'S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent Bobbi Morse needs to get out of LA. Like, yesterday. With her painful divorce from Hawkeye still being hashed out, Bobbi could do with a new job to take her mind off the mind-numbing mediations. Luckily, an old friend and mentor of Bobbi’s is missing, so a jaunt to the UK might be the perfect distraction. What Bobbi isn’t anticipating is having to team up with the snarky and handsome Lance Hunter, but her options are limited if she wants to solve this mystery. Someone is trying to recreate and weaponize the original Super-Soldier Serum which could spell global disaster. To save the world, Bobbi will have to face her past, put her problems behind her, and let the Mockingbird take flight.'
Whilst I've read a decent amount of Marvel over the years, Mockingbird is a character that I've not really encountered before, and my only real experience with her is with her character from the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. television series. That being said, when I saw that the latest book in the Marvel Heroines line was going to feature her I was excited to read the character for the first time. Then I read the description and saw that Lance Hunter, another character I had no comic experience with but had enjoyed in the television series, was going to be in the book, and I was absolutely on board.
Mockingbird: Strike Out begins with Bobbi Morse, the titular Mockingbird, dealing with a difficult chapter of her past as she's going through divorce proceedings with her husband, the fellow costumed hero Hawkeye. Things are not going well for her, not only has her difficult marriage fallen apart, but she and her husband seem to be at each others throats and trying to make things as hard as they can be. Tired at fighting with Clint over who gets what, Bobbi jumps at the chance to leave the country for a while for a special mission for S.H.I.E.L.D..
When a former mentor of hers, who's been working in Oxford as a professor, goes missing, Bobbi is sent to investigate. It might be nothing, but the fact that her professor used to work on a super soldier programme, and her having left under a dark cloud, means that her disappearance might indicate something more nefarious is going on, and that she might be walking into danger. Not long into the investigation Bobbi ends up running for her life, alongside S.T.R.I.K.E. agent Lance Hunter, who's also been investigating the professors disappearance. When the two agents are ordered to work together by their respective organisations, they start to find that they actually work really well together; and as the investigation goes on Bobbi finds herself becoming more and more attracted to the man. But is it too soon for her to jump back into the world of romance once again?
There seem to be certain stories that work well in the comic book medium. Bright costumed heroes flying through the air, punching monsters through buildings, and performing great feats might work well in prose, but the drawn pages of a comic is where they excel. And whilst there have been some fantastic espionage style comics over the years, I've found that those kind of tales tend to just click more when presented in the prose format, and Mockingbird: Strike Out really exemplifies this, as a story that would have been a really good comic becomes an excellent novel thanks to the format it's been presented in.
One of the best things about this book is that we get to go deep into Bobbi Morse. Comics will allow the reader to do this to a certain degree with thought bubbles and narration boxes, but even then limited page space means that these tend to just be snippets. Mockingbird: Strike Out spends a lot of time getting to know Bobbie, and there are multiple times where we leave the world around her behind and go into her thought process, her emotions, and her history in a way that enhances both her character and the story around her. I loved getting to see such an intimate dive into a character that I've never gotten to read in the comics before, and came out of the book feeling like I'd gotten to know her really well. It was interesting to see how her mind worked, to see that she's not a cold, calculating secret agent super spy, but a woman with insecurities, passions, and a deep well of emotion. It humanised her wonderfully.
The book being able to slow down like this also helped with the style of story that it was telling. Instead of trying to cram things into a couple dozen pages of comic issues, chapters had room to breathe, and it meant that our heroes could take their time investigating, that they could explore more avenues, and that we the reader could have things explained to us in more detail so that we could keep up with it. Scenes like Lance explaining how they're going to figure out where a set of three historic keys would work based on their time periods and blueprint designs felt like an interesting deep dive into history and architecture; but it also felt like the kind of scene that would either be very cut down, or cut completely, from a comic. With this being a mystery story, one where investigation and the finding of clues is a key part of the narrative, being able to take as much time as needed and not being constrained by the format helped in spades; and I came away from the book thinking that this is probably the best way for stories with these kinds of characters to be told. Nick Fury would probably be a much better character in novel form than he is in the comics.
We also got a lot more time given over to the romance that forms between Bobbi and Lance, and it ended up feeling both incredibly natural, and well earned over the course of the book. Having only really known these characters from the TV series they were in, them getting together felt like the most obvious direction to take them; and I wasn't disappointed to see it happen here. Lance is also written very similar to his TV incarnation; though I don't know if that's because his comic counterpart is like that too. Maria Lewis manages to bring a lot of charm to a character that could easily slip into brash or annoying.
Lewis also does a good job at leaving hints throughout the story that I completely missed until moments later in the book that led to a big reveal or two. Looking back on it, some were less obvious than others, but there was one I was slapping myself for not having seen. She manages to make you think one thing is happening before throwing something ridiculously fun into the mix that reminds you this is a world of big, weird characters, and that it's not just a spy story set in our world. I think Marvel fans are going to have a lot of fun when these moments happen.
I had a great time with Mockingbird: Strike Out, and it was a genuine delight getting to know Bobbi Morse and Lance Hunter in this way. Whilst I've enjoyed all of Aconyte's Marvel novels, I really hope that we get more with these two characters in the future, as their style of adventures suit the format well, and it feels like so many more adventures with them can be told.
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