A group of heroes who show up in New York in the wake of Onslaught, when the heroes the public relies on are presumed dead, but are really just trapped in a world under the control of Rob Liefeld and Jim Lee. Which might be worse than death. The Thunderbolts weren't the first team to step into the void - Iron Fist dusted off the Heroes for Hire first - but these characters were all new, unknown quantities to everyone else.
Of course, by the end of the first issue we find out they're the Masters of Evil in disguise, led by Baron Zemo pretending to be Citizen V. I know there's debate about whether it was good to give that away right off, or if Busiek would have been better served keeping the team and their motives a mystery until Zemo was actually ready to make his move.
I don't think that would have worked. Either you have to abandon thought balloons or any other internal narration for the characters until the big reveal, or they have to think entirely in vague remarks that can do no more than hint at secrets. Like, "I know this is just part of the boss' plan, but I'm really starting to enjoy this hero stuff!" No direct references to their villainous pasts or codenames, everything oblique. How long can you keep that up before it gets irritating?
That's a hypothetical. The reality was the mystery of what Zemo thought to gain with the deception, and the other characters finding life on the other side of the line to be a chance. Screaming Mimi and the Beetle, now Songbird and Mach-1, figured out they liked getting cheered and especially not getting thrown in jail. Atlas (formerly the bad guy Power Man or Goliath) was content taking orders, but he fell for the team's liaison with the city, Dallas Riordan, so that was its own problem. Moonstone (now Meteorite) didn't care about being a hero. As usual, Karla Sofen was just sure that Zemo was screwing up her plan and that she could do better. That seems to be her whole thing, always eager to backseat drive other people's plans, but never any of her own.
Techno (formerly the Fixer) was the only one who didn't seem affected, content to take the pleasures of the hero worship while he could, but always following Zemo, and he got killed.
To complicate matters, Busiek and Bagley added Jolt, an entirely new character whose design I thought won a fan contest, but maybe that was Charcoal, who popped up around the end of Year 2 of the book. Jolt, like the Kamala Khan Ms. Marvel, was a bit of a superhero geek, albeit one abducted amid the chaos of Onslaught's attack on New York and then experimented on by Arnim Zola. Jolt made a real splash for herself, to where Zemo had to let her stay, even though she was intent on really being a hero and wasn't aware of his plan.
I don't know if Bagley came up with the designs for the Thunderbolts' costumes. That's not something I've ever really considered a strong point of his, but I quite like some of their looks (Songbird's in particular - and many of them have stuck to varying degrees. Even when Techno's gone back to being Fixer in stuff like Cable/Deadpool, he kept the red/black spandex with the "techpack" look.
Year 1 of the book ended with the T'Bolts' deception exposed, but the rest of the team (minus Techno, now in a synthetic body) having wrecked Zemo's plan. So the book enters a "fugitive" arc, where the remainder of the group hangs together primarily out of lack for any better options. The general consensus among heroes and law enforcement is to bring them in, for questioning about Zemo if nothing else.
Busiek and Bagley are pretty effective at making the team feel like it's coming apart at the seams. Minus Zemo, who turned out to be a decent tactician, if generally lack in tact, it turns out no one else on the team is any good at being a leader. Meteorite only knows how to manipulate and look out for number, not inspire or bring people together. Atlas follows orders rather than gives them. Jolt's inspiring, but she's also a kid (and Meteorite is trying to twist her into a weapon throughout.) Songbird's getting increasingly violent and the Beetle's led groups before - Sinister Syndicate represent! - but those same teams routinely get their asses kicked by just Spider-Man, so the resume's not great. Plus, his armor's falling apart and it was built by Techno, so he can't repair it.
Bagley's selling the emotion, the sullen glares, the emotional explosions, the increasingly battered look of Mach-1's armor. And he had plenty of experience with illustrating fights between groups from New Warriors, so there was no issue there. Some of that is probably scripting, the writer knowing how to describe the fight so that the artist knows where two separate skirmishes need to be in relation to one another for when (or if) they overlap. The artist still has to present it cleanly, and Bagley's always been good at that kind of thing.
While Zemo and Fixer look on from a secret lair, and interject occasionally to be vindictive assholes, the T'Bolts are flailing. They get humiliated for half an issue by the Great Lakes Avengers, simply because the GLA understand the basic concept of teamwork. Meteorite tries to have them take on a new Masters of Evil, led by Crimson Cowl, as a statement, and they get trounced. Nothing's really going right, depending on how you feel about Jolt increasingly following Meteorite's commands to be more ruthless and give vent to her anger.
And into the void steps Hawkeye, which is a move I particularly love. Busiek had a one-off issue in the first year where the Black Widow relates a story to Songbird and Mach-1 of the Kooky Quartet having to prove they could be trusted as the Avengers. The implication is she knows who the T'Bolts really are, but she's willing to see if they prove themselves. So here comes a member of the Kooky Quartet, one who always has something to prove and believes in redemption, promising he can get their crimes waived if they just let him lead.
Busiek wrote the book through issue 33, and things were looking up for the team. But what goes up, must come down.
2 comments:
I agree, Busiek made the right choice with the nature of the mystery. Why the Thunderbolts are playing as heroes is much more interesting than what their real identities are. The latter is worth maybe one issue, which is exactly what Busiek gave it.
The only way I could see keeping the mystery of identities going was if it was only one or two characters. Like Citizen V approaches Goliath/Beetle/Screaming Mimi with the idea of how much better their lives could be as heroes instead of villains, and then at the end of year 1, they find out they've actually been following Zemo in his latest Masters of Evil plot and they can't turn on him because no one will believe they didn't know all along. Busiek sort of did that with Jolt, since she wasn't part of the plan and basically forced her way on the team.
Post a Comment