Grimlock ♥ Ultra Magnus

Volume one, issues 1-6

I’m not that fond of Steve Dillon’s art, and never have  been.  I think it’s just personal preference; he’s well known for doing good art, and he does.   Technically?   He’s amazing.   I still am not crazy about his particular style.   Never have been, and at first I thought it was that his style was clashing with the material.   Except he’s done work on things that match his style exactly and Thunderbolts is one of those series. I still have a massively hard time getting through this.  I start looking at the art more closely, still don’t like it, and end up wandering off to other titles. 

I really wanted to read Thunderbolts, though, and I really do like Daniel Way’s Deadpool.   Plus, I tend to like anti-heroes.   Deadpool, Red Hulk, Punisher, Elektra and Venom during Flash Thompson’s run with the symbiote.   (Still going on in Guardians of the Galaxy, by the way.   Thompson’s run with the symbiote, that is.)   And as far as anti-heroes goes, these are some of the sketchiest of the Marvel universe.   A  revenge-driven mass murderer with nothing to lose, a trained ninja/assassin, an obsessed, revenge-driven and crazed career soldier who is now a Hulk, and an actually mentally ill, brain tumor patient turned mass murderer, plus one evil symbiote now on the good team because he’s hooked up to to a hero?   Yeah, it doesn’t get sketchier than that, really.   

But this doesn’t work.   It’s too much: too much anti-social behavior and narcissism on display for them to work together.   And while this is all about saving people, it doesn’t fit in with these guys MO.   (Especially the Punisher, who, yes, was blackmailed into this, but why hasn’t he escaped yet?   Why would Ross blackmail him and then tell him he can leave whenever he wants later?)  The problem is that this is a nationwide problem, and it feels wrong.   Punisher and Elektra don’t normally work this big scale, and the interactions between them felt… wrong.  Wrong in that they’re loners who do what they want, and it all feels a little artificial and not very deep.   Even Deadpool’s unrequited crush doesn’t move me very much, and usually Punisher and Deadpool, at least, get my sympathy. 

Then again, I like where this story is going enough to read at least one more volume.    I also usually like Way, but he didn’t pull this together for me.   It looks like he’s handing the writing reigns off to someone else, whom I hope /can/ pull this off for me.   It’s a damn good concept, fun in a way that has the potential for all kinds of gore and fucked up shenanigans.   

Crossing my fingers it all pulls together in time for more of said shenanigans!