New Avengers: The Reunion #4

I have a little ritual, probably not an uncommon one; every week after I pick up my comics from the shop, I rank them for reading in the order of my excitement, from the least anticipated to the most. Every once in a while, though, an issue comes along that I am so eager to read, so nervous about its consequences for the heroes, that I just have to forget the system and throw it on the top of the pile. New Avengers: The Reunion #4 (Jim McCann) was such an issue.

Marvel's preview solicitation promised we'd see "an emotional choice [that] forever alters the course of both Ronin and Mockingbird's lives." But in just the few months since I'd read their initial reunion in Secret Invasion - and especially after 3 1/3rd issues of McCann's series - I wasn't sure I wanted the course of these lives to be altered. I wanted Marvel to put a marriage back together for once, instead of tearing it apart. Because apparently being married makes you automatically old and unhip or something.

I needn't have worried. McCann found the perfect way for everyone to have their cake and eat it too. At the end of all the fistifcuffs and fireworks, Bobbi (Mockingbird) and Clint (Ronin) acknowledge the legal dissolution of their marriage, the troubles in their past and the ways they've both changed in their years apart. At the same time, they recognize their obvious desire to be together, to fight side by side and work things out. A couple who were married nine days after their first meeting, they decide they're now dating for the first time.

It's a brilliant finale: upbeat, triumphant even, without being smug or pat or too easily come by. It doesn't try to paper over the problems Clint and Bobbi had in past stories, or wash away the psychological trauma inevitable after deaths and resurrections and alien captivity all at once. It takes the whole wacky, wild, and sometimes deeply flawed history of these characters into account, but keeps the hope that mistakes can be learned from. Not easily, not always quickly, but we can move forward, live better and love better, if that's what we truly want.

- JC