Death and Imitation

The end of Hawkeye and Mockingbird #1 had Mrs. Morse telling Hawkeye that her daughter Bobbi had been dead for years. The start of the second issue shows us we're dealing with the "hero fakes their death to protect their loved ones" gambit. A slightly more extreme version of how most costumed types handle it, simply not telling their loved ones they are vigilantes. Thanks to Hawkeye, the plan goes kaflooey, as he brings her family to see her, and her mother winds up shot by the end of the issue. Whoops.

Anyway, the faking a death tactic isn't unusual in comics, so I really should have expected that to be the result. For some reason, though, I was expecting a different revelation. I thought we'd learn that Bobbi Morse really is dead, and Mockingbird is someone else. No, not a Skrull. Maybe an old friend of Bobbi's, or a coworker, or heck, maybe a random agent Fury wanted to assign a safe identity. So he gives her the name of a prior agent who passed away, whose family won't be endangered, and this will subsequently protect Mockingbird's identity.

It's not a new idea for stories, because I've seen it before myself*, but it could put things in kind of an interesting light. Hawkeye's been worried that Mockingbird is shutting down, and she won't talk to him. So he tried to find her family, because maybe that would help. Except they aren't her family, and Clint would have to realize he didn't know her as well as he thought. You'd hope this would cause Hawkeye to reevaluate things, maybe make more of an effort to study things before he tried to help her again, but it's more likely he'd get huffy and offended**.

It works with her codename, since mockingbirds imitate the calls of other birds, as a way to keep as many species as possible from setting up shop near their nest. She'd be pretending to be a dead person to protect anyone from her past life she might care about. Plus, it makes for a sort of interesting Russian nesting doll situation, where you have a Skrull impersonating a woman using the name of another woman. Deceptions within deceptions, though I suppose the Skrulls would have figured it out when they copied her, which could produce interesting results. Would knwoing their subject was pretending to be someone she wasn't alter how the Skrull would behave? Would it behave like Mockingbird-pretending-to-be-Bobbi Morse, or more like Mockingird, period? Even if she's just using the name as a cover, I'd think taking someone else's name would produce some sort of change in how she acts.

* Gundam Wing, for example. One of the pilots is called Trowa Barton, the name of a fellow he worked with on the assembly of what eventually became his mech The real Trowa was killed in a disagreement with some of the other staff over a plan to drop space colonies on the Earth. The guy who went through the series being Trowa had no name he could remember prior to that, and he agreed it was as good a code name as any.

** With some reason, since this would mean she was lying to him about this even when they were married. He wouldn't even have known his wife's real name. Could be cause for anger.