By: Jeff Parker (writer), Declan Shalvey (artist), Frank Martin (colorist)
The Story: What a waste of a perfectly good prostitute.
The Review: Ever since both Herc and S.H.I.E.L.D. dropped off my radar, I’ve been scoping around for other Marvel titles to check out and cover. A couple of you made suggestions, which I appreciate, but most of them turned out to be minis that were already part-way through their run, so those didn’t seem like the best long-term choices. What I really wanted to find was that great Marvel middleweight—not one of the pop sellers, but an enjoyable title in its own way.
And since I’ve had a hankering for a quality antihero title since the end of Secret Six (which I miss more and more with each passing day, by the way), the Thunderbolts seemed like a natural fit. Reading through this issue makes it clear this dubious band of individuals don’t have quite the edginess Gail Simone’s smart writing brought to the Six, but the T-bolts have a lively, engaging group dynamic all their own.
For one thing, you have far more than six people bouncing off each other. All told, you have almost twice that number of members on the team, each with a very distinctive power set, design, and personality. You’ve got the daughter of Satan, a slightly disturbed psychologist, a half-Asgardian, half-Troll, several geniuses with varying degrees of amorality, and Mr. Hyde. And that’s before you get to the heroic alignments of the characters, some of whom really seem to be in this for the nobility, and others who can’t care less.
Obviously, with Luke Cage and Brunnhilde (I know she goes by Valkyrie, but her Asgardian name is a lot more fun to say, don’t you think?) around, you have your true-blue heroes, but the rest of the T-bolts are a little harder to pin down. I’ll say this, though: none of them show as much of an inclination to kill as the most principled of the Secret Six. Troll expresses remorse (“No…! Not mean to…”) when she slays the Iceni curse-keeper in this issue, and even Boomerang holds off killing the woman trying to suck his soul until told he’s fated to do so.
As for the plot at hand, time-traveling hijinks are always fun when there are no universe or reality-threatening stakes to them. Parker seems to be having fun picking and choosing the various periods to send the team, though he makes some fairly obvious choices (here, we go from Industrial Revolution England to Arthurian legend). But so long as he keeps bringing the creative twists—as it turns out, it’s Jack the Ripper’s victims who are the murderers here—there’s no reason why we shouldn’t enjoy the ride.
Shalvey goes for a simple, sketchy style in the same tradition of Cliff Chiang, but his lines are even thinner and he seems more interested in dynamic movement than drama. But that works; unlike the Greek tragedy going on over in Wonder Woman, this title is all about action from beginning to end, so Shalvey’s lean, kinetic art (along with some interesting paneling choices, like Satana’s “fiery” recounting of the Iceni legend) fits very well.
Conclusion: Entertaining throughout, Thunderbolts lacks much in the way of depth or complexity, but it delivers a satisfying read nonetheless.
Grade: B
– Minhquan Nguyen
Some Musings: – “A proper room instead o’ the alley? Fancy!” I shudder to think of the undoubtedly countless people forced to do the nasty in a pre-Industrial England alley. Those people can’t be alive now. As it happens, they aren’t. So let that be a lesson to you: do it in a room!
– “Never thought my job would require arranging trysts as a pimp.” None of us ever do. And I’m a document controller by day, so…
A Second Opinion
The Story: The Ripper Tour, Part Two: Trapped in the 1880s, Fixer, Moonstone, Boomerang and Troll are facing off against Mr. Hyde and Satana, who appear to be more than a little involved in the Jack the Ripper murders.
The Review: This is not a complete time travel story, but only the middle section of a multi-part time travel tour. This means that this issue won’t give us the satisfying “A-ha!” moments we get out of the ends of time travel stories, but there’s a good bit of fun in how the Bolts solve the various problems in this issue, both physical and temporal. For instance, yeah, maybe Hyde and Satana are involved in the Ripper murders. So what? The murders still happened. No way to change that now (or ever), so the Bolts have got to be awfully careful in what they do. And the care that Parker takes in the resolution shows he knows too. Everyone loves a good time travel story. And for those of us who nit-pick at the physics, I have to say I *love* how no one from the present was able to go through the time machine, except for Ghost who reduced his mass to zero. Nice. In terms of characterization, I can’t say the ground moved for me in this issue. This is an ideas-based arc, where I’m not seeing that anyone (characters or reader) are going to change. It’s still a fun adventure story, though. On character, though, I’m a Valkyrie fan from my Defenders days and I like Satana, mostly because of her brother and father. Marvel created fine offbeat (in the case of the Defenders) and horror and supernatural (in the case of Satana) stables in the 1970s and characters like Valkyrie and Satana come with so much cultural baggage that even throw-away lines and subtle actions can be quite fun when they are involved.
Artwise, I dug Shalvey and Martin. This is a weird series and bits like the haunted women, the flight of butterflies, and the sucking of souls came out well. I wouldn’t put this art team among my favorite draftsmen, but their combined style tells a story effectively. Case in point, I think Shalvey has a strong feel for angles that pull a reader through a piece of action. For example, when the Bolts get the signal to hit hard and fast, Shalvey starts high and close on the three, backs *way* up and to the side to give a long perspective of the field, then snaps close to the haunted women while Martin cuts the color, and then swoops in on Moonstone as she lifts off. That kind of dynamism in the camera angles propels the story.
Conclusion: A fun issue about an über-offbeat super-team of anti-heroes and heroes in training, doing a tour in time.
Grade: C+
-DS Arsenault
Follow DS on Twitter.
Grade
Conclusion