“We are the Thunderbolts!” shouts Alexei Shostakov the Red Guardian in the trailers for the next MCU entry Thunderbolts*. “We can’t call ourselves that,” responds an exasperated Bucky.
It’s a weird exchange, one that goes beyond the usual snarky humor that’s marked the Marvel Studios brand since nearly the beginning. Why, exactly, can’t they call themselves Thunderbolts? Who cares?
For most comic book fans, the answer is obvious. What he probably says is “we are the Avengers!” And Bucky, an Avenger in practice if not in name, objects. However, comic book readers know that Red Guardian is onto something. The Thunderbolts began as replacement Avengers and, for a short while, were the actual Avengers… or at least, the Dark Avengers. That weird history makes the Thunderbolts one of the more compelling additions to the MCU with potentially huge implications going into Avengers: Doomsday.
Justice… Like Lightning
The first incarnation of the Thunderbolts arrived in 1997’s Incredible Hulk #449 and launched into their own ongoing series a month later. Created by writer Kurt Busiek and artist Mark Bagley, the Thunderbolts presented themselves as a new superhero team who arrived to fill the gap left when the Avengers and the Fantastic Four were killed by the villain Onslaught (it’s a whole nerdy thing involving the X-Men and Franklin Richards that we don’t have time to get into right now).
In Thunderbolts #1, the new team quickly wins over the world by defending New York City from an attack by the Wrecking Crew. But as they celebrate back at their headquarters, swashbuckling leader Citizen V replaces his mask with a new one, a purple covering familiar to any long-time readers of The Avengers. He is Baron Zemo and the Thunderbolts are, in fact, classic Avengers villains: the Masters of Evil.
From that twist launched one of the most compelling Marvel series of the 1990s, as some Thunderbolts such as Atlas and Songbird took to the hero game, butting heads with Zemo. So good was the concept, in fact, that when Busiek and Bagley completed their story and left the book, other creators struggled to follow them and the series languished for about a decade. One incarnation focused on an underground fight club where Z-list baddies beat each other up. Another saw General Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross create a Suicide Squad-style team of supervillains seeking redemption by going on government black ops missions.
That is until 2009, when another major Marvel event gave the Thunderbolts a new lease on life.
Lightning Strikes Twice
Under the stewardship of writers such as Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Millar, Marvel of the mid-2000s was an unending series of major events, for better or for worse. First there was Avengers: Disassembled and House of M, in which the Scarlet Witch loses her mind, destroys the Avengers, recreates reality, and depowers most of the world’s mutants. Then comes Civil War which, like the third Captain America movie, sees the superhero world break into two factions, one led by Captain America and the other by Iron Man. With half of the heroes in prison or on the run, the shapeshifting alien Skrulls make their play for domination of the Earth in Secret Invasion.
Between the mess of Civil War and the failure to prevent the Secret Invasion, the Marvel Universe’s general public had lost its faith in superheroes. So when billionaire Norman Osborn, known to Spider-Man fans as the Green Goblin, kills Skull Queen Veranke live on television, he is elevated to the head of SHIELD and by extension governance over the Avengers.
Osborn didn’t have to look far to find his new Avengers line-up. He just rebranded the bad guys in the Thunderbolts Initiative and presented them as the Avengers. So Bullseye put on a purple mask and called himself Hawkeye; Venom made his tongue and teeth disappear and called himself Spider-Man; even Norman got into the action, taking Tony Stark’s armor and painting it red, white, and blue, calling himself Iron Patriot.
This version of the Thunderbolts debuted during Marvel’s Dark Reign event, a company-wide crossover that saw Osborn and all the villains seize control, sending even the heroes on Iron Man’s pro-registration side into hiding. It’s fitting, then, that the team’s adventures occurred in a series called Dark Avengers.
Dark Avengers is a fun, if imperfect, read. The chatty, verbose style that made Bendis’s Ultimate Spider-Man and Daredevil runs so fresh feels out of place on Dark Avengers, slowing down the major stakes of the story. Penciler Mike Deodato not only amps up the sexuality to embarrassing degrees (multiple panels in the first issue are composed with Carol Danvers’s butt front and center) but also makes the absurd decision to draw Osborn as Tommy Lee Jones with wavy hair.
Neither of those distractions undermine the central power of the Dark Avengers concept. Osborn has taken over the greatest superteam of all time to use for his own secretive ends. He’s even recruited the Sentry, a Superman-like hero with extreme mental illness, using the promise of a cure to keep the Golden Guardian of Good in his employ.
Heroes*
It’s easy to see the similarities between the Dark Avengers and the MCU Thunderbolts coming to theaters this week. The movie also takes place in a world without the Avengers and while Norman Osborn hasn’t yet made his official appearance in the MCU, Julia Louis-Dreyfus‘ Valentina Allegra de Fontaine has been gathering heroes for her own secretive ends. The MCU Thunderbolts have a very different line-up than that of the comics. Winter Soldier only became a mainstay a decade ago, and White Widow, Red Guardian, and even Contessa were recent add-ons to the team. But they’re still a morally gray group who don’t often get to be the heroes.
Will the Thunderbolts* succumb to Valentina’s plot to become the Dark Avengers? Will the final title card be a reveal that instead of “The Thunderbolts,” this whole time we have really been watching… The Dark Avengers?! Or will they embrace their better angels and earn the right to drop the asterisk from their name and become the New Avengers? We’ll find out soon.
Thunderbolts crashes into theaters on May 2, 2025.
The post The Dark Avengers Shadow Hanging Over Thunderbolts* appeared first on Den of Geek.
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