The first time I tried to read this over a month ago I just couldn't get into it. I just had problems with Mockingbird. I don't know why but this time around I was more accepting of who Mockingbird was and I was able to read through the book and sort of enjoy it. You need to have a lot of background knowledge on Mockingbird to really get into this. I was able to follow what was going on but I think I would have enjoyed it more with more historical knowledge. There is a great timeline of their relationship at the end of the story. It almost makes more sense to start with that. ( )

The first time I tried to read this over a month ago I just couldn't get into it. I just had problems with Mockingbird. I don't know why but this time around I was more accepting of who Mockingbird was and I was able to read through the book and sort of enjoy it. You need to have a lot of background knowledge on Mockingbird to really get into this. I was able to follow what was going on but I think I would have enjoyed it more with more historical knowledge. There is a great timeline of their relationship at the end of the story. It almost makes more sense to start with that. ( )

The first time I tried to read this over a month ago I just couldn't get into it. I just had problems with Mockingbird. I don't know why but this time around I was more accepting of who Mockingbird was and I was able to read through the book and sort of enjoy it. You need to have a lot of background knowledge on Mockingbird to really get into this. I was able to follow what was going on but I think I would have enjoyed it more with more historical knowledge. There is a great timeline of their relationship at the end of the story. It almost makes more sense to start with that. ( )

The first time I tried to read this over a month ago I just couldn't get into it. I just had problems with Mockingbird. I don't know why but this time around I was more accepting of who Mockingbird was and I was able to read through the book and sort of enjoy it. You need to have a lot of background knowledge on Mockingbird to really get into this. I was able to follow what was going on but I think I would have enjoyed it more with more historical knowledge. There is a great timeline of their relationship at the end of the story. It almost makes more sense to start with that. ( )

Hawkeye the archer has always been one of my favourite Marvel characters. I like the fact that he can be a hotheaded jerk, that he's got a chip on his shoulder which comes from being the "bow and arrow guy" in a team comprising thunder gods, armoured millionaires and WWII super soldiers, and that despite all this, he always tries his best to be a hero. I even like his names - both superhero (which always makes me think of Alan Alda in M*A*S*H*) and alter ego... Clint Eastwood meets Dick Barton.

The character has been treated somewhat shabbily in recent years, killed off for shock value during the Avengers Disassembled storyline, clumsily resurrected in House of M, handing over his Hawkeye identity to a teenage girl while he slums it as Ronin, even forced to watch as a psycho like Bullseye sullies his name and costume in the Dark Avengers.

His sometime partner, in crime-fighting and love, Bobbi Morse aka Mockingbird has been treated even worse. Captured, held prisoner and raped by an 19th Century ghost in the old West Coast Avengers book, murdered, then retroactively replaced by a Skrull, before being returned to a world she hardly even recognises.

The road to their reunion has been a long and clumsy one, but as Hawkeye is one of those crazy characters who keep me reading superhero books long after I should have grown out of them, I've been long awaiting this new collection. It was preceded by another book, New Avengers: The Reunion, by the same creative team, which was hampered by having to sort out all the convoluted continuity that had come before. With that out of the way, writer Jim McCann and artist David Lopez are finally able to kick loose and start forging ahead, and they do this with style now, reinventing the duo as Marvel's answer to "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" (a movie I haven't seen, so I prefer to think of them as a more kick-ass Jonathan & Jennifer Hart - or Nick & Nora Charles from The Thin Man). Dramatic tension is added to their relationship by the fact that Mockingbird is a SHIELD-trained License To Kill type while Hawkeye still espouses that rather old fashioned superhero virtue of "nobody dies on my watch".

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