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Jun 10

Giant-Size X-Men: Thunderbird #1

Posted on Friday, June 10, 2022 by Paul in x-axis

GIANT-SIZE X-MEN: THUNDERBIRD #1
“And When There Was One”
Writers: Steve Orlando & Nyla Rose
Penciller: David Cutler
Inkers: José Marzan Jr with Roberto Poggi
Colourist: Irma Kniivila
Letterer & Production: Travis Lanham
Design: Tom Muller with Jay Bowen
Editor: Sarah Brunstad

John Proudstar is a character in a strange position. He was introduced along with the rest of the new X-Men line-up in Giant-Size X-Men #1 (May 1975). He was dead by X-Men #85 (October 1975). He appeared in a grand total of three issues. He didn’t even die fighting a major X-Men villain. He got himself killed trying to punch Count Nefaria’s aeroplane to death.

Now, viewed from 2022, it’s maybe a little unfortunate that Giant-Size #1 introduces a new multi-ethnic team and then promptly gets rid of both Sunfire and Thunderbird. But viewed in terms of a team dynamic, you can see the thinking. The team introduced in Giant-Size #1 has not one but three characters who are defined largely as grumpy, unco-operative types. You don’t need three of that character. Early Wolverine will do the job just fine. On top of that, Thunderbird’s main power is to be big and strong… on a team that already has Colossus. He’s an aggrieved ex-soldier… on a team that already has Wolverine. He does wilderness back-to-nature type things… on a team that already has Wolverine. To be fair, Wolverine only really grows into that last role a bit later on, but the point remains that you don’t need Thunderbird to cover this territory.

So if you weren’t thinking of diversity as a high priority – and in 1975, they weren’t – it’s entirely understandable that you’d see  Thunderbird as surplus to requirements. But of course, doing that turns him into a character who is iconically dead. It’s his thing. He’s dead. Technically he’s not the first X-Man to die in action; Professor X was killed off in the mid-60s, and when they brought him back, they retconned the Changeling into the role. But the Changeling has no iconic status. He’s an explanation, not a tragedy.

All of which raises a problem in the Krakoan era, when you have resurrection on tap. Or perhaps an opportunity. How can Thunderbird be iconically dead when a central part of the premise is that death has been conquered? The simple answer is to say that you can’t resurrect characters from before a certain point – which seems to have been the idea. But while the X-books have been generally good at keeping track of this sort of thing, they blew that one rather badly, partly by having Petra and Sway running around, but mainly by never clearly defining what the cut-off point was in the first place. It’s pretty obvious that some of the artists drawing crowd scenes had no idea.

Either way, once Trial of Magneto clears that problem aside, there’s no good reason not to resurrect Thunderbird. And ironically, now he a hook – he barely knows any of these people apart from his younger brother, he never grew beyond the surly bastard seen in his earliest appearances, he isn’t particularly invested in the X-Men, he’s surrounded by people who see him as a big deal in a history he knows nothing about. From his point of view, he’s skipped years of history and woken up in an unfamiliar near future which everyone keeps telling him is utopian. And he’s unconvinced about the whole idea of Krakoa, which is obviously a self-imposed reservation. (Really, there should be more characters with that concern, but if you’re going to keep it on the margins, John is a good choice to be raising it, for multiple reasons.)

Giant-Size X-Men: Thunderbird #1 is a straightforward story. John returns home to reconnect with his roots. The reservation is being plagued once again by Edwin Martynec, the mad scientist who was inserted into the Proudstars’ back stories in a couple of issues of X-Force. He’s not a particularly prominent villain, but he’s the only existing villain with any connection to Thunderbird’s back story, so fair enough.

It’s not 1975 any more, so this Thunderbird has a bit more reflectiveness in his interior monologue than he did back in the day. Plus, he’s among what he sees as his own people, even if they largely react to him as an outsider. But the core of the character remains unchanged: faced with a clearly recognisable villain, Thunderbird has a simple three stage plan. 1: Hit things. 2: ????? 3: Victory!

By the X-books’ standards this is fairly small-scale stuff, but that’s as it needs to be in a story which is mainly about John’s return home. It needs to be grounded for this to work, and Thunderbird’s a mid-powered mutant at best, so you can chuck the conventional cops at him and get an action sequence out of it. David Cutler’s artwork on this is great – a lot of this story depends on making the setting feel distinctive, which he does, but the acting is solid too. I like his redesign of the Thunderbird costume – a data page explaining the significance of the colour scheme might have been excessive, but it makes sense cast as John explaining to Jumbo what he’s looking for. Thunderbird’s long-lost grandmother is a lovely bit of character design too; her clothes get across enough about the character that her first panel has impact even though we’ve never seen her before.

There are some glitches. The story treats resurrection as public knowledge, or at least as something that John is entirely unconcerned about talking about, when the central plot of X-Men requires it to be a state secret. The ending is a little unsatisfying, too – fair enough, Grandma Lozen tells John that just smashing things up is not going to be the answer, but she doesn’t really have a clear alternative in mind. I’m not sure quite what to make of her giving him a speech about how he might be untouchable due to his mutant powers, but the people around him aren’t. Literally the most famous thing about  Thunderbird is not being protected by his mutant powers. You could read that as a problem. I’m willing to take it as dramatic irony, and I think it works quite well that way.

This is one of the better Giant-Size one-shots – a decent enough story, but more to the point, a solid restatement of the character to define the starting point for whatever’s going to be done with him in X-Men Red. Worth a read.

 

Bring on the comments

  1. Si says:

    The old X-Force story with Martynec is worth reading. It has a very different angle on the Proudstar brothers in flashback that nevertheless fits perfectly with what they become. And there’s an unintentionally hilarious carnival scene in the flashback, where a small midwestern fair somehow has fully half of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe in attendance, but all as civilians just hanging out, by coincidence, unknown to each other.

  2. Jenny says:

    I’m not so much sure the kids are talking about “coming back from the dead” as specifically the Five-style resurrection, but more in a general “superheroes have been coming back all the time from the dead.”

  3. Jos says:

    Paul, there’s a typo. It should be X-Men #95, not #85, as I’m sure you know.

  4. Uncanny X-Ben says:

    Jenny- agreed.

    I rather liked this, it was a solid redefinition of the character.

    I think “pissed off jerk who thinks this is all dumb” is sorely lacking in the books.

    Thunderbird is pretty great.

  5. ASV says:

    This story kind of went in one eye and out the other, but wasn’t the untouchable thing a reference to resurrection?

  6. Taibak says:

    “The team introduced in Giant-Size #1 has not one but three characters who are defined largely as grumpy, unco-operative types.”

    It was worse than that. It had FOUR characters who were defined as grumpy and uncooperative. That was part of the original concept for Nightcrawler and it didn’t really change until a few issues into the Claremont run.

  7. Zoomy says:

    Well, it wasn’t really his grumpy personality that caused him to be killed off; he was never NOT going to die, or at least be written out, straight away. The entire thought process behind Thunderbird’s creation was “Also, there should be a brand new character who doesn’t make the cut. Makes it more believable that way.”

    And as it turned out, this ended up turning him into a legend among X-Men fans, and it’s really hard to see how they can write stories about him now without diminishing that legend, however good the writing is. Still, at least it’ll be interesting to see if they find a good hook for the character now…

  8. YLu says:

    “The simple answer is to say that you can’t resurrect characters from before a certain point – which seems to have been the idea. But while the X-books have been generally good at keeping track of this sort of thing, they blew that one rather badly, partly by having Petra and Sway running around, but mainly by never clearly defining what the cut-off point was in the first place. It’s pretty obvious that some of the artists drawing crowd scenes had no idea.”

    I didn’t read it but weren’t people saying the X of Swords promo comic listed Thunderbird as a revived mutant? I suspect the original plan was to have the Cerebro cut-off point much earlier and that all the later stuff about him still being dead was specifically established for the sake of giving Wanda something to fix, giving her a win.

    Interestingly, the X-Men 90s cartoon writers said Morph/Changeling’s death was originally supposed to be Thunderbird’s, adapting that element of the comics. They swapped out the character because they didn’t want to kill off someone who’d be the only Native American in the cast.

  9. Mike Loughlin says:

    Re: almost all the characters in Giant-Size X-Men #1 are jerks:

    When Marvel started publishing Essential collections of their Silver and Bronze Age comics, I was surprised that so many characters were thoroughly unlikable. Stan Lee started scripting character conflicts to make the books more interesting, and characters often stayed in that mode until the fight scenes. Roy Thomas took the characters’ tendency to argue up to 11, especially in Avengers. Kirby & Lee smoothed out some of the character conflicts in FF as they went along, only for Thomas & Co to portray the characters as practically hating each other.

    Giant-Size X-Men 1 reads like a remnant of the “write like Stan” age of character interaction. Chris Claremont was good at writing conflict, but way better at giving the character conflicts motivation beyond (but not excluding) chips on shoulders and jealousy.

  10. Nu-D says:

    So is James older than John now? Seems like he should be, and that a brothers’ reunion story would be enjoyable. James trying to explain to John how he came around to join the X-Men; John having trouble taking his “little” brother seriously, even though James is now 5-10 years older than John, with substantially more life experience.

  11. Si says:

    Yeah, the age difference would be interesting to explore. You even have the visual, where the “little” brother is much physically larger. But I think the sliding time scale might make such stories difficult to pull off. I still don’t know how old Cypher is meant to be. For a while he was written and drawn as a young adult like the other New Mutants, but now he seems to be back to being the teenager he was when he died. The one story where they examined the “time slip” aspect was Gertrude in Runaways, and even then it was like “everyone else has aged [mumble mumble] years or months and now some things are a bit different.”

  12. Miyamoris says:

    I really liked this. Felt somewhat old-school and the perspective of a character like Thunderbird was sorely needed.

    Regarding grandma’s speech, I’m fine with it being more about being more mindful of the people around him than giving a clear solution. As for his invulnerability, there’s a panel where a bullet doesn’t do much more than a scratch in his head, so I take his powers grant him a bit more of protection even if it’s not enough to survive burning alive in a plane crash.

  13. heartstone says:

    @ASV
    “This story kind of went in one eye and out the other, but wasn’t the untouchable thing a reference to resurrection?”

    I interpreted that as a reference to being a super-hero. He’s got powers and is part of the X-men, so he’s ‘protected’ from (and thus untouched by) the normal life problems, but his tribe isn’t.
    The obvious theme is that he can solve short-term problems with is fists, but once he’s gone again on some adventure, other people will have to pick up the tab and live with the consequences.
    His grandmother’s remark about not solving everything with his fists goes in the same direction.

  14. Michael says:

    @Jenny- I think the problem is that Leland, for example, had a cover story to explain how he survived and where he’d been since his “death”. Thunderbird didn’t- or if he did nobody bothered to share it with the readers.

  15. The Other Michael says:

    “We thought you were dead.”
    “Yeah, well. You know how I died punching Count Nefaria’s airplane?”
    “It’s the legend, man.”
    “He had some supervillain stuff on board. When it exploded, I was bounced forward in time. End of story.”
    “It was… time travel?”
    “You’re willing to believe Captain America survived in a block of ice for decades.”
    “Good point. Welcome back.”

    Not even the most ridiculous story out there. I mean, Dan Slott had the Challenger from the Golden Age also bounce forward in time. Never even bothered to explain the circumstances.

    “Well, when the plane exploded, I actually survived but was found by (insert government agency or foreign government or secret organization here) and kept on ice while I healed.”

    “When the plane exploded, I was rescued at the moment of death by a being called the Timebroker and sent to repair damaged timelines…”

    “One word: clones.”

    “It was my Earth-A duplicate who died.”

    “I’m from the What If… Thunderbird Had Not Died On His Second Mission Like A Total Chump? Earth.”

    It’s almost easier to concoct a stupid yet plausible reason for survival than it is to explain how he died in the first place.

    Now, trying to keep Krakoan resurrection a state secret is all well and fine, but at some point they’re going to resurrect so many mutants who were known to be dead that no amount of cover stories can help.

  16. ASV says:

    This is one reason I wish Children of the Atom had continued – it was well set up to explore what regular people know or believe about the superhuman population of the Marvel universe. From our perspective, these characters died and returned all the time pre-Krakoa, but do regular MU people know how prevalent that is, especially for figures like the X-Men who tend to operate less in the middle of the New York City?

  17. Jenny says:

    “@Jenny- I think the problem is that Leland, for example, had a cover story to explain how he survived and where he’d been since his “death”. Thunderbird didn’t- or if he did nobody bothered to share it with the readers.”

    I suppose so, but Leland is just a guy. Thunderbird, on the other hand, is a “superhero.” A couple months back the Hulk was coming back from the dead every other week, while just a year or two ago Iron Man came back from his second or third death. Why not some random guy whose been dead for about a decade? It worked for Jack of Hearts. The ones you need cover for are the Ugly Johns or the Morlocks; the ones who aren’t well known or cared for by the public. And Leland is just a buisnessman.

  18. The Other Michael says:

    Especially since the X-Men died very publicly in Dallas, and came back eventually.

    The Avengers and FF died very publicly in New York City against Onslaught, and came back eventually.

    And so many other heroes and villains have died and come back over the years, individually and as groups. Hawkeye, Wasp, and so on.

  19. Michael says:

    @Jenny- I’m still not sure what the public knows about Leland’s and Emma’s past with the Hellfire Club, especially after the Kingpin released his files on Emma. They seem to know Emma was *some kind of villain* but they don’t seem to know Emma committed murder or child abuse. They seem to know Leland was in a fight with Nimrod that involved the X-Men but it’s not clear if they know that he used to be a villain or if they think he just happened to be in the neighborhood, saw the fight and tried to help.

  20. Chris M says:

    I’ve not read this yet, but wasn’t the entire Proudstar tribe killed off by Stryfe at the end of New Mutants volume 1? X-Force lived out of the abandoned reservation for a while, right? Selene resurrected all of them as zombies back in Necrosha, too. So what did Thunderbird have to return home to?

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