Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand
After I deliver a rousing monologue on the utter meaninglessness of canon in comics I unwrap a pair of books that helped the Avengers franchise branch out – the Avengers West Coast omnibuses (which brings me back to the flexibility of canon when it comes to Mockingbird)!
Want to start from the beginning of this season of videos? Here’s the complete Season 1 playlist of Crushing Comics.
Episode 38 features Avengers West Coast Omnibus Volumes 1 and 2, covered in the Guide to Avengers West Coast.
I’ve got a newly-revised comic guide for you – The Definitive Bobbi Morse AKA Mockingbird Collecting Guide and Reading Order!
Not in the mood to browse through an in-depth guide? Keep reading to learn a little more about Mockingbird, including where to start, what’s new, where she’s been in 2017, and what percent of her comics have been collected.
[Read more…] about Updated: The Definitive Guide to Mockingbird, Bobbi Morse
The Mockingbird comic books definitive issue-by-issue collecting guide and trade reading order for omnibus, hardcover, and trade paperback collections. Find every issue and appearance! Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated October 2017 with titles scheduled for release through March 2017.
When most comics fans think of the most fearsome, non-powered Avenger, they’ll typically name Hawkeye – or, perhaps Black Widow (though whether she has any enhancements is debatable).
The best answer is actually Bobbi Morse AKA Mockingbird, but part of her allure is that you would have never thought of her.
Mockingbird has the athleticism of Hawkeye (she’s a trained gymnast and combatant), the secret agent training of Black Widow (she’s a member of SHIELD, where she graduated top of her class), plus she holds a PhD in biology. Her origins find her roughing it in the Savage Land as Ka-Zar’s original blonde love interest before turning out to be a SHIELD agent under deep cover. Her first solo story finds her going under even deeper cover by dropping out of SHIELD for her assignment before returning to SHIELD to root out their double agents.
Yes, she’s pretty awesome. So, why is she so often forgotten by Avengers fans?
First, because until the 2010s she has always been cast as a love interest – first to flirt with Ka-Zar and then after just a two-issue breather on her own she’s married to Hawkeye! She joins the Avengers seemingly through marriage, as if she’s being added to a health insurance plan. Though she later is a founding member of Avengers West Coat, she plays second fiddler to her headline star husband.
Second, there’s the matter of how she exits Avengers West Coast. I won’t spoil it here in the intro (although I do, slightly, below), but it left us without Mockingbird appearances for over 15 years! That’s a long time to forget about a hero.
Third, because it’s just her style. As a double- and sometimes triple-agent, Mockingbird has never been a character who sticks out as the big star – even after her return in Secret Invasion (as championed by writer/editor Jim McCann), she remained a supporting player.
That all changed thanks to her popularity as a Hawkeye-free character on Agents of SHIELD, and after a rapturous response to her first solo one-shot in 2015 (due in large part to writing by Chelsea Cain) she graduated to her own series in 2016 as she returned to widespread use in All-new, All-Different Marvel. [Read more…] about Mockingbird, Bobbi Morse – The Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order
The Avengers West Coast & Force Works definitive collecting guide and reading order for comic books in omnibus, hardcover, and trade paperback format. Find every issue and appearance! Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated May 2023 with titles scheduled for release through August 2023.
The Avengers had the best kind of problem in the early 80s, whether your perspective was from within comic book continuity or behind the scenes: there were just too many darn Avengers!
The Avengers had gradually shifted its focus from Marvel’s major heroes who anchored their own books (like Iron Man and Captain America) to a roster of characters that needed a team book to thrive. That meant plenty of fan favorite characters would be left out during any given run.
The best solution was to follow a trend set by Spider-Man and just recently by Chris Claremont’s X-Men: launch a second Avengers book!
West Coast Avengers launched with Hawkeye as a central focus. He was chief amongst those team-based, fan-favorite characters, hot off of his own limited series. Hawkeye was initially joined by his wife, Mockingbird, Tigra, and West Coast natives Wonder Man and Rhodey Rhodes as Iron Man.
From a story perspective, the central conceit of the book was that America was a big country, and the NYC-based team couldn’t always be responsive to threats across the nation. In practice, it allowed writers like Steve Engelhart, John Byrne, and Roy Thomas to tell big stories that still focused on character history and personalities. Byrne, in particular, used it to dig deeply into the story of Scarlet Witch.
As comics became more entrenched in extreme, violent themes, the relative staid Avengers team was disassembled in favor of an Iron Man lead Force Works. (The in-continuity reason was the team’s standoff with the UN Security Council over happenings in Genosha in the “Blood Ties” crossover in the penultimate issue of the series.)
Despite a flashy launch with a pop-up cover, Force Works never caught fire like the similarly themed X-Force, and was cancelled as part of the line-wide removal of Avengers in 1996 as they headed off to the Heroes Reborn pocket universe in the wake of Onslaught.
[Read more…] about Avengers West Coast – Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order