Feb 2
House to Astonish Presents: The Lightning Round Episode 29
Posted on Monday, February 2, 2026 by Al in Podcast
It had to happen. And now, it finally has. It’s time for me and Paul to bite the bullet and step into the squared circle to take on Marvel’s Most Merciless, the Masters of Mayhem, the Mush-Mangling Mavens of the Marquis of Queensbury, the… Thunderbolts?
It’s Fightbolts time, but will they float like butterflies, or sting like bees?
The episode is here, or available through the player below. Let us know what you think, in the comments, on Bluesky, or via email.
The writing for the trade era did lead to a lot of poor pacing in a lot of books, Bendis got away with if because he was good a filler to stretch out his stories but this is not a good example. It seems odd that if writing for.collection there was not a satisfying final issue.
Super fight club is a good idea and has worked as subplot in the most recent She hulk run as a way to.let of steam.
It’s interesting that the biggest name in the comic after Spidey is Mac Gargan who would be a large part of the Ellis Bolts.
Speaking of decompressed comics I’ve been toying with revisiting the “Tsunami” era books…. because I’m a madman. Human Torch, Mystique, Runaways….
Tbolts fans were rooting for this relaunch to fail and Tbolts had become the kind of lower selling continuity heavy book Jemas wanted shot out of a canon along with X-Men the Hidden Years.
Some of those titles were pretty good. Mystique wasn’t bad at all. How can you go wrong with Brian K. Vaughan or Sean McKeever writing?
I really like that version of the New Mutants.
At least Namor got Andi Watson to write for Marvel, but yeah, better off reading his own series.
I remembered Robert Kirkman on Jubilee being part of that line also, but it’s not showing up on the list. Anyway, I liked that series too. It had a nice “indy” feel to it, different for a X-character book.
I definitely would never touch some of the other books again: Emma Frost (with their appealing to ephebophilia covers), that version of Inhumans (especially when you had the outstanding Jenkins series to choose from just a few years before), or (shivers) especially Venom…
I remember the Kesel/Young Human Torch being entertaining.
@Chris V – Kirkman’s Jubilee was a “Marvel Age” series.
Jubilee was (inexplicably?) part of the “Marvel Age” line along with (according to the GCD) MA Fantastic Four, MA Hulk, MA Spider-Man, MA Spider-Man Team-Up, Mary Jane, and a bunch of promo reprints. Though, seemingly the digests of Sentinel and Runaways were also released as “Marvel Age” titles. It only lasted from 2004-2005.
I’d guess that Jubilee was intended to be a Tsunami title (and maybe even was promoted as such), but the last Tsunami titles (Runaways #18 / Venom #18) came out 2004-09-22 and Jubilee #1 came out 2004-09-01 and I guess they didn’t want it to just be released as a “Marvel” title.
“Marvel Age” was replaced by “Marvel Adventures” in 2005.
Wolverine: Snikt! by Tsutomu Nihei was also a Tsunami title and one that would have actually sold to manga fans if Marvel hadn’t inexplicably published the collected edition as Wolverine Legends Volume 5 and then let it go out of print. Viz reprinted it in 2023.
Al’s wrong on 15-Love, that wasn’t until almost a decade later, in 2011.
I think I read it?
Yeah, I was getting confused with the fact that he co-wrote the Namor series that was part of the initial Tsunami line-up
15-Love was announced in 2003 and then sat unpublished for a long time.
https://groups.google.com/g/rec.arts.comics.marvel.universe/c/G4zhLVvtv7Y/m/rpzalIoAVbMJ
That comment thread about the cover of 15 Love is…. Um… Really something
It is…the problem I have when I see covers like the ones on Emma Frost or Trouble, is that I never think of comic books being aimed at younger females or even teenage males in the 21st century. I think of all the 40-something, maladjusted men I see every week frequenting the local comic shop. I’d like to give Marvel the benefit of the doubt or think that I’m just forgetting that the comic industry wasn’t quite so insular 20 years ago, but then I think I’m being too generous, and yeah, Marvel really was attempting to lure in single men in their 40s to buy these crappy comics with teen girls posing lasciviously on the covers.
Anyway, yeah, when I said “read Andi Watson’s own series”, I didn’t mean 15-Love. I meant something like the delightful Breakfast After Noon.
I don’t get it. Which of those 15 Love covers was the source of that discussion? I was just looking at 15 Love cover images online, and not a one of them stands out to me as being overtly sexualized or suggestive in any way. And I’m not a 40-something maladjusted man. I’m a 50-something maladjusted man. I have a decade more maladjustery experience, and yet those 15 Love covers all look pretty tame to me.
Oh, I’m not sure about that comic. I saw that someone had brought up Trouble (as they always tend to do), and it reminded me of the covers for Trouble and the old Emma Frost as a teenager series. I hadn’t actually heard of 15-Love before this thread.
Moo: Based on the conversation in that Usenet thread, I think there was a photo cover for 15-Love when it was originally announced (similar to the ones for Trouble). But by the time it came out (eight years later), they’d gone with more traditional drawn covers.
Of course, is there any evidence anywhere online of the original cover? I dunno. The link in the Usenet thread is on archive.org, but the actual cover isn’t saved.
You’re asking about an unused cover for a comic that literally nobody cares about from over twenty years ago. You’d have to look through some archive.org snapshots of comics news sites and see if you could find anything. (I could not.)
“You’re asking about an unused cover for a comic that literally nobody cares about from over twenty years ago”
I didn’t know it was unused.
Sorry if I came off as overly aggressive/critical towards you. That was not my intent! It was more just general frustration at the lack of documentation/archiving/preservation of old comics news websites.
Okay, now that I’ve finished the episode (and reread the issues). I originally read this shortly after it came out after digging the full run out of a dollar bin and kept hold of them for years because I liked the character and art. (And had no prior experience with the Thunderbolts.)
I think you’re right in that if this had been launched as a new series or had some tenuous connection to the previous Thunderbolts series it probably wouldn’t have done any better, but would have at least been remembered more fondly.
Until now I had no idea that Danny had never appeared before, I had assumed he was an actual established character. And I’m surprised he’s never showed up since then. I feel like “single dad recovering supervillain” is a character who could show up in something. Like, have him be working for the Kingpin or someone as a guard and then getting really mad that Spider-Man or Ms. Marvel show up. “I thought this was a real job! I have a 401k! And now you want me to fight Spider-Man? He’s a good guy!”
Armadillo on the other hand only had like 8 appearances before this but has shown up dozens of times since this series.
Jubilee was (supposed to be) an ongoing? I just happened to note in the last few days that Wikipedia says it was a limited series.
Retroactively. It was supposed to be an ongoing, but the sales were so bad that Marvel decided to cancel it after six issues. In order to save face (that a Kirkman comic was cancelled so quickly at Marvel, maybe? I’m not sure how big of a name Kirkman was at that point), Marvel a would then claim it was always supposed to be a six-issue mini-series.
Paul even has Jubilee listed under “Canceled Titles” as opposed to “Miniseries” on the old X-Axis site.
Maybe Marvel just didn’t want to admit that an ongoing series featuring a popular X-Men character wasn’t going to last as long as “The Brotherhood” did, so it suddenly became, “Oh, yeah. It was a miniseries all along. Yesiree. No early cancellation here.”