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Review: Thunderbolts #158

By | June 3rd, 2011
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Written by Jeff Parker
Illustrated by Kev Walker

FEAR ITSELF TIE-IN! When the Fear Itself hammer falls, The Raft is raised by one of its most powerful prisoners with a newfound weapon of the gods! Now the Thunderbolts will begin to learn the true meaning of FEAR ITSELF! Frank Tieri, Jen Van Meter & Joe Caramanga join series writer Jeff Parker to give us all side of the story as the Thunderbolts try to hold themselves and their world together against tide of anarchy!

The Thunderbolts have nothing to fear but Fear Itself. Get it? GET IT? More amazing jokes after the jump.

There’s a lot going on in this issue of Thunderbolts, make no mistake. Not only are we two issues into the saga of the beta team — the “Underbolts,” as Moonstone so affectionately coined last issue — but we’re also dealing with the impact of Fear Itself. Rather than take these two issues in isolation and focus entirely on them, though, Jeff Parker and Kev Walker decide to take these story complications and use them like baseball bats to smash the entire room up. At a rapid clip, the Thunderbolts are given enough material to subside on for at least a year. But it’s all a bit sudden, isn’t it?

Don’t get me wrong, Thunderbolts is one of my favorite books on the market. But every so often in Jeff Parker’s run writing it, I’ve thought: well, he could pick up the pace a bit, really. Well, shows what I know. While not quite reaching the fragmented bliss of Final Crisis’s breakneck pace, this issue of Thunderbolts roars forward and doesn’t even stop to think. More important than solving mysteries is making sure there are plenty of mysteries to solve: Who’s reanimating the dead in Iraq? What are they gonna do about Juggernaut? How many people died during the catastrophe that hit this issue? Where’s John Walker? Where’s Cage, for that matter? Et cetera, et cetera.


If there’s a problem with this, it’s that so much happening leaves precious little room for getting much in the way of character development, which is especially important when you’ve just added like six new people to the main cast. We get broad strokes: Mr. Hyde likes smashing stuff, Troll likes shouting and killing things, Boomerang and Shocker do NOT like being swarmed by zombies. Still, Juggernaut getting a page to himself to set up his big Fear Itself tie-in deal is all we really get that isn’t “people reacting to various bad things happening around them.” Far be it for me to backseat drive, but one of the best features of Suicide Squad was the annual-ish Personnel Files stories. Not exactly a perfect solution, but at this point, I really would like a reason to care about, say, Fixer, beyond “he’s a veteran, and he’s there.” Not everyone needs a solo spotlight like the Ghost, but anything is more than nothing.

There’s also the question of Fear Itself — now, I haven’t actually read any of that yet (Matt’s been writing the reviews, so I’ve felt free to slack off and wait until the whole thing’s done to read it then). The concern with these tie-ins is always “oh but if I don’t read this and sixty other things I won’t understand what’s going onnnnnn,” which is fair enough but thankfully not much of an issue here. A magic hammer falls from the sky, empowers Juggernaut, and he acts a fool and makes a huge mess. Then he flies off, presumably to appear in the main Fear Itself book. Good for him. The focus here stays more or less squarely on the Thunderbolts reacting to his deeds, though, keeping things from being too mired in crossover continuity — which automatically bumps the review score up by itself, I’ll admit.


Kev Walker is back on complete art duties this month, and he brings his usual strengths. Under his pen, the Thunderbolts fight their enemies with staggering, visceral power — Kirby-like in its bluntness and impact, but thoroughly betraying Walker’s 2000 AD roots in the way it doesn’t shy away from the more grisly side of people hurting each other. His beautiful understanding of how to use shadow is complemented perfectly by Frank Martin’s coloring, which takes us from the orange aridity of the desert to a wet, dark, cold night on what used to be the Raft, making us feel the shift in climate as much as the characters might.

In all, this is another successful issue of Thunderbolts, ending up neither saddled by the expectations of a summer crossover, nor broken under the weight of its own plot content. There are a lot of interesting places the book can go after this issue; let’s hope that visiting them is just as fun, but that we take a little time in the future to get to know who we’re traveling with.

Final Verdict: 8.0 / Buy


Patrick Tobin

Patrick Tobin (American) is likely shaming his journalism professors from the University of Glasgow by writing about comic books. Luckily, he's also written about film for The Drouth and The Directory of World Cinema: Great Britain. He can be reached via e-mail right here.

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