then, but it wouldn’t be until New Avengers: The Reunion #2 in 2009 that the change of heart began to make sense.
The Bobbi Morse divorcing Hawkeye was not the Bobbi Morse who continued to adventure alongside him in the pages of West Coast Avengers.
Gross, Clint.
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Emotionally scarred by years stranded on a Skrull planet, the Mockingbird in Hawkeye Modern Era Epic Collection – The Reunion deservedly receives the lion’s share of the narrative focus; though branded as a Hawkeye volume, the first three-quarters of the book might well have easily passed as a Mockingbird book. While Clint features heavily throughout those three-quarters, it’s most often as a bumblingly inept hanger-on, a man left scrambling to earn a place in the life of a woman who distinctly doesn’t want him around.
It’s important to note that she was even badass when we weren’t paying attention.
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They are Bobbi’s dramas that the book focuses on: trauma from her abduction in New Avengers: The Reunion and lingering guilt and need for revenge for a (problematic) early story in Hawkeye & Mockingbird. With no firm personal footing and desperate for a purpose, Bobbi rounds up a crew of fellow Skrull abductees to form an espionage outfit known as the World Counterterrorism Agency.
So driven, Bobbi sets off on a series of missions. . . and Clint sort of tags along, unwanted.
The stories have their stumbles – though Bobbi becomes a much more deeply realized character than she had ever been, she is still tethered to her more famous boyfriend, for instance, mirroring her Skrull imposter so easily that one wonders why their decades-old divorce figures so heavily in the narrative.
Even the most interesting villain is Bobbi’s, not Clint’s.
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Thankfully, she is never reduced to incompetence, never made the damsel in distress – she never loses her personal agency, which is key for stories in which she must overcome her demons.
Sadly, characters go through periods of disuse, fluctuating peaks and valleys based on creator preference just as much as fan interest. The years collected in this volume are the highest Mockingbird’s flag ever flew. Though she briefly had her own title, it lasted only eight issues; her appearances in the years between have reduced her to a role similar to the one she had in the 1980s: as a supporting character for others.
Hawkeye Modern Era Epic Collection: The Reunion never does much with the titular character – he’s got one miniseries at the end where he almost—but ultimately does not—go blind – but the work it does on Mockingbird is revelatory. Since her 1971 debut in Astonishing Tales, Bobbi Morse had never been as in control of her own narrative like she was here.
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