Dec 1
House to Astonish Presents: The Lightning Round Episode 28
Posted on Monday, December 1, 2025 by Al in Podcast
Paul and I hit a major milestone this episode, as we reach the end of the first run of the original Thunderbolts team, and cover issues 72-75. There’s fighting, arguments, and weird things exploding, and that’s just the behind the scenes escapades of Bill Jemas. Will all the TBolts survive? Will they all get off Counter-Earth? Will they all make it to the next volume of the book? Find out the answers to two of these questions right here, true believer!
Next up, it’s the Homies, so look out for a post on that in the next few days. And then… sigh… it’s Fightbolts.
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!
It good timing that you reach the end of V1 of Thunderbolts the same time as Jay and Miles end X-force, the successful experiment in rebranding that may have led to Fight bolts.
This does not feel like it was meant to be an ending with so many loose-ends but New Avenger / Thunderbolts will pick up most of them. Which as confusing when I first read having not read any Thunderbolts since Busiek left.
I’m not sure Paul noticed Al’s subtle Red Dwarf gag, but I enjoyed it.
This is well past the point I gave up on the book. I didn’t pick it up again until Ellis was writing.
@Daibhid C I also appreciated it.
So just how bad was Fightbolts?
It wasn’t bad. It just had the misfortune of being rolled out as a replacement Thunderbolts concept instead of being rolled out as its own thing. That Kurt Busiek quote they used as a cover blurb was incomplete. Although he did say he thought it was good, he went on to say that he’d have given it a new #1 and a different name entirely (“Beatdown” was his suggestion).
There was also the questionable decision to put scantily clad women in sexy poses on all of the covers.
Marvel must have convinced themselves that their decision to completely redo X-Force reinvigorated the title meant that it was a workable way to increase sales. The problem is that the Milligan X-Force was playing off of the old X-Force team when the new team debuted.
This was shoving an entirely different series into a cancelled series. It was bizarre logic. It’d be like deciding to cancel the Avengers and publish Howard the Duck in the title.
The fact that it lasted all of six issues shows how well it fared. I’d have called it Grapplers, as that was an existing Marvel group, and it’d have been a callback to the fact that Melissa Gold debuted as Screaming Mimi with the Grapplers. Even though Songbird was gone, it would have created a thematic resonance for the new name and direction if Marvel was concerned about having too many new #1 issues back then. Which, Marvel just had no idea about where the company was going in that regard.
Ah, the Warren Ellis and Andy Diggle runs on Thunderbolts were so great.
I’d have called it Grabass.
Pretty sure the fightbolts replacement idea came from incoming editor Andrew Lis. Think he wanted to be the next Axel Alonso whose track record was pretty good at the time. Besides this debacle, Lis also shooed Gail Simone off Deadpool. I recall industry commentators on CBR and so forth making fun of his stellar track record. I don’t believe he lasted at Marvel for terribly long afterward.
This is the first comic I remember being upset enough to see it go that I sat on the final issue for a week before I could bring myself to read it.
I was a casual pal of Andy’s when he still at one of the comic shops in suburban Philly. Dont know if I ever talked to him once he went to Marvel/NYC, except maybe when he was (briefly?) married to a cartoonist online pal I talked to at the time.
(Whoops, my apologies, I hit the wrong button)
The Karla/Hallie stuff really is wonderful.
Chris Batista was a penciler that I always liked, but the Spaceknights mini with Starlin that you mentioned last ep was so gorgeous and so very much made in a lab for ke that I always just wanted hin to do more space robot fights.
Y’all talking about Nicieza’s tendency to overvomplicate led me to try and fail (my web search skills are admittedly bad for finding individual 20-year-old usenet posts) to find an old X-Axis post in which Paul reviewed an issue of Cable&Deadpool during the Commcast/Black Box arc. If my memory is not completely gone, he said something to the effect that a Nicieza character would never walk to the store to buy milk when they could steal a device that opens a portal into the grocery store fridge, and then Fabian agreed and threatened to use it himself as a selling point.
Did you say a white hole is sucking things in? That’s black hole territory. If white holes exist, they do the opposite, vomit matter out. I know it’s not the first or probably the worst violation of physics in comics, but did Nicieza not bother with any research at all?
I remember thinking at the time that the Andy Diggle run read like a lesser version of Ellis’s, but that was 15 years ago.
(I also remember being angry that Songbird had nothing to do with Osborn’s fall in Siege, despite being set up in Thunderbolts to do something, anything to help take him down. But that’s on Bendis / editorial.)
On the other hand, I have very fond memories of the Jeff Parker T-Bolts/Dark Avengers run, but that also was many years ago and I never read those books again.
If you think Nicieza‘s plotting here can get convoluted, just wait till New Thunderbolts.
Diggle’s run was very much influenced by Ellis’, but Diggle made the Ghost into my favourite character in the Marvel Universe, and I’ll always have love for the Digglebolts because of that. Then, no one else ever did anything interesting with the character again after the Dig.
Parker’s run was fine. I’ll take it or leave it. It could be fun. Though, he decided to give the Ghost a completely unnecessary and completely generic origin story which did more harm than good. So, that lowered the Parker run compared to Ellis or Diggle, in my eyes.
@Joe- Nicieza did do research into a white hole- in Marvel conitinutiy. During Operation Galactic Storm Carol Danvers was able to use a white hole to “vacuum up” antimatter that was threatening the sun. So in the Marvel Universe, white holes suck things in. Nicieza apparently thought of that story when he wrote those issues of Thunderbolts. Sometimes there can be a conflict between continuity and scientific accuracy.
https://groups.google.com/g/rec.arts.comics.misc/c/3b1rXtUtjog/m/5qwk-b4VWNAJ
“At this point, one of Nicieza’s recurrent writing flaws rears its head again – his inexplicable love of overly complicated macguffins which seem like the result of a bastard collaboration between Jack Kirby and Heath Robinson. It sometimes seems like a Fabian Nicieza character will never simply pop down to the shops to buy some milk when he could use a subcutaneal nanoimplant to send arcanopsychic signals to a hidden icon in a supermarket fridge which will open a bacterial portal through which milk will be telekinetically relocated in hard-light form to a pocket holding dimension located in an occipital interstitiality whence it may be drawn down with the use of an experimental computer program held on three separate computer discs located in Bangkok, St Petersberg and the Sea of Tranquility.”
Couldn’t find a response from Nicieza.
Oh wait, found it:
https://groups.google.com/g/rec.arts.comics.marvel.xbooks/c/3b1rXtUtjog/m/LmIZ9moU-ZEJ
Brian Doyle: “LOL!
Sorry FabNic if you read this, but if that weren’t so long, I’d use it as my signature quote… :)”
>
Fabian: “Quite all right. I laughed harder than you did. I respect anything Paul has to say, positive or good-natured negative. Besides, he’s like a lawyer, right? So, take it all with a grain of salt…
😉
Personally, Kruch’s plan made perfect sense to me…”
Also, just so that I don’t make a million comments, here’s a comment Nicieza made about the end of Thunderbolts.
https://groups.google.com/g/rec.arts.comics.marvel.universe/c/lPAUOc5qmHU/m/cWLeWbS6wI4J
Shawn Hill: “It’s the thunderbolts. They wouldn’t have done it by force (like Authority), or by assumed superiority (the Order), but by deception. The trick would have been seeing if they got found out before they succeeded.”
>
Fabian: “Exactly what I had planeed. I hate talking about “what might have been” on books I used to write, but I will say that the planned opening for #76 followed seconds after the end of #75 with all the characters staring at Zemo for a beat, shrugging their shoulders, then walking out of the room to do other things, with Zemo left going, “What? What did I say?”
And the stories about “taking over the world” would have sprung from the standpoint that they KNEW they never would — but thought they knew how to “save us from ourselves.”
As much as I enjoyed Squadron Supreme and Authority, it wouldn’t have been like either.”
“Couldn’t find a response from Nicieza.”
Probably an angry email to Paul demanding to know how he hacked into his laptop and got a look at one of his upcoming plots.
Thanks, Michael. I know I shouldn’t expect much scientific accuracy in comics, but I’m still disappointed. Ah well.
For more information on white holes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxWN8AhNER0
Also, just for the record, it’s extremely unlikely that white holes exist in reality. If matter and energy can never flow into them, there’s basically no way they can form.
White holes. Pfft. And they’re not even real. Just more whitewashing. Black holes matter.
I’m sorry I fell off but I’ll definitely be back for Fightbolts, The Comic Of All Time