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In the latest Comic Book Legends Revealed, discover whether Mockingbird teamed up with Hawkeye in an attempt to give Marvel its own version of Green Arrow and Black Canary.
Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the eight hundred and twenty-first installment where we examine three comic book legends and determine whether they are true or false. As usual, there will be three posts, one for each of the three legends.
NOTE: If my Twitter page hits 5,000 followers, I’ll do a bonus edition of Comic Book Legends Revealed that week. Great deal, right? So go follow my Twitter page, Brian_Cronin!
COMIC LEGEND:
Mockingbird was conceived as Marvel’s answer to Black Canary
STATUS:
Basically True
Well before he was ever working as a comic book professional editor and writer, Mark Gruenwald was already one of the most thoughtful and observant writer in the world of comic book fanzines. Gruenwald edited, designed and did much of the writing for his own fanzine, Omniverse, which was dedicated to the exploration of continuity in comic books.
Gruenwald also wrote a series of articles for DC’s in-house magazine, The Amazing World of DC Comics. As you can see from the Omnivese introduction, Gruenwald was not just a thoughtful, interesting guy, but he was a thoughtful, interesting guy who had pretty hard and fast opinions about things and how things should be done.
While Gruenwald was very fascinated by the world of DC and would have loved to have worked for that company, as it turned out, the available job for him at that time was at Marvel, so Gruenwald went to work as an assistant editor at Marvel and soon rose in the ranks and became one of the most notable figures in Marvel Editorial throughout the 1980s and 1990s, as well as being a beloved writer, as well, writing Captain America for a decade and writing (and drawing!) the Hawkeye miniseries that first paired Hawkeye and Mockingbird.
That Hawkeye and Mockingbird series famously ended with the two heroes married…
However, the interesting thing about Mockingbird is that she was always intended to be paired with Hawkeye, as her creator, Mark Gruenwald, came up with the character initially as Marvel’s answer to Black Canary so that she could be paired up with Hawkeye like Black Canary was with Green Arrow!
In an old Comic Book Legends Revealed from many moons ago, I explained how Gruenwald had invented a character named Mockingbird who was going to fight Spider-Woman during Gruenwald’s time as the writer on that series. She was going to be African-American and eventually, she was going to end up hooking up with Hawkeye. Gruenwald never got around to introducing the character, and when Bobbi Morse needed a new superhero identity because her then-codename, Huntress, had just been used by DC for a new character, Gruenwald let Steven Grant take the name and costume design for Bobbi Morse in an issue of Marvel Team-Up where Bobbi took the name Mockingbird…
In TwoMorrows’ Back Issue #56, the always informative Jarrod Buttery interviewed Grant about it all, and he explained the character’s Black Canary influences, “Mark’s early love was always DC superheroes, and he had a long-term dream of creating a Marvel version of the Justice League. Not parallel world versions like the Squadron Supreme, but a Marvel-Earth version. He had notebooks and notebooks at home full of character names and designs, and gave me the notebooks to look through to see if there was anything there I liked as a new identity for Bobbi, since the Huntress identity was shot by, ironically, Paul Levitz creating a Huntress character for DC. One of the characters in Marvel’s notebook was a Marvel-earth version of Black Canary, who in Mark’s version was in fact black, who he intended to pair up with Hawkeye, the pre-existing Marvel parallel to Green Arrow. Her name was Mockingbird. I actually wasn’t crazy about the name, but it was far better than anything I had come up with at that point, so Mockingbird it was.”
Grant, though, didn’t pursue the intended Hawkeye angle (granted, he only had the one issue to do anything with the character at all, and he was using it to follow up an old story about traitors inside of S.H.I.E.L.D.), but three years later, Gruenwald picked up the idea and did it himself in the Hawkeye miniseries.
His assistant editor, at the time, Mike Carlin, also explained to Buttery about how the plan for the series was always to pair up Hawkeye and Mockingbird to be Marvel’s Green Arrow and Black Canary, “The whole story arc was planned out from the start. Mark was a big fan of both the Marvel and DC Universes, and he loved the relationship that DC’s Green Arrow had with Black Canary, soooooooo, Mark made the Marvel version of that relationship slightly different by having his archer/bird-lady take the plunge. Mockingbird was created as a Black Canary type, and Mark put them together after the fact, the same way DC did.”
It was a thoughtful idea, which was par for the course for the great Gruenwald, who we lost way too young back in 1995. His widow, Catherine Schuller Gruenwald, is doing a fine job, though, keeping Gruenwald’s name and beliefs out there for everyone to continue to learn from!
Thanks again to Jarrod Buttery, Steven Grant and Mike Carlin for the fascinating information!
SOME OTHER ENTERTAINMENT LEGENDS!
Check out some entertainment legends from Legends Revealed:
1. Was Carol Hathaway Originally Going to Die in the ER Pilot?
2. Did Tom Selleck Force Blue Bloods to Reverse a Character Being Written Off the Show?
3. Just What IS the Lyric in ELO’s “Don’t Bring Me Down” That Sounds Like “Bruce”?
4. Did Clark Kent Ever Turn Into Superman in a Phone Booth on Television?
PART TWO SOON!
Check back soon for part 2 of this installment’s legends!
Feel free to send suggestions for future comic legends to me at either cronb01@aol.com or brianc@cbr.com
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