Ellis & Deodato, Jr. on Thunderbolts

Thanks to Newsarama

Issue #110 will be the first for Ellis & Deodato, Jr.

Ellis is at his best when dealing with anti-heroes, so I have to assume he'll be just as good when writing non-heroes. On the other hand Ellis does his best work when he's not too encumbered by continuity, which this book will probably be dripping in.

Deodato is hit or miss for me. Every now and then he draws a book that blows me away, but all too often his work seems blah.

But the thing that really sold me was a quote from Mark Millar:

My idea for Thunderbolts, very simply, was that it should employ the same strategy as New Avengers and JLA in that if we have a team, why not make it the A-Team in the sense that they're all recognizable names? Sure, these guys would be harder to control, but that also takes the story in interesting new directions. I really started to see the Marvel Universe in terms of pre and post-Civil War and the Thunderbolts line-up was one of the big changes.

They could have gone the Suicide Squad route and stocked the team with D-listers*, but they went whole hog and put big names on the team and even bigger names on the marquee. A job well deon Marvel.

*(This was in no way a shot at the Suicide Squad, which was a great book, but when your big names are Deadshot and Captain Boomerang you're not exactly playing with the big boys)

RANT: Civil War Thoughts

Civil War is starting to piss me off. I'm warning you now that discussion of this week's releases, including ASM #535, Civil War Frontline #6 and others will follow. So read the rest of this post at your peril.
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Joe Quesada, Tom Brevoort, Mark Millar and a host of others have been saying for almost a year that Civil War would tell a balanced story. Both sides would be shown as principled, neither side would be 'the bad guys'. Well a little more than halfway throrugh the event and Marvel's braintrust has been revealed to be bold-faced liars.

Think I'm being too harsh? Here are some examples of just how badly the Pro-Registration side has been acting.

EXAMPLE - Amazing Spiderman 535. Reed Richards tells of a beloved uncle, a writer, called before Joesph McCarthy's HUAC committee. Reed's uncle refused to testify, was blacklisted and died a broken man soon after. Okay nothing too crazy there, until you see that Reed is using Uncle Fantastic to illustrate that nobody is above the law. So JMS' example of why you should respect the rule of law is an uncle that flipped McCarthy and HUAC the bird? Why not go whole hog and put him in the S.S. and show him "just following orders" as an example. There are literally dozens of examples I could have come up with to illustrate why you should comply with the law, and I'm not a professional writer. Why would JMS use what is clearly, other than the Nazi scenario I cited, the worst possible analogy imaginable? Because he isn't really interested in showing Iron Man's side in anything approaching a positive light.

EXAMPLE - Civil War 4, AMS 535 & Frontline 6. The Negative Zone prison. Tony gives Peter a tour of the facility and makes it very clear that the people there are there for the duration. Since the prison isn't on American soil you have no rights once you're there. Now for the moment I'm going to ignore the ham-fisted polemics about modern American policy here (that's a rant for a different day) and focus on the subtle details. In both instances where the Prison is shown, ASM and Frontline, several inmates are clearly identified. All are in small, dank cells with dirt floors and will remain there until they Register or die. All of them are characters we would, previously, called 'good-guys'. Why? Why not show some of the bad guys that refuse to register when we tour the prison? Because all of the really bad apples have been recruited into the new Thunderbolts. The Pro-Reg side has the 'good guys' sleeping on dirt floors, while simultaneously drafting the baddest of the bad into a Cape-Killer unit. Jenkis and Straczynski could have shown someone, say The Absorbing Man, that truly deserved to be incarcerated for life. Instead they only show heroes at the detention center. Why not just show Iron Man and Mr. Fantastic runnning over kittens while you're at it.

There are a ton of other examples I could make. But when you get right down to it every time Quesada or Millar or anyone else at Marvel tells the public that they give both sides equal shrift they are lying.