I used to have time to read my comics in a coffee shop. Now I have to read them in the bathroom. Then I write reviews of them. I wash my hands in between.
SECRET AVENGERS #16
Poor, poor Bobbi Morse! You’d think that someone high up over at The House of Ideas was offering out bonuses for putting Mockingbird through as much crap as possible. Like their horrible ex-wife was named Bobbi and they’re taking out all this pent up angst on a fictional character. In the last several years she has been through the wringer. Estranged from former husband Hawkeye, we discover during Secret Invasion that at some point she was kidnapped and replaced with a Skrull so all the bad stuff that happened with Hawkeye may or not have been her after all. So she comes back to a world that she doesn’t recognize that didn’t realize she was gone and that messes with a person’s head. She goes back into espionage, makes peace with Hawkeye, reconnects with some old friends, and finds herself working with SHIELD as a ‘Secret Avenger’. Good right?
For Bobbi? Not so good. For the reader? Pretty damn good.
Secret Avengers was hatched as a covert squad of heroes, tasked to SHIELD,
essentially running Black ops missions that, for whatever reason, couldn’t end
up on the front page. But the trick of it is, they’ve all been implanted with
some serious mind programming that, at the speaking of a trigger word, wipes
their memories of the most recent mission. This was also a good way to get the
Marvel Universe versions of the Movie Universe’s Nick Fury and Agent Coulson
into regular active continuity after their initial introduction. This had the
makings of a really great spy caper book, with superheroes thrown in the mix.
Given, it was mostly the Black Widows and Hawkeyes of the superhero world, but for
the kind of missions they were given, these were perfect. The stories were
politically charged, yet still retained the need for ‘super powered
intervention’, Basically, a really good SHIELD book.
So why is this the last issue?
I’m not really sure. Maybe people got bored with the 5 part
Mockingbird storyline that ends here. Maybe it wasn’t politically charged
enough? Maybe that Marvel Exec got fired? Hard to say. But the series is
relaunching this month with a new #1. So maybe it’s just Marvel grubbing for
money.
I mean, I didn’t hate this storyline. Mockingbird and the
team are behind AIM enemy lines when the mission is aborted. She’s stuck by
herself hiding in plain sight with an image inducer when they enact the mind
wipe protocol. That was a nice moment when the programming took effect and she
was a stranger in a strange land not looking at all like herself. THEN she shoots
the Taskmaster and we find out that she’s been a long undercover mind
controlled asset of Andrew Forson, the AIM Scientist Supreme. She fights her
programming for most of a couple issues and ends up assumed lost but in fact on
the run with The Winter Soldier and former SHIELD head Daisy Johnson. Along the
way MODOK shows up at SHIELD and wants amnesty in exchange for information,
which he gets, and some of AIM’s infrastructure is taken down because of it.
I feel almost like they had a good idea (the mind wiping)
but by making it work so well and letting so few outside the team know about
it, and those few being basically ineffectual about it, they kind of shot
themselves in the foot. I mean, Bucky, in the first issue, was opposed to it,
but after that, it just kind of became de rigeur, to the detriment of the book.
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