Title: Thunderbolts
Publisher: Marvel
Creative Team:Fabian Nicieza (writer), Mark Bagley (Penciler), Pat Zircher (Fill-in Penciler), Norm Breyfogle (Annual Pencils)
Core Issues: Thunderbolts #34-50, Thunderbolts Annual 2000
Essential crossovers: Avengers (Vol. 3) #32-#34, Maximum Security
Years: 2000-2001

Kurt Busiek may have been the original Thunderbolts writer, but the one with the longest pedigree on the series is still Fabian Nicieza, who shaped the team from issue #34 of the original series, right up until #109. Nicieza spent most of his run working with artist Pat Zircher, who took over with issue #51 – but many will have forgotten that for the first year or so, he mostly collaborated with original Thunderbolts penciler, Mark Bagley.

Today, when creators leave a title, it’s generally at the end of an arc, and often involves a relaunch or repositioning of the characters. This wasn’t always the case. In fact, Busiek actually began several plot threads in the couple of issues before he left for Nicieza to pick up – the most major being the series climax, in which Hawkeye (who was leading the team at the time) announced that the Thunderbolts were going to take down the Hulk.

Much of Nicieza’s early run owed something to Busiek’s plot notes, which is why the veteran writer retained a credit for several issues after. With events such as the return of The Beetle, the debut of MACH 2, the unmasking of Citizen V, the introduction of the new Scourge and the death of Jolt the early issues retained – indeed, recaptured – the pace of Busiek’s earliest stories. Although the opening 12 issues are considered classic, the latter half of Busiek’s run was comparatively limp – many of the book’s biggest events, in fact, occurred during the Nicieza/Bagley period.

Artistically, the book had been consistent ever since the series began. Bagley had drawn almost every issue, and his particular blend of superheroics and storytelling was then, as it is now, a joy to read. When Bagley was taken off the title to concentrate on his Ultimate Spider-Man run, he quickly became one of the industry’s top talents – or rather, people finally recognised him as such. Those of us reading Thunderbolts were already well aware.

For many years now, Marvel has treated the series rather like the red-headed stepchild of the Marvel Universe. While Busiek’s opening 12 issues garnered much acclaim, it was soon eclipsed by his work on the returned Avengers title. Nicieza’s run – explosive though it was, by the fans’ standards – never quite managed to get the book much attention. A cancellation was undone by a Busiek and Nicieza Avengers/Thunderbolts collaboration, and the relaunched book ticked over under Nicieza until it was handed to Warren Ellis and reworked into something massively successful – though perhaps not entirely similar to what came before.

In light of the rejuvenation of the brand, Marvel did little to remind people of the Thunderbolts’ more conventionally superheroic past. Even Busiek’s run – acclaimed though it was – has never been reprinted past issue #12. Nicieza’s run, even those issues with a name collaborator like Bagley – is unlikely to ever see print, if only because the second and third volumes required to get to it will end up slogging through Busiek’s weaker period first.

And yet the Nicieza/Bagley issues are arguably the title’s fasted-paced period, every one featuring a major event and interleaving several compelling plot mysteries. Although Nicieza eventually succumbed to his own predeliction for convoluted plots and pet characters, the run with Bagley, which ended in the title’s fiftieth issue, was incredibly entertaining.

It might not be revolutionary stuff – but if you’re interested in reading a companion to Busiek’s own Avengers run (which received a complete reprint in hardcover), the Thunderbolts of this period is the perfect book for it – not just because of the direct crossover, but because Songbird features in Avengers Forever, the Genis-Vell Captain Marvel of Avengers Forever guests in Thunderbolts, and the 2000 annual follows up on a Hawkeye/Mockingbird plot thread introduced in one of Busiek’s earliest Avengers stories. And best of all, it’s doubtlessly available on the cheap.

You don’t often have to look far in a comic collection to find an issue with a dramatic death scene. You do, however, have to look far to find one that stuck. You’re pretty much limited to Gwen Stacy, Ben Parker and this guy. Charcoal, the Burning Man.

Charcoal’s death is, admittedly, not that interesting in its own right. With the ability to turn into living carbon (riding the spectrum between charcoal and diamond), Charlie Burlingame’s death came at the hands of Graviton, who exploded him into tiny shards with his gravity-based powers. Although Charlie had the ability to reform when shattered, he never managed to pull himself together in this instance, and remains dead, even to this day.

What makes this death relatively unique is that it’s one of the few deaths that stuck for a reason beyond “no-one cared in the first place”. See, the character was created as part of a Wizard magazine “Create a Villain” contest. Charcoal won, and was written into Thunderbolts as a villain – and, given the book’s concept of villains reforming, he soon joined the team – a move as the creative team had always secretly intended to make.

Unfortunately, no-one at Wizard told the guy who won the competition that he had actually won it. And then they forgot to send him his additional prizes. And feeling slighted, he got in touch with Marvel, lawyers in tow, asking to be paid for the use of his character and granted ownership of him.

It’s not clear whether that worked, or whether the rights issues were resolved, but Fabian Nicieza, the writer at the time, had planned to kill off the character – so Brevoort, editor of Thunderbolts at the time, took this as an opportunity to veto the storyline that would involve his resurrection. As recently as this year, Brevoort re-iterated his anger at the situation on his Formspring page, saying that as long as he’s at Marvel, there’s no way the character will return – as much out of bitterness over what went down than because of legal reasons.

And that, I suppose, is why I like this death. First of all, it’s incredibly simple on the page. He just gets exploded in the heat of battle, and it knocks everyone for a loop. It’s random and shocking, like death tends to be, assuming the person in question is under about 60 years of age. More than that, though, it’s got a meta-story behind it that’s far more interesting than the usual “deaths generate sales” reasoning. In any creative industry, context means a lot – and this is an event with a lot of context behind it.

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At the time of publication, this the plotline for the first issue of Fabian Nicieza’s crossover with Mike Carey’s X-Men seemed a rather odd choice. With Cable’s utopian island state being ripped apart by a rampaging bio-weapon, the stage seemed set for an action-packed arc to win over visiting readers from the more popular title. Instead, the writer delivered a reflective and strangely mournful piece, largely set within Nathan Summers’ own mind. With hindsight, however, Nicieza’s preoccupations are all-too apparent.

The end of Carey’s most recent issue had seen Cable agreeing to merge with a psionic parasite, restoring his telepathy and enabling him to fight Hecatomb, with the visiting team’s physical powers obviously no match for the creature. Nicieza rewinds matters slightly, moving back to show Summers musing whether to go through with the deal. His thoughts follows a rather unexpected path, musing that all his recent triumphs, establishing democracy in a fictional eastern European state, starting his Providence think-tank to encourage a new form of society and outwitting that US government’s bids to discredit him, were only possible because he had abandoned his telepathy and oversized guns. It’s a slightly far-fetched hypothesis, reliant on the notion that his psychic “cheating” worked against him, but the writer’s real thesis soon emerges. Nicieza later described Cable’s removal from his own book to participate in the Messiah Complex plotline as “faintly hysterical”, but there’s a tone of real wistfulness here, as the author know ledges that his more complex take on the character he helped define will soon be abandoned.

What seals the deal is the moment where Cable begins to reflect on whether some outside force is governing his life, manipulating into playing the “grizzled, gun-totting tough guy” every time he tries to grow out of his niche in the X-universe. There’s no fourth-wall break here, as Summers’ reflections are clearly crouched in sci-fi language, and such elemental beings showed up fairly regularly in Cable’s solo title. For all that, the attack on Marvel’s editorial policy is unmistakable, with the writer clearly irked by the dismissal of the mix of geopolitics, espionage and super heroics that had become the character’s modus operandi. Nicieza had clearly received his own glimpse of his time-traveller’s future, reduced to a plot device in his own book and forced to regress into a Leifield-esque terminator analogue. Cable & Deadpool #40 is an unexpectedly sobering read, and leaves a striking glimpse of the cost of investing creative energy in a character whose destiny is in the hands of others.

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The omens weren’t good. It’s unreasonable to expect any writer, no matter how experienced, to produce their best work when parachuted at the last minute into a long-running series. Especially when that series is just starting to feed into one of the most intricately prepared comics epics of the last few years. Despite these handicaps, Robin #175 is a slick piece of work from Fabian Nicieza. But there are still a number of weaknesses, in concept, if not execution. Nicieza appears to view the issue as a jumping-on point, both for the Robin series and Batman R.I.P. as a whole. The former is a perfectly logical assumption- many casual readers of the franchise will be picking up this book to gain an additional perspective on Grant Morrison’s dreamlike saga, and the writer is understandably trying to hook them into Tim Drake’s ongoing adventures. The second of these two missions, however, is rather questionable. It’s not that Nicieza’s work is defective, as he skilfully uses Robin’s state of mind as an excuse for flashbacks that emphasise the importance of Batman’s Thogol meditation exercise. He’s also able to re-introduce the Black Casebooks and isolation chamber experiment that have loomed large through Morrison’s run on Batman, providing a handy primer for those walking into the climax of the long-seeded tale.

The difficulty is that the pages of Robin are hardly the place to which casual readers will turn for such explanations. It’s far more likely that they will simply head straight for the core books, passing over the adjuncts to the line. The writer is correct in viewing R.I.P. as an opportunity to expand Robin’s readership, but seems to overlook the fact that the influx will predominantly be from those already versed in the Gotham status quo and looking to round out their understanding of R.I.P., rather than non comics readers intrigued by The Dark Knight (which does not feature a Robin). It’s also rather jarring that certain areas of Batman R.I.P. have been clearly listed as off-limits for the book. Morrison has suggested that the existence of Damian is the primary factor in the wedge between Tim and his mentor, and it feels distinctly odd that Drake’s thoughts never dwell on Bruce Wayne’s illegitimate son. It might be argued that Robin is deliberately ignoring this unwelcome presence in his life, but the copious first-person narration provides any number of opportunities for a retracted mention of the cuckoo in the nest.

The issue’s art is strong, with Joe Bennett proving his adeptness with facial expressions, and Guy Major’s colours help tie the chapter into its parent story. The central plot moves quickly, and Nicieza does a good job of solidifying Tim’s state of mind, although it’s hard to shake the impression that Morrison will cover similar ground in a couple of panels at some point. It’s a competent piece of storytelling, but it’s hard to imagine the Nicieza’s imagined audience getting as far as picking the book up.

download aliens vs predator requiem dvdrip Every Wednesday we take turns to delve into our trusty longboxes, pluck out a dusty back issue, and give you our thoughts. We’ll also try and place it in the context of the time it was originally published.

With X-Men: Legacy promising to return to Carter Ryking and the Almagordo, I’m going to take this opportunity to review one of the comics I coincidentally picked up in Bristol – X-Men #12, which features the first appearance of Carter Ryking.

While I recently remarked that Secret Invasion: Fantastic Four was taking an impressive leap of faith by bringing back Lyja, a character who has been virtually ignored for literally 11 years since she was written out of the Fantastic Four’s supporting cast. Carey is going one better, bringing back plot elements that only occurred in two issues of X-Men almost 16 years ago (though Carter Ryking did appear in 2 issues of Gambit a mere decade ago!). I was 10 when X-Men #12 was published! And that’s why I love X-Men Legacy.

Still, we’re not here to talk about Carey. X-Men #12 opens with a panic at Carter Ryking’s containment facility. He’s having a seizure which involves a lot of electomagnetic energy being thrown around, brought on by news of his Father’s death. Back at the X-Mansion, we’re seeing some of that X-Men downtime that used to be so popular, including a brief nod to the current big soap opera storyline of Cyclops having guilty thoughts about everyone’s favourite nimbo, Psylocke. Meanwhile, the Professor is training Jubilee in the danger room when it’s dramatically interruped by Wolverine.

While dramatic, it does strike me as a hilarious moment – the idea that Wolverine snuck into the Danger Room to make his point, rather than go to the Professor in the control booth, but that’s the kind of 90s exxxtreme action that comics were about then. If it looked cool, it didn’t have to make sense. Wolverine started ranting about files he’s found that suggest Xavier has been keeping information about his past from him. His explanation for discovering the file is itself side-splitting – Wolverine says he was looking for access codes for “the computer work I’ve been doing.” Frankly, the idea of Wolverine doing computer work brings tears of laughter to my eyes. What was he doing, making a spreadsheet of Weapon X facilities? Wolverine at the office? Comedy gold.

Elsewhere, Carter Ryking escapes! And he’s upset. The Professor and Logan make up and discuss the information Wolvey found about Almagordo and Xavier’s father’s work there, and how it might relate to Weapon X. When Xavier sees news of the elder Ryking’s death on TV, they decide to go to the funeral and investigate. Xavier muses a little over Ryking’s death, and the funeral is then attacked by an insane Carter. Recognising Xavier from his childhood, he reveals that he was the one who sent the file that led to Almagordo, and Kidnaps Xavier. As the issue closes, the X-Men discuss the next step with Val Cooper, and my fanboy buttons are pushed when she offers to “scramble in X-Factor.” The X-Men decline, and say that they’re headed to Almagordo. Cliffhanger!

90s ridiculousness aside, this is the X-Men exactly how I remember it. Soap opera, intrigue and mutants upon mutants upon mutants. I always enjoyed Nicieza’s take on the team. While Ryking isn’t exactly the greatest character, this issue reads like an utter prototype for X-Men: Legacy, with Xavier taking the spotlight to investigate his past. Art Thibert gets the art credit, and since he’s best known for inking I’m unsure if he just did some very, very strong breakdowns over someone else’s pencils, or if he actually took the lead. In any case, it’s a bit of an indentikit Jim Lee/Andy Kubert mashup, as was the X-Men style at the time, and if I hadn’t checked I might even have suggested it was one of them.

At this point, X-Men was the industry’s biggest title, and deservedly so. Even with all the 90s-isms heaped upon it, this issue stands as a fairly good read when similar stuff from this era is complete, unmitigated toss. It’s a rare artifact indeed – a 90s superhero comic that you might actually benefit from re-reading.

Every Wednesday we take turns to delve into our trusty longboxes, pluck out a dusty back issue, and give you our thoughts. We’ll also try and place it in the context of the time it was originally published.

With the new series of X-Force riding high on the charts, it almost feels like the 1990s again. So, I figured, why not go and see what the 1990s actually felt like? Rob Liefeld plots and draws, Fabian Nicieza scripts, and as I recall, a lot of New Mutants fans get very, very upset and what’s being done to their characters.

Rising from the ashes of New Mutants, X-Force #1 features the former New Mutants as they strike out on their own under the guardianship of the still relatively new character, Cable. The idea behind X-Force is that Cable thinks the X-Men are too reactive, and he wants to train the new guys to go out there and fight the mutant threats before they cause trouble. It’s actually a pretty good idea, and one which applies (more or less) to the current incarnation of the team.

Now, with a solid idea, we then introduce Rob Liefeld into the equation. He’s a real divisive figure. You either love his work, or you hate it. And if you love it, you are objectively wrong. Nonetheless, something about his artwork appeals to some section of people, and he’s made a career out of being a severe unit shifter, so bafflement aside, he was justifying his appearance by making X-Force one of the biggest selling debuts of all time, as it hit the stands during what was already one of comics’ biggest sales periods ever, and shattered records.

The comic is partially redeemed by Nicieza’s script, though I’d hate to think how it felt plotting over Liefeld’s pencils. The story opens with a trademark incomprehensible fight scene, though it does actually show X-Force doing what they planned – taking the fight directly to the MLF in their own base. There’s some really painful dialogue going on, though this sort of thing was as stylistic in the 90s as Bendis-style naturalism and decompression are now, so it’s hard to blame it too much. Eventually, Stryfe and some of the MLF escape, and then there are a few disconnected scenes showing various parties reacting to the aftermath of the battle. Mixed in is a scene with Sunspot, who wasn’t in X-Force at this point, hanging out with Gideon, one of those long-forgotten 90s villains with no personality or motivation worth remembering. The book ends with Bridge calling in Department K and… WEAPON X! Unfortunately, next issue this turns out to be Deadpool, or Kane, or someone else who isn’t Wolverine. Ah well.

Truly, this comic doesn’t remotely compare with modern standards. It looks horrible, and even Nicieza’s dialogue can’t save it. The title makes the frankly odd pacing decision of opening with a massive fight scene and ending with a bunch of subplot advancements. The one thing I enjoyed about re-reading this was seeing Zero, Stryfe’s mute teleporter who was, back in the day, quite a cool character. Probably because he looked really badass, but never did anything. Unfortunately, he lived up to his name, and continued to never do anything before he died in an issue of Excalibur, of all the places to make your exit.

Truly, reading X-Force one was a horrible experience that I do not wish to re-visit. The modern incarnation is much better, probably because it’s got Wolverine in it, not a sprawling cast of under-developed nobodies. X-Force #1 is so abundantly available, you can probably find a copy for 25p. Try to save your money.