Radio Songs: Faith in Monsters

Ugh. My air conditioning died on Friday, and now I’m hot and sticky and uncomfortable. Short article today cuz my arms are sticking to the desk.

The Inmates are Running the Asylum

Today I pulled a random TPB off my shelf, and ended up with Thunderbolts: Faith In Monsters. It’s written by Warren Ellis and drawn by Mike Deodato Jr., and takes the TBolts in a new and… interesting… direction. I originally picked it up during TBolts week of the MUN preview season because I was unfamiliar with this new direction for the ‘Bolts and found it a little confusing to see actual villains on the team, and grabbing the TPB seemed like the easiest way to brush up.

Format

The TPB I’m looking at today collects TBolts issues 110 through 115, as well as a one-shot called “Thunderbolts: Desperate Measures”, and some backup stories from a couple Civil War things (CW: Choosing Sides, and The Initiative). Cover price is $19.99 US or $32.00 CAD, but I got mine for US cover price because of the laughable value of the US Peso when I picked it up.

Story

The story takes place during all that Civil War crap– the government wants heroes to register, and those who don’t are hunted down. Well, the TBolts are the ones who do said hunting. Now, you’d expect that the team dispatched to do that job would be made up of Pro-Reg’s best and most trustworthy supes, but you’d be incorrect– someone in the government decided that the best way to hunt down heroes is to violently coerce a bunch of psychotic supervillains to do it for you.

Now that, in and of itself, is only as ridiculous as anything else in comics, so I guess I can buy it. Personally I would’ve picked villains of the NON-psychotic variety since they’d be easier to control, but hey… I guess that’s why they didn’t hire me to consult.

So, okay. You’ve decided to hire dangerously unstable people to work for the government– I assume, then, that you’ll at least be putting them under the control of someone you know and trust, someone who you can be sure will work in the government’s interest, and who will command their respect and get them all to behave.

You… should really stop making these assumptions.

No, instead of doing something that makes sense, the government appoints two people in charge of the team (one at home base, and one leader in the field). The people they choose to fill these roles? Why, none other than Tommy Lee Jones, who you may know from his previous career of throwing bombs at people from a glider while cackling like a madman, and the amoral Karla Sofen, who uses her psychiatric training to manipulate people for her own gains.

And this, folks, is where they kinda lost me. The “villains as a shock team” concept has been done before, so that’s not too unbelievable. But if you look at the previous incarnations of it (Suicide Squad, The Dirty Dozen), you’ll see one thing in common: there’s always a solid, trusted authority figure in charge of it. If you can’t trust your troops, you can be sure that’ll mean you need to trust your generals even more than usual. So Ellis’ decision to put psychopaths in charge of psychopaths, while certainly a “new twist”, makes no goddamn sense. NOBODY in their right mind would EVER do that, and it completely tore me out of the story. Every issue or two, they’d do something completely ridiculous, and all I could think was, “Why isn’t anyone stopping them? Why is the public buying this?”

So, the premise of the book is laughably stupid, but if you can ignore it, the series’ events, especially the antics of the “bit players”, are pretty entertaining. The TPB covers two of the team’s “missions”– in the first one, they go after a guy named Rick Flagg (are we supposed to have heard of him? Cuz I haven’t…), which ends up being an entertaining arc because Moonstone’s inept leadership causes the team to get their asses kicked by this C-string hero. It’s a lot of fun to watch them fail like that.

The second mission starts like the first one– they’re given an unregistered hero (Steel Spider, who, again, I’ve never heard of) to arrest, and they run out to find him. As it happens, though, two other unregistered heroes are in the area when the TBolts show up to arrest the Spider, so there’s a big brawl between a bunch of good guys who don’t know or like each other and are being painted as villains, and a bunch of villains who don’t know or like each other and are being painted as heroes. It’s basically just a large brawl, with both sides taking sizeable hits, and ends with a one-on-one duel that really didn’t end how I expected.

The backup stories really confused me at first, because I didn’t know I was leaving the main series and jumping to backups, so the transition was kind of awkward. The stories in the backups aren’t very notable– the art in the last one is decent enough, but otherwise, they’re just filler, and they don’t really do much to flesh out the characters.

Overall, I think Ellis must knows how ridiculous his premise is, but he’s decided to accept it and move on to the “how does everyone react” stage of the story. And from that point of view, the story is pretty good. The characters are entertainingly dysfunctional for the most part, and the fights are well-paced and don’t end how you’d expect them to. And as I said before: it’s really fun to watch the TBolts lose a fight. Ellis makes it pretty clear that the people we’re watching are just bad guys running a scam, so we can rejoice guilt-free in their failings.

Art

Deodato’s art is really solid. Unlike a shockingly large number of artists working today, he pays attention to keeping his basics straight; his anatomy is consistently good, his faces are well-drawn and don’t arbitrarily change from panel to panel, and the action scenes are blocked out very well and have a lot of energy. I’m also going to applaud his great use of light– he sculpts out forms with huge black pools, which gives his characters a satisfying heft.

He also seems to be working closely with the colourist, Rainier Beredo. There are a lot of spots where there’s obviously supposed to be a detail line, but drawing it in black would be too dark, so the duty to carve out the “extra” refined detail falls to the colourist, and he does a fantastic job of it. The transition from the inks to the colours is seamless, to the point where I at first assumed it was one artist doing both. The colours finish the ideas the inks start, instead of fighting with them for supremacy, or instead of simply “being there” and ignoring the extra definition work that’s required and calling it “the inker’s job”.

Just some great work overall.

The covers to the main series also deserve a mention– the godlike Marko Djurdjevic does his usual breathtaking job and turns out some really striking covers. I am soooooo glad Marvel picked this guy up… I just don’t have words to fully describe my awe of his work. I’ve started buying random comics that he does covers for that I have no intention of reading– I just like having the covers to look at.

*swoons*

Overall

Ridiculous premise, but decent enough story, backed up by solid art. For anyone who can suspend disbelief better than me, it’s a good read.

“There’s nothing less frightening than the world’s greatest marksman with nothing in his hands.”

Obviously, we just got a full team feature for these guys, so there’s no point in me trying to outdo those. Instead, I’m going to focus on one character that this series just made me fall in love with: Bullseye. I love me some hopeless psychopaths, and Bullseye comes close to Joker-level instability. I’ve never seen Bullseye written the way he was in this series… he’s a living monument to death. He thinks about nothing else than what he could do to kill everyone around him, all the time. It makes me wonder how he ever put up with being the Kingpin’s lackey– wouldn’t he just tire of him one day and kill his boss?

Aaaaanyway. Bullseye is the effing man in this series, and since he got the short stick in MUN by being left off the Crime Lords team entirely, I figured I’d give him his due and see how I’d do him as a Legend.

Alrighty, that’s me for this week. I’m gonna go call the Air Conditioning place again… the repair dude’s late, and I’m swimming in my own juices at the moment.

That’s right… think about that. Visualize it. Let the image wrap around you and overwhelm you.

Spud Juices.

-Spud