Radiant Comics

I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got seven new comics plus a hard cover collection:

And now for a review of something I’ve read recently.

”Thunderbolts: Siege” by Jeff Parker and Miguel Sepulveda

Last summer when I was sampling various comic title for something new to read I picked up an issue of “Thunderbolts” written by Jeff Parker. It was pretty good. I kind of lost track of it amongst other books and never got another issue of it. I’ve liked Parker’s writing on a few other things so one day while tooling around on Amazon I decided to see what collections of Thunderbolts were out there. I usually buy my comics through my local comic shop but that day I found four used “Thunderbolts” TPB collections for about four bucks a piece. And that’s with shipping.

This is the first of the four I bought and it’s off to a good start. It’s actually a totally different team the issue I read last summer but that didn’t even matter to me. Parker’s writing was the reason I picked these up and not the characters. The Thunderbolts, in this incarnation, are a team of villains who have been converted to working as covert agents for the US government. Norman Osborn, the Green Goblin, is the head of their agency. He’s a bad man and most of the team is bad men. As a matter of fact a couple of them are barely in control of themselves psychos. It’s a weird mix.

Osborn sends them on assignments and in this volume they take on the Agents of Atlas and then the Avengers as it crosses over with “Siege” which was some big Marvel crossover that I know nothing about. They spend a bit of time fighting with each other too as there are some real anti-social types on the team.

The artwork is okay but nothing special. There is nothing wrong with it except that it’s B level stuff. Not great but solid. They storytelling is also solid but not spectacular. One thing I’m glad they did was put each character’s name above him on the splash page of each issue. Since the characters are supposed to be black opps agents their costumes are a bit bland. It took me a little while to be able to keep track of who was who. The names helped in that regard.

Overall I liked this volume. It’s a little more mean and violent than typical super hero stuff but it has some humor and intelligence to it also. They writing was the real star for me here. I haven’t read of ton of his stuff just yet but Jeff Parker is beginning to be a favorite of mine. Check it out for some espionage crazy super-hero stuff.