{"id":7936,"date":"2022-06-10T23:39:26","date_gmt":"2022-06-10T22:39:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7936"},"modified":"2022-06-10T23:39:26","modified_gmt":"2022-06-10T22:39:26","slug":"giant-size-x-men-thunderbird-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7936","title":{"rendered":"Giant-Size X-Men: Thunderbird #1"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>GIANT-SIZE X-MEN: THUNDERBIRD #1<\/strong>
\n“And When There Was One”<\/strong>
\nWriters: Steve Orlando & Nyla Rose<\/strong>
\nPenciller: David Cutler<\/strong>
\nInkers: Jos\u00e9 Marzan Jr with Roberto Poggi<\/strong>
\nColourist: Irma Kniivila<\/strong>
\nLetterer & Production: Travis Lanham<\/strong>
\nDesign: Tom Muller with Jay Bowen<\/strong>
\nEditor: Sarah Brunstad<\/strong><\/p>\n

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<\/em> #1 (May 1975). He was dead by\u00a0X-Men<\/em> #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.<\/p>\n

Now, viewed from 2022, it’s maybe a little unfortunate that Giant-Size<\/em> #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\u00a0Giant-Size<\/em> #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.\u00a0He’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.<\/p>\n

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 \u00a0Thunderbird 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Either way, once\u00a0Trial of Magneto<\/em> 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.)<\/p>\n

Giant-Size X-Men: Thunderbird<\/em> #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\u00a0X-Force<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n

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!<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0X-Men<\/em> 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\u00a0really 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 \u00a0Thunderbird is\u00a0not<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

This is one of the better\u00a0Giant-Size<\/em> 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<\/em>. Worth a read.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

GIANT-SIZE X-MEN: THUNDERBIRD #1 “And When There Was One” Writers: Steve Orlando & Nyla Rose Penciller: David Cutler Inkers: Jos\u00e9 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7936","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-x-axis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7936","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7936"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7936\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7953,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7936\/revisions\/7953"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}