House to Astonish Presents: The Lightning Round Episode 24
We’re back in re-reading mode this time round, and we’re taking a look at Thunderbolts issues 60-62, as Marvel’s Most Wanted put the T in both TBolts and Teleported To counTer-earTh. What will our heroes do when confronted by the planet of doomed NPCs? What is the dark secret of Fixer’s terrible Tamagotchi? And how do power-dampening manacles work when your power is “big teeth”? All this and definitely some more, Thunderbuddies!
(We should have called this podcast Thunderstudies, shouldn’t we? Ah well.)
The episode is here, or available via the embedded player below. Let us know what you think, in the comments, via email, or over on Bluesky. And if you want a House to Astonish t-shirt that will make you look cool and keep you warm, then that’s a helluva coincidence, because we’ve got you sorted.
Believe it or not:
də-MOYN
Excited to hear the next batch of episodes. Doing my own read through a few months back it’s wild seeing how the new marvel house style begins to creep in.
Listening to the list of other places the Thunderbolts could have been sent, I thought a fun story could have been sending them to the Squadron Supreme Earth, albeit with a little timey wimey action so we could see them face off against the pre-mini series Squad, the Pre-Crisis JLA.
Joseph S, correct–though if there is a location with a French name in the midwest US, there’s an *excellent* chance it is pronounced nothing like French. (My wife banked for years with The Bank of Des Plains–dess playnez–to say nothing of Cairo (care-row) further downstate in Illinois (ill-e-noy).
The main reason I came to the comments was to point out that the original Counter-Earth adventures of Adam Warlock, Superstar, despite being a *very* heavy-handed commentary on Christianity, had nothing to do with Jim Starlin. The original WARLOCK run was mostly a Roy Thomas book–Mike Friedrich wrote the last couple of issues, but Thomas and Conway finished the story in a three-parter in INCREDIBLE HULK.
I remember Peter David talking about the “Heroes Return” mini-series on Usenet, soon after it was published. Paraphrasing from memory, he said that his original brief was “The world is ending, abandon ship!” However, he didn’t think that it was very heroic for the main characters to save themselves and leave everyone else behind, so he wrote the story a bit differently.
There’s a hint of that in issue 1, where a street evangelist is talking about Noah’s ark.
“And the Lord spoke unto Noah and told him he was going to destroy the earth! And Noah offered no arguments, but simply accepted the Lord’s word and saved himself! And some scholars feel Noah was less than pious, because he should have tried to argue with God, or to save his fellow man!”
In issue 4, they make a deal with Ashema (the Celestial). She tells them that if they all leave then this world can continue, but if any of them stay behind then the world will be destroyed. So, that way their consciences are clean, and once they get back to the 616 universe there’s nothing they can do to help the residents of Franklin’s world.
After Doom brings Franklin’s Earth into the 616 (as the new Counter Earth), I’d say it became more of a political question than a superhero issue, just because of the scope involved. I.e. this isn’t a case of rescuing a handful of people from a disaster: even after the floods, there are presumably millions of people on Counter Earth. Looking at real world politics, it’s sadly quite plausible that the governments on the main Earth wouldn’t want to take in that many refugees or spend extra money on foreign aid.