The Thunderbolts was a book that landed like a life-preserver for the Marvel Universe.
Launched a year following the company’s 1996 declaration of bankruptcy, the book hit stands where the highest-quality Marvel releases continued to be X-Men and X-Men-adjacent titles. Wild swings were being taken in other books, but few of them were landing; a slew of Image crossover stories were being told, Spider-Man was suffering from fan backlash to stories like the Clone Saga, and even a Star Trek license wasn’t lifting the ship from troubled waters.
Marvel had essentially leased their non-X, non-Spider characters to the Hot Young Kids at Image for their Heroes Reborn event, desperate to drive up sales, and it was from this vacuum that Thunderbolts sprang. It was the perfect narrative insertion point for a new team with a newly marketable reimagining of existing IP, and Kurt Busiek, Mark Bagley, and company were likely eager to create what might be an iconic new franchise.
The idea was simple: take established villains of the universe and reimagine them as heroes. A narrative trick, a double bluff, that could fill a void in Earth-616 that the Avengers and Fantastic Four had occupied.
Few other writers of the time were as tuned into the very core of super heroics as Kurt Busiek. Marvels had become an instant classic three years earlier, blindsiding readers with a new perspective with which to view their beloved Marvel Universe characters. Meanwhile, Astro City was exploring new characters in a new world with an adeptness few other made-from-scratch universes had ever managed (or have managed since).
Applying the increasingly iconic pencils of a post-Spider-Man, pre-Ultimate Spider-Man Mark Bagley to this deep understanding of the material meant a book that felt prototypical, hand-crafted to be a landmark – or at least an instantly successful IP. It looked like a comic book, it read like a comic book. It bled four colors.
The Thunderbolts were perhaps the most Saturday Morning Cartoon-ready of Marvel’s line-up, so episodic and formulaic was their setup; a direct line to the mayor’s office that popped up on a big vid screen to alert them of their adventures, a series of one-and-done adventures, and a highly merchandisable variety of characters – all they were missing were a funny animal sidekick.
Whether this similarity with ’80s action cartoons was a pointed intention of the book (these were lean times for Marvel, after all) or a simple attachment (and subversion) of those sorts of fun, clean antics is unclear. The 1992 X-Men and 1994 Spider-Man animated series had spelled a major boon for Marvel, but each successive attempt at multimedia expansion brought smaller and smaller returns – from The Marvel Action Hour, which debuted the same year as Spider-Man, to 1998’s The Silver Surfer.
It seems more likely that Thunderbolts is what it appears at face value: a comic book teetering between the deconstructionist and reconstructionist extremes of the era. On the one side, it’s a team of villains with roots in the Crime Syndicate and Squadron Supreme, and the other it’s Busiek’s joy of the genre that borders on Grant Morrison’s ongoing attempts to make comic books more like comic books. Making Thunderbolts bright, shiny, and Saturday morning-ready scratched an itch that had been bothering the medium throughout the grim ’80s and extreme ’90s: comics weren’t always fun.
Marvel Comics
The cartoon-ready setup doesn’t last, of course: the Thunderbolts’ public treachery doesn’t survive the length of this first volume, tumbling our hero-hopefuls into unsteady flight from the collective Marvel heroes (including the returned Avengers and Fantastic Four). As easily as the comfortable rhythms of the book were established, the creators wipe it away, presenting a much more pressing sense of conflict. Where Zemo has remained a Nazi and the Fixer remained an egotist, the rest of our crew has started to believe themselves capable of redemption now that they’re no longer opposed to the very heroes they emulate. Maybe being a good guy has far more benefits than being a career criminal.
This Epic Collection leaves the team balanced on that precipice and will make new readers desperate to know what happens next – few Epic Collections are balanced so perfectly as this one due to the piece-by-piece storytelling of classic comics.
While Thunderbolts didn’t singlehandedly save Marvel Comics from drowning, it almost certainly helped right the ship. The book ran for fifteen years, sailing over the rough seas of the ’90s and baffling early-aughts and into the Pixel Age, taking part in the major events and stories of the time right alongside course-correcting new classics like The New Avengers. Justice, Like Lightning exemplified how to make comics fun again.
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