ABC/Florian Schneider
ABC's Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. stars B.J. Britt as Antoine Triplett, Chloe Bennet as Skye, Iain De Caestecker as Agent Leo Fitz, Ming-Na Wen as Agent Melinda May, Clark Gregg as Agent Phil Coulson, Nick Blood as Lance Hunter, Henry Simmons as Alphonso 'Mac' Mackenzie, Elizabeth Henstridge as Agent Jemma Simmons and Brett Dalton as Grant Ward.
ABC/Sandy Huffaker
The cast of Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., including Clark Gregg, Iain de Caestecker, Chloe Bennett, Ming-Na Wen, Brett Dalton and Elizabeth Henstridge, were a hit at the Comic-Con International: San Diego on July 25, 2014.
ABC/Kelsey McNeal
Agent Skye (Chloe Bennett) addresses three new characters Agent Isabelle Hartly (Lucy Lawless), Agent Lance Hunter (Nick Blood) and Idaho (Wilmer Calderon).
By Andrew A. Smith
Tribune Content Agency
Sept. 25, 2014 -- Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. got off to a bumpy start, but the second season promises lots of goodies, especially for comics fans.
Admittedly, even die-hards found the first season a little slow – until the release of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, that is. Evidently the TV show had to mark time until the movie turned the board over, around episode 17 or so. S.H.I.E.L.D. really picked up steam after that, with Agent Coulson – excuse me, Director Coulson – and his small band of loyalists going underground to rebuild their now-disgraced organization, and dealing with the fallout of Agent Ward’s betrayal.
That’s the premise of the second season, and it should be a fun ride. But as a bonus, Marvel’s got plenty of Easter eggs to feed the hungry, hungry fanboys and fangirls.
For example, the season premiere, which aired Sept. 23, flashed back to World War II, with Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell), “Dum Dum” Dugan (Neal McDonough) and Jim Morita (Kenneth Choi). In the comics, Carter was an O.S.S. agent with the French underground – Captain America always called her “mademoiselle” – while Dugan was with the Rangers squad nicknamed the Howling Commandos and Morita was in another Rangers outfit, dubbed the Nisei Squadron. In the movies, however, Carter is with the “Strategic Scientific Reserve,” and both Dugan and Morita are Howlers.
This is more than just a treat, however – it’s a tease for Carter’s own series, which will run in place of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. when the latter goes on midseason break sometime around the holidays. That series will take place in 1946, where Agent Carter will have to deal with both the sexism of the ‘40s and the transformation of the S.S.R. into S.H.I.E.L.D. (akin to events in our world, where the O.S.S. became the C.I.A.). One “episode” of sorts has already been filmed, and was included as a short on the Iron Man 3 Blu-ray (a clip can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-Gydv3aYbg).
Speaking of the season premiere, another Marvel Comics character made his small-screen debut: Carl Creel. In the comics, Loki bestowed on convict Carl “Crusher” Creel the power to transform into any material he touched. As The Absorbing Man, Creel has been tangling with Thor and other Marvel heroes since 1965. (If some of that sounds familiar, it’s because the screenwriters gave that power to Bruce Banner’s father, played by Nick Nolte, in Ang Lee’s 2003 Hulk.)
And speaking of supervillains, another one has already made a stealth debut. In the first season, S.H.I.E.L.D. Academy student Donnie Gill misused a weather-controlling machine that resulted in giving him the power to freeze objects. That sounds an awful lot like comic book supervillain Blizzard, a long-time Iron Man foe, whose civilian name is … Donnie Gill. He’ll be back in the second season’s third episode, “Making Friends and Influencing People.”
The premiere also gives us new agents in the form of Isabelle Hartly (Lucy Lawless) and Lance Hunter (Nick Blood), and some guy named Idaho, but they don’t exist in the comics, so we only know what the show tells us about them. The season premiere also featured George Stephanopoulos, playing George Stephanopoulos. Look for veteran actor Kyle MacLachlan to appear in the second episode. And keep an eye on the character Daniel Whitehall (Reed Diamond) … because that’s not his only name, which is all I’ll say.
But the real blockbuster for comics fans this season is the addition of Bobbi Morse (Adrianne Palicki), codename Mockingbird. She’s not only been both an Avenger and a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, she’s got one of the wackiest back stories in comics!
The character first appears as an unnamed brunette in 1971 in an Astonishing Tales story starring Ka-Zar, Marvel’s Tarzan knockoff, who lives in a Land That Time Forgot knockoff called the Savage Land, where dinosaurs still roam. (It’s hidden under the Antarctic ice sheet.) She shows up at Ka-Zar’s English estate – he’s also the Lord Kevin Plunder, you know – and tells the butler, “Lord Kevin Plunder and I have never met – and yet I feel that I know him … You see, I can – can ‘feel’ people in my mind! And I know that unless I speak with him – Lord Kevin will die!”
After another appearance, where she finds out that Ka-Zar is in the Savage Land, the brunette disappears, before turning up in dinosaurville – as a blonde. She also gets the name “Barbara,” no mention is made of psychic powers, and she is revealed to be a biologist. Talk about a career change!
Barbara becomes a supporting character in the Ka-Zar strip, gains the last name Morse, and becomes a love interest for the Jungle Lord. It also turns out she has a vague connection to S.H.I.E.L.D. We also see in flashback – actually an unprinted inventory story from a canceled magazine – that she worked in Florida in, or near, or with the project that accidentally created the Man-Thing.
(Yes, Marvel has a character named Man-Thing. It’s a swamp monster, and Agent Maria Hill actually mentioned it in passing on one of her S.H.I.E.L.D. appearances last season!)
Anyway, Barbara Morse – who at some point decides she wants to be called “Bobbi” – hangs around in the Ka-Zar strip for a few years, mooning over the brawny jungle king and being captured by bad guys a lot – although her S.H.I.E.L.D. connection gets firmed up, and she gains the codename Agent 19. But before Ka-Zar got canceled again – Ka-Zar has had five series, and they have all been canceled – she is pushed out of the strip by the Lord of the Savage Land’s new love interest, Shanna the She-Devil.
(Yes, Marvel has a character named Shanna the She-Devil. That’s not as funny as “Man-Thing,” but honestly, nothing is as funny as “Man-Thing.” Well, except for the series titled Giant-Size Man-Thing that ran for five issues in 1974. Yes, for real.)
Got all that? Well, forget it. None of it counts.
Morse’s next appearance was in the pages of a quickly canceled (after one issue), black-and-white magazine titled Marvel Super Action in 1976. In a move that made absolutely no sense, given her previous appearances as a frequent Girl Hostage, Morse appears as a kick-butt, costumed superhero named The Huntress.
You can forget that name, too, because Marvel did. (Possibly because rival DC Comics has several trademarked characters named Huntress, one of whom debuted in 1977.) The next time we see Bobbi Morse is in an issue of Marvel Team-Up, a book that featured Spider-Man teaming up with different characters every issue, in 1980. In that book she has a new costume, a new name (Mockingbird) and a new goal: rooting out corruption in S.H.I.E.L.D. Which she and Spidey do, although Morse is severely injured.
Injured enough to disappear for four years, before turning up in a “Hawkeye” miniseries. (You remember him from Avengers, right?) In that series, Marvel finally got around to straightening out her contradictory back story, showing how she got trained as a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, relating how she switched from being a biologist to a field agent, and all of that stuff. And they sorta explained how helpless she was in the Ka-Zar series by implying that she let the Jungle Lord rescue her a lot as a sop to his male ego. (There was no explanation for the hair color change or the disappearing psychic powers, but at this point we never will.)
Oh, and she married Hawkeye. I should probably mention that.
So Mockingbird is hanging out with hubbie Hawkeye, who is tapped to found an Avengers franchise in California (1984), and naturally she’s a charter member. Hi-jinks ensue.
But later, due to her lethal actions on a mission – she was a spy once, after all – she and Hawkeye become estranged. Then they become divorced. Worse, in 1993, she becomes dead!
But don’t worry, this is comics, so nobody stays dead forever. (Except maybe Batman’s parents. And Krypton. And Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben. Maybe.) In 2009, it is revealed that the dead Mockingbird was actually a Skrull imposter. You know the Skrulls: shapeshifting aliens from outer space. The Avengers movie called them Chitauri, but we comics fans still call them Skrulls.
Anyway, in 2011, Mockingbird got killed again! Well, almost – she was fatally wounded. Desperate, the Avengers gave her an experimental formula given them by Nick Fury that was a combination of Captain America’s Super-Soldier Serum and an immortality drug called the Infinity Formula. As a result, Mockingbird is more than human, almost Captain America level. Plus, she’s now working with the Secret Avengers as their undercover expert, finally having a reason for the codename Mockingbird.
All of which, or none of which, or some of which, may or may not show up in the Mockingbird character on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Me, I’m just curious to see what color her hair will be.
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Replies
I missed out on Morse's pre-Mockingbird appearances, but I did pick up that issue of Marvel Team-Up when it came out. I liked it and was disappointed there was no follow-up to that issue. I also picked up the Hawkeye mini, and West Coast Avengers from the start of that series. I thought Steve Englehart did a lot of good work with the character but I think John Byrne did not. I stopped reading WCA after Byrne left, and when I came back to reading comics in the late 90s I found out she was killed off in 1993. Sounds like what they have done with her in Secret Avengers is interesting but I'm not reading that series.
That's quite the history. It's probably worth mentioning that in the past few years we saw her running her own spy organisation, the WCA (love those initials).
I'm so old that I still think of Morse's "Mockingbird" persona as ... new.