Heroclix Team Awesome: Thunderbolts #1 Review

Editor’s Note: One last review of the comics of 12/5/2012 before the comic stores open…

Let’s get the preliminaries out of the way: the chick with the purple hair who doesn’t speak and is the only apparent member who isn’t asked to volunteer in Thunderbolts #1? That’s Mercy. She debuted back in Peter David’s and Todd McFarlane’s run on The Incredible Hulk – issue 338 to be exact, a couple of issues before the arc collected in the Ground Zero paperback. If I recall correctly, she shanks people who she thinks are down on their luck… and she thinks everyone is down on their luck. You’re welcome.

Thunderbolts #1 is yet another Marvel Now book that is, despite Marvel’s protestations, a complete reboot (but, but, Marvel doesn’t reboot! Which is why The Punisher is still a superpowered avenging angel! And he’s still a black guy!). We’ve gone from the team being the standardized government-sponsored team staffed by former supervillains hoping for redemption that it’s been for years (but don’t let it make you bitter; if you miss that idea, DC’s still publishing Suicide Squad), to apparently just General Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, former Hulkbuster and current Red Hulk, out on his own, building a team out of the darker, more edge heroes of the Marvel Universe. You know, like DC’s Team 7.

So now our Thunderbolts are apparently Red Hulk, Punisher, Deadpool, Elektra, Venom and Mercy, which is a lineup, except for Mercy, that should be familiar to anyone who has seen twelve-year-olds playing Heroclix (although you probably heard them referred to as “The Asskickers,” or perhaps “Team Awesome”). However, this lineup is being written by recent Deadpool writer Daniel Way instead of a runny-nosed punk jacked up on Red Bull and his first boner over imagining Elektra naked, so we can expect a little more from this team, right?

Truth be told, I can’t quite tell yet.

Because let’s be clear: there is no team yet in Thunderbolts #1. This issue revolves around Ross recruiting each member individually, with the only two working together being Red Hulk and Punisher, and even that’s only for a single panel. So what we get here are introductions to characters who, in general, don’t really need introducing for any even casual comic book fan… with the exception of Mercy – an obscure, 25-year-old villain who has appeared in four comic books issues before this in that entire time, and who I only vaguely remembered thanks to my obsessive hunting down of the David / McFarlane Incredible Hulk issues back in high school. In Thunderbolts #1, Mercy doesn’t say a word, her name is never mentioned, and she is “recruited” when Ross simply unlocks her cell. So the one character who could actually use an introduction doesn’t get one. Which is… shall we say, an interesting choice by Way.

So we get introductions to everyone for whom we don’t need one, but what is more interestingly handled here is the motivations for each member for actually joining a team… but even there, there are few surprises here. Elektra joins because there’s apparently money in it. Venom joins because Flash Thompson is a soldier, and Ross is a General. Deadpool joins because, well, he is crazy and has a history of volunteering for crazy shit. The only surprise is the reason for Punisher signing on, and frankly, it’s surprising because I don’t really buy it. Ross puts Punisher in a position where he can agree to join or be tortured to death, and then butters him up, saying that the Department of Defense has been emulating Punisher’s methods for years. Which is a fine choice for Way, except for the fact that it flies in the face of everything Greg Rucka has been establishing in his excellent run on Punisher for the past year. Rucka has gone out of his way to demonstrate that, when Punisher works with someone, bad things happen, so he constantly tries to cut potential allies loose from him. And while that is just Rucka’s interpretation, the fact is that it is the most recent interpretation of Punisher, which make Punisher’s agreement to suddenly join a superteam feel extremely out of character. While Way might redeem the choice with some cool stories in the future, right now, it just feels forced.

Frankly, with no indication in this issue as to how Way will be writing these characters once more than one of them is in the same room, the best hope for this book right now is that it includes Deadpool, a character that Way has shown, thanks to his recently completed run on Deadpool’s self-titled book, that he can have one hell of a lot of fun with. Even in this issue, which is packed with serious conversations and gravity of intent, we see Ross recruit Deadpool while Deadpool fights killer mimes. Of course he’s fighting mimes, he’s fucking Deadpool. The sequence is an indicator that Way intends to write Deadpool in the same insane, fun and entertaining way that he did on Deadpool’s own title, and the idea alone of seeing that guy try to interact with deadly serious Punisher, polished professional Elektra, and trained soldiers Red Hulk and Venom is enough to get me to try at least one more issue of this title.

Steve Dillon is drawing this issue, which means you already know what it looks like. It’s good to see him drawing Punisher again, but the tricky part of Dillon’s art is that it always looks the same. Flash Thompson is a curly head of black hair away from being Jesse Custer. Shave Ross’s head and moustache and carve a groove in his dome? It’s Starr. With that said, Dillon is an unmatched pro when it comes to layout and storytelling; panels are easy to follow and sized to control pace well (although pacing on a story that contains action, but action that is never the focus of a scene more than the simultaneously-occurring reasonable and measured conversation, is a tricky proposition), and his camera moves keep even the two-guys-talking sequences visually interesting. The biggest problem is the same problem I had when Dillon did pencils on The Incredible Hulk a few months ago: the man cannot draw Hulks. We only get one panel of Red Hulk in this issue, and while he looks a little more imposing than Hulk did in the previous example, Dillon still draws him more like a dude who fell into a vat of horse testosterone and red latex paint than a terrifying larger than life monster.

If it sounds like I thought that Thunderbolts #1 was a terrible comic book, I really don’t. However, I think that it has significant problems. It takes liberties with Punisher that I didn’t believe, it introduces character that don’t need it, and it fails to introduce the one character that really needs one. And frankly, it feels like 20 pages of reverse engineering; it feels like Way started with the Team Awesome lineup he wished someone would do back in 1996, and then tried to figure out how to make that lineup make sense within 20 pages, regardless of whether it was logical for the characters. Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if the reason we didn’t get any introduction to Mercy was because Way was hoping until the last minute that he could get Black Cat on the team.

So this individual issue? Yeah, it’s problematic. However, Way put together one hell of a fun ride on Deadpool over the last few years, and I am interested to see how these character interact now that they are together. But this issue? It’s record keeping. It’s an excuse to put them together. If I’m you, I’d skip it and try Thunderbolts #2 in three weeks, and just take on faith that, regardless of any reasons, this is just the team now. You’ll probably have more fun that way.