Kev Walker's Thunderbolts

[Emperor]

Kev Walker takes over as the artist on the Thunderbolts with the post-Siege shake-up and CBR have his character sketches:

http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=25706

He is working a chunkier, less slick style for this and it looks great. I've got a bit behind on my Thunderbolt reading (with all the line-up changes) but this looks to be the incentive to catch up (especially as they are returning to a more classic raison d'etre).

[Colin YNWA]

Wow how many different versions of Thunderbolts has there been now!

[TordelBack]

Pity, the last run was good fun.  Siege has been a bit poo, at least in comparison to its long and interesting build-up.  of course seeing as i haven't actually paid for a single issue i've abslutey no right to complain.  on the major plus side:  Kev Walker!

[Emperor]

And Jeff Parker's Agents of Atlas shows he can write a good team book, so it seems like an ideal team.

Wow how many different versions of Thunderbolts has there been now!

Urmmmmmm roughly (ignoring minor changes):

• The originals
• Fightbolts
• New thunderbolts
• An expanded Civil War line-up
• Ellisbolts
• Digglebolts - although technically the Ellisbolts became the core of the Dark Avengers, so...
• The ones run by Cage

The sad thing is that it was pretty stable for a long time (apart from the disastrous Fightbolts) and it is only really once it reached the 100s that they started massively tinkering and that process has only speeded up since Civil War - the irony is they have become a core Marvel title and been key parts of a few stories but have also been radically made-over a number of times (which is odd as you'd not see the same dicking around with the Avengers or X-Men, not with such a rapid change of teams).

[Colin YNWA]

The sad thing is that it was pretty stable for a long time (apart from the disastrous Fightbolts) and it is only really once it reached the 100s that they started massively tinkering and that process has only speeded up since Civil War - the irony is they have become a core Marvel title and been key parts of a few stories but have also been radically made-over a number of times (which is odd as you'd not see the same dicking around with the Avengers or X-Men, not with such a rapid change of teams).

Yeah the original concept was pretty fun, I picked up a number of issues that crossed over with the Avengers of the time. It was a simple concept that worked. Since then its been relaunched, re-visited, rehashed and restaffed so many times that I wonder whats left of the core concept. That said it would appear that Jeff Parker is trying to go back to that so some degree and he does have a decent track record and all.

[Emperor]

Some samples of Kev Walker's Thunderbolts pencils, it looks out of focus but if you mouseover the image you get a "zoom" button which gives you the full image (the blur seems to be from a auto-resizing):

http://marvel.com/news/comicstories.12266.first_look~colon~_thunderbolts_%23144

Tricky to see without the blacks (as his chunkier style uses quite a bit) bit it has got me excited about the Thunderbolts again and that is a magnificent Man-Thing (no double entendres intended) - I'm currently reading the Essential Man-Thing Volume 1 (I read quite a few of the later stories in Savage Action but these pre-dates the ones I remember), so the timing is perfect.

[Jim_Campbell]

Man Thing appeared in Marvel Zombies 4, also by Kev -- he draws a brilliant version.

Cheers

Jim

[Emperor]

Man Thing appeared in Marvel Zombies 4, also by Kev -- he draws a brilliant version.

Indeed but he seems to be using a chunkier style for Thunderbolts than he used for Marvel Zombies (going by the sketches and what I can make out from those pencils) more like the style he used on The Eternal (inked by Simon Coleby which might have helped too) which seems to have resulted in an even better Man-Thing, although we'll have to wait and see what the finished art looks like.

[TordelBack]

Typical.  Nowt but praise here for Kev Walker, but every time Simon Davis draws Man-Thing people complain...






I'll get me coat.

[Professor Bear]

Ellis turned it into a Marvel version of Suicide Squad with some fun Looney Tunes violence and over-exaggerated character touches like Norman Osborne's naked dictation, but each writer since has brought less and less to the table, and when it got to the Siege stuff it was impenetrable unless you've followed the book for years and were buying other Siege-related titles.  While such books can still work as a snapshot into a bizarre pseudo-reality of Freudian superheroic fantasy if they have big mad ideas thrown in with the mass-murders and messianic persecution complexes of increasingly unrelatable costumed drones, Thunderbolts isn't that book, it's an exercise in keeping its characters in print and little more.

[Radbacker]

I'm a bit behind on my Marvel at the moment what was the go with this Seige thing?  was it something to do with Thor and Asgard and Loki and the whole mess there?.

Still love that Giant Sized Man-Thing actually got printed before anyone realized what they'd done.  I'd kill for a Giant Sized Man-Thing (i know its an oldy but its a goody).

CU Radbacker

[Pete Wells]

Slightly off topic, I just read Kev Walker's Silverfin this weekend and it was wonderful. The guy's art is just flawless.

[Kerrin]

It's a belter isn't it Pete. I don't know if there are plans to do any of the other young Bond books, I damn well hope so.

[Professor Bear]

I'm a bit behind on my Marvel at the moment what was the go with this Seige thing?  was it something to do with Thor and Asgard and Loki and the whole mess there?CU Radbacker

Basically, if you were reading Dan Jurgens' surprisingly much better than anyone expected run on Thor six years ago (for my money easily as good as Walt Simonson's), Siege is the storyline that was truncated so Bendis' Avengers: Disassembled event could do whatever it was that it did (but which looked to me like they just put Wolverine and Spidey on the same team).  Jurgens' storyline had the UN go to war with Asgard because the city was situated over American soil, and the money shot was Asgard shot out of the sky after a battle between America's pro-government superheroes and Thor and the Asgardians - which believe it or not is exactly the same storyline as Siege, except the Thor story didn't have a billion tie-ins, the money shot was Asgard falling on NYC rather than an empty field, and the fights between Thor and Wolverine/Captain America had more resonance because no-one was going to win no matter who came out on top, an observation helped by Thor acknowledging that 'normal' people had somehow become a background irrelevance reduced to little more than cannon fodder for superhero smackdowns.
It sure is good to see the guys ripping off that story with Siege didn't miss the point or anything.

[Colin YNWA]

Basically, if you were reading Dan Jurgens' surprisingly much better than anyone expected run on Thor six years ago (for my money easily as good as Walt Simonson's)

Dan Jurgen's is a writer who always surprises me with how good he is.

I'll derail no further.