Thunderbolt Jaxon is the second WildStorm project to use the library of obscure British characters they acquired from IPC.  The first was Albion, an awkward piece of metafiction which had the involvement of Alan Moore but still came across as a dreadful slog.

I confess that this whole project of reviving ancient British superheroes leaves me a little baffled.  I'm aware that there's a generation of British fans who find this stuff fascinating, but we're dealing with characters from decades in the past.  Thunderbolt Jaxon, a schoolboy who transformed into a superhero by wearing the belt of Thor, debuted in 1949 and got cancelled in 1963.

The nostalgia audience for these characters, I suspect, is vanishingly small.  I've never even heard of this guy - or most of the characters used in Albion - and I'm 30.  That means they have to stand on their own merits, which are debatable.  After all, it's a revival of an obscure Golden Age superhero whose central gimmick has long since been cornered by Captain Marvel.

Can this character possibly be made to work in 2006?  Dave Gibbons and John Higgins' solution seems to be to reinvent from the ground up, and basically do a complete revamp sticking with only the core elements: boy finds magic Norse thingie, becomes superhero.  And they may be on to something.  Those core elements are, after all, archetypal.

Sidestepping any hint of nostalgia, the approach here is to place this basic concept in a modern setting and play it straight.  Issue #1 is an origin story, so we'll have to wait and see how this is going to come off.  Placing mythical superheroes in a real-world setting frequently leads to a glaring style clash, and I'm not quite sure that this book is striking a tone where the character is going to fit.

Those concerns aside, it's certainly a solid piece of craftsmanship.  Gibbons puts a good, old-school origin story together, and John Higgins can do no wrong.  Taken in isolation, it's a decent first issue.  But the whole concept still leaves me slightly baffled.  Do we really need a Thunderbolt Jaxon series in 2006, over forty years after the rather generic hero got axed?  For all the updating, I'm not sold on the idea that this character is anything more than another generic Golden Age hero who's been understandably forgotten.

Rating: B

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