Thunderstruck

DC Comics don’t have the monopoly on telling stories that put the villains first. The mighty MARVEL house of ideas has its own take on a superhero team composed only of bad guys, but they didn’t go down quite the same path as DC’s infamous SUICIDE SQUAD. Let’s take a look at THUNDERBOLTS, an entirely different way to make bad guys look good…

- Ed Fortune

Thunderbolts roared into the pages of Incredible Hulk back in 1997, ten years after Suicide Squad hit the shelves of your local comics shop. The Thunderbolts weren’t initially marketed as a book about villains. The idea was that this was a new team of heroes and the fact they were actually old villains pretending to be good guys would be revealed over time.

The ‘90s were a perfect time for this sort of stunt. Back then, comic book heroes were incredibly exaggerated and each book was liberally peppered with huge chests, huge guns and huge amounts of angst and overly long monologues. Everyone pretty much expected heroes to misbehave, so bad behaviour from the good guys was par for the course. This time also saw Marvel experiment with killing off some of their more iconic (but poorly selling) lines. The crossover event Onslaught murdered the Fantastic Four and most of the Avengers. Of course, they came back. That’s how comic book heroes work.The initial Thunderbolts seemed to be an all new team of never-before-seen heroes, stepping up to fill in the gap left by the Avengers. In their initial appearance, they looked like a new (if a little arrogant) superhero team in the same sort of vein. The brainchildren of Kurt Busiek and Mark Bagley, the idea was to keep readers guessing for a big reveal. Busiek, who’s better known for his work on Superman, would return to the motif of villains turned heroes in his critically acclaimed series Astro City.