Thunderbolts #110, the first issue by Warren Ellis and Mike Deodato Jr, is a damned odd comic.

On one level, it virtually reinvents the book in the same way that once happened with X-Force, including massive shifts of both concept and style.  On the other hand, the book still features a team of ex-villains, and it still has Songbird, Radioactive Man, Swordsman and Moonstone making up most of the cast.  In other words, the book remains clearly recognisable as a version of Thunderbolts - but a very, very odd one.

Previously, the basic premise of the series saw ex-villains attempting to redeem themselves by acting as a superhero team.  Now, post Civil War, that has more or less gone out the window.  Instead, the book has been turned into a version of DC's Suicide Squad, with reluctant villains hauled out of jail and sent out on missions they don't necessarily want any part of.  Except, somehow or other, the public perceives the team as bigger heroes than ever.  To them, the new Thunderbolts are everything they were always supposed to be.

So on one level, Ellis has written an ironic inversion of the gimmick.  The Thunderbolts appear closer than ever to their redemption, while in reality their lives have never been worse.  Norman Osborn now runs the team, and obviously his idea of management falls some way outside the mainstream.

At this stage, I'm not quite sure what I make of the book.  On some fairly central levels, it really doesn't make a great deal of sense.  Plainly Ellis intends to be satirical when he has the public cheering on the Thunderbolts, buying action figures where Captain America is the villain, and operating from a hi-tech mountain full of old-school gimmickry shamelessly lifted from Thunderbirds, even down to a "Thunderbolts are go!" catchphrase.  (Come to think of it, will American readers get that reference?)

But at the same time, we're asked to accept this response to a team featuring Venom (murderer), Bullseye (serial killer) and Norman Osborn (A-list villain and all-purpose maniac).  None of these characters are kept secret from the public; they're in the action figure range, and Osborn acts as the team's public face.  Since this book spins off from Civil War, as it proudly announces on the front cover, you've got to wonder how on earth we credibly leap from a world where the public turns on Captain America to a world where they not only tolerate but actually embrace the Green Goblin.  Granted, a Marvel Universe inhabitant wouldn't regard him as an A-list villain, but they still know enough to make it deeply implausible that he'd be accepted in the role.  And no matter how much the book might aim for satire or black comedy, it can't get away with making a 180 degree reversal from the premise of Civil War at this stage.

On the other hand, the story seems to be aiming for a sense of everything being deeply wrong, and by keeping the more established Thunderbolts virtually mute and relegating them to the background, it obviously wants us to wonder how on earth this could have happened.  So I'm prepared to give Ellis the benefit of the doubt for the moment, and assume that if it doesn't make sense, well, that's how I was meant to react.  Presumably there's an explanation coming.  A lot depends on what that explanation turns out to be.

The book is still rather silly and over the top, and it interests me that Ellis has written it in a way that makes that work.  The whole set-up is crazy, but the tone suggests, without quite spelling it out, that we're watching a world gone wrong.  There's just enough there to stop it being a scorched earth reboot and make it a story about the perversion of the Thunderbolts' concept.  In fact, considering that Ellis wrote it, the story shows an unexpected level of interest in continuity minutiae.  Ellis has always been quite open about the fact that he doesn't care about this sort of thing, which makes it all the more surprising that he's dredging up obscure characters like Jack Flag (an old Captain America sidekick) and writing them more or less straight.  Even though it's clearly intended to be funny on some level, the book holds out one hand to the past.  After all, it wants us to feel uncomfortable about what's happened to these characters, and it manages to pull that off.

Incidentally, the ludicrous Penance doesn't even get a word of dialogue in this issue, so we'll have to wait and see how Ellis deals with him.  Since Ellis coined the phrase "pervert suits" to describe superhero comics, Penance seems like either a gift or a curse.  Many have observed that for somebody who used to proclaim endlessly that the future was creator-ownership and greater diversity, Ellis sure writes a hell of a lot of superhero comics these days.  Unless he's undergone a total change of attitude, I can only imagine his attitude to writing a character like this.  I looked for some interviews but couldn't find any - although the editors have confirmed that this concept for the Thunderbolts was pitched to him, and not the other way round.

Something tells me that Ellis might be taking this concept a little less seriously than whoever came up with it, but that could be for the best.  Ultimately the new Thunderbolts amounts to the old Thunderbolts, crossed with Suicide Squad, and with a dash of the maniac-director-in-charge Weapon X.  It doesn't revolutionise the book.  But for the most part, it made me laugh and, to my surprise, it did make me a little uncomfortable at moments.  It works. 

Rating: A-

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