Set during the first few months of Nicieza's run as writer of Thunderbolts, Clint Barton's approached by an associate of Daimon Hellstrom's with a message: Mockingbird's soul is trying to contact Hawkeye from where she's trapped in Mephisto's realm. Hawkeye recognizes Hell is probably not a place for his morally compromised team to go, and tries to handle it alone. His team, naturally, choose to follow anyway. Atlas gets himself in debt to the Enchantress to get an audience with Pluto so he'll open a doorway, and Moonstone brings a pair of Clint's underwear so Pluto can create a "sympathetic alignment" to help them find Hawkeye faster.
They naturally end up in the standard scenario of confronting their inner fears instead. The reactions are varied. Mach-IV acknowledges his guilt for murder and vows to do better. Atlas accepts he's never going to "get it right", but intends to keep trying. Songbird and Charcoal both deny any guilt whatsoever over what's used against them. Moonstone says she's prepared to handle whatever she's becoming.
The dialogue emphasizes how real everything feels to the team, but I feel like it missed a chance to let Breyfogle really go wild with the nightmare imagery. The man absolutely had that gear in him, as evidence by any number of Batman stories he drew, but this comic does not take advantage of that. Missed opportunity.
Hawkeye puts a temporary hurting on Mephisto with an arrow juiced up by a chaos magic and a battle stave loaded with the purer intentions of the trapped souls, and the team bails with a body wrapped up behind Mephisto's throne. A body which turns out to be Patsy Walker (Mockingbird would have to wait another 8 years to return in Secret Invasion.) This leads into the Avengers Annual of the same year, and eventually the Steve Englehart/Norm Breyfogle Hellcat mini-series we looked at in Sunday Splash Page #236.
This comic gives Hellstrom the air of a man pretending to be cold and heartless, but saddened by the distance between he and his ex-wife. Englehart paints a less-tragic picture, and Christopher Cantwell's seemingly trying to rewrite history to suggests Patsy's always just blamed Daimon (and everyone else) for her own shortcomings. Which smells a lot like bullshit, but he's using Daimon to shovel a good 40% of it, so it may very well turn out be bullshit.
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