Jul 22
House to Astonish Presents: The Lightning Round Episode 26
Posted on Tuesday, July 22, 2025 by Al in Podcast
We’re on the home stretch of TBolts Volume 1, as we look at Thunderbolts #65-68. There’s a whole new squad of ‘bolts, a brand new costume for Moonstone and a fresh new minty taste (that’ll be the Verdant Green). Plus! The logistics of Hydro-Man’s stogie! The Continuity Sugababes! and the unfortunate wording of early 2000s soft drink ads!
The podcast is here, or available via the embedded player below. Let us know what you think, in the comments, via email or on Bluesky, and if you want one of our lovely shirts then we recommend getting it now while we reconsider what we’re doing with the Redbubble shop.
Huh, Marvel Unlimited have #68 before #67. I guess it doesn’t really matter with the split format.
Getting close to Fightbolts
RIP one time Peter Porker guest star Ozzy Ostrich.
Issue #65 is actually where I started reading Thunderbolts! Those recaps were welcome to me back then.
The Kents is a fantastic series, and the first thing I thought of when the ‘handwriting’ font was mentioned, but it’s not an Elseworlds. It’s a straightforward Western comic featuring Pa Kent’s ancestors.
Now I can’t help but imagine the people of Algeria getting an end-of-the-movie celebration as the Eiffel Tower dissolves from view and they know that, for the first time in their lives, they are truly free.
I agree with Paul’s point about the Jemas era. Sure, a significant percentage of it was bad, but at least it was interestingly (and memorably) bad. You can’t make an Milligan and Allred’s X-Force without the occasional Zimmerman’s Rawhide Kid, unfortunately.
It was a more memorable period for Marvel. I mainly have fond memories of it. The problem was that it may have happened too soon. Jemas mainly brought in writers from Vertigo Comics to increase the quality of a lot of books. The problem was that there weren’t enough quality name writers around at that time to take over an entire line of comics. So, we had names like Chuck Austen, or writers who were apparently friends with Jemas like Frank Tieri or Daniel Way bring given titles. Too bad Andi Watson didn’t do more work for Marvel.
Imagine if Jemas’ revamping of Marvel Comics took place after the indy comic scene was reinvigorated, with names like Gillen coming to Marvel. So, you could have had Morrison, Milligan, Jenkins, Ennis, Gillen, Carey (and some of the other indy greats) all at Marvel at one time, being given that level of creative control.
We could be talking about another “golden age” at Marvel instead of the Jemas era having a lot of positives but quite a few negatives also.
Andi Watson. Man, I haven’t heard that name in like a decade.
@Chris V – I think those guys were friends with Quesada actually, not Jemas.
But whatever. Whoever they were friends with kept them in jobs for longer than they should have. I recall Quesada issuing a very feeble defense of Chuck Austen in the face of all of that online criticism that he’d earned between the work he was doing and his public remarks. He said something to the effect of, “If I did business by what the Internet said, I’d be out of business.” He then referenced the online hostility Marvel was met with when they first announced the Ultimate line and the subsequent turnaround that occurred after the books started coming out.
But that was like comparing apples to oranges. With the announcement of the Ultimate line, that negativity was a case of fans having a knee-jerk reaction to the *idea* of something. Something they had yet to see in print. But in Austen’s case, I don’t recall any online negativity towards the announcement of Austen coming on to replace Joe Casey. Nobody was going to miss Casey, and Austen was still something of an enigma to Marvel readers back then. It was only after they’d read his work that they began complaining, not before. Totally different situation from the Ultimate thing where fans were fuming about it before they’d even read anything.
And even then, the fans didn’t start complaining about Austen straight out of the gate. His first arc wasn’t terrible. It sure went downhill fast from there, though. I don’t know (or want to know) what porn stars do for warm-up exercises before they begin shooting their scenes, but apparently Austen was similar to a porn star in that respect. He had to warm up first before he could really start sucking.
@Chris V
Tieri’s still in at Marvel though. He had a Sabertooth mini only a couple of months ago.
@Chris V- The problems with Jemas went WAY beyond some of the writers he went in. Breevort posted a memo on his Substack where Jemas proposed Ultimate-izing the entire Marvel Universe:
https://tombrevoort.substack.com/p/43-weaponized-nostalgia
Luckily he was gone before anything could happen.
Wasn’t there a bit of controversy around those “tobacco is wacko if you’re a teen” ads because they seemed to be promoting cigarettes as cool?
@Si – Yeah, it was the “…if you’re a teen” part of it that was the controversial bit because that particular phrasing appeared to frame smoking as an adult activity, and teens instinctively want to adult themselves up.
Those ads were sponsored by the tobacco industry, by the way.
Like the alcohol industry trying to discourage underage drinking or drunk driving. Bad PR for business.
I don’t know about the booze industry, but I think the government makes the tobacco industry sponsor those anti-smoking campaigns. Maybe the wording of the ad from that particular campaign was an act of passive-aggressive retaliation, lol.
Those ads suck anyway, regardless of how they’re worded. They need to stop with the health scare stuff. That doesn’t work on teens because teens think of themselves as invulnerable. If you really want to steer teens away from cigarettes, you have to know how to scare them. An ad that reads: “Smoking will make you dance like your parents.” ought to do the trick.
There was the “if you’re a teen” bit, but I half-remember them also including cartoon pictures of radical kids on skateboards and stuff as well, deliberately muddying whether “whacko” was a bad or a good thing. Maybe not.
And yeah, I agree, if you want to scare a teen, forget about illness, hit them in the self-esteem.
There was an ad with a cartoon of a radical kid on a skateboard…but with only one eye and his head flying off as he smoked a cigarette. I have no idea what that was supposed to represent, but it seems incredibly Freudian.
Cigarette smoking among youngsters has dropped precipitously since those ads were started, but the reason seems to be that e-cigarettes became much more popular. Which is the actual way to appeal to the younger demographic…creating the idea that something else is so much cooler and then having your friends take it up. Unfortunately, corporations are the biggest deciders of marketing cultural cool, otherwise youngsters today would be smoking tea leaves instead of addictive substances. Smoking tea leaves isn’t completely safe, but it’s not addictive and doesn’t contain the added chemicals. It was right there in that Aerosmith song.
At my workplace, the cigarette smokers are all 35 and older. All the folks in their 20s and early 30s are vapers. One guy alternates between the two.
“One guy alternates between the two.”
Tell him to get off the fence. Nobody likes both-siders.
Does anyone remember the “For every cigarette, there’s a Nicorette” ad from before vaping was cool? They were weird. Various scenes from movies that prominently featured smoking, reshot with a six-inch plastic wand. The result had me, a lifelong non-smoker, thinking “Huh, I guess smoking really is cool, because The Man With No Name now looks like an utter dweeb.”
Hi. I’m Québécois, and actually we do get to see the Eiffel Tower from here. But to do that, you have to look out from a particular window of the Charles-DeGaulle suite at Québec City’s Chateau Frontenac. Beware that the view can be obscured by a poutine storm, but just sing one or two Celine Dion songs and the storm should fade out.