With Captain America: Brave New World currently in movie theaters, eyes of Marvel fans are turning to the next film from the studio, coming out in May, Thunderbolts*. Yes, that asterisk is part of the title. No, as it turns out, it isn’t actually important. But we’ll get to that later. Although they’re not exactly the Avengers (more on that later, too) the Thunderbolts have been bouncing around the Marvel Universe in one form or another for nearly 30 years, having first appeared in 1997. Despite the pedigree of having been around for such a long time, a lot of people don’t seem to quite understand who the Thunderbolts are, and honestly, you can’t blame them. If you look at their publishing history, it seems as though Marvel doesn’t really know who they are either.

Let’s go into the history, shall we? It started in 1996, when the Marvel Universe came under attack by a villain named Onslaught. Powerful and ravenous, he started off fighting the X-Men before taking on virtually every superhero in the world and, when he was finally defeated, both the Avengers and Fantastic Four were killed in the battle. Or so it appeared, anyway – as it turned out, Franklin Richards saved them at the last second by shoving them onto an Alternate Earth, because things like that just happen in comic book universes sometimes. But the world at large BELIEVED that they were dead, and that was enough to cause serious chaos. With the Avengers and Fantastic Four gone, it was open season for villains, who saw an opportunity with the biggest, boldest heroes in the universe unavailable to thwart them.

Then the Thunderbolts appeared. 

A brand new team of brand new heroes, paragons of courage who had never been seen before, burst on the scene and began cleaning up the town. The gigantic Atlas! Armored hero MACH-1! The cosmic-powered Meteorite! High-flying Songbird! The scientific wizard Techno! And their sword-wielding leader, holder of a mantle of a forgotten World War II hero, Citizen V! After an appearance in Incredible Hulk, the Thunderbolts slid into their own series, written by Kurt Busiek and drawn by Mark Bagley. I was – and still am – a huge fan of both Busiek and Bagley, and so I naturally was eager to read the book, but it was a little confusing before we got there. Who were these new characters? Why should we care about them? Did they REALLY think they were worthy of replacing the Avengers?

And then, at the end of the first issue, Busiek hit us with a curveball that comic books have not been able to duplicate since. Citizen V traded his heroic mask for another one, a purple one…he was really Baron Helmut Zemo, arch-enemy of Captain America, and each of the Thunderbolts was a member of his Masters of Evil in disguise. When the Avengers and FF vanished, they decided to masquerade as heroes and win over the public trust as part of Zemo’s plan for world domination.

And we, the readers, were FLOORED.

It’s so hard to imagine, in today’s landscape, how such a reveal could have been pulled off. All of the press leading up to this issue just talked about these great new heroes and how awesome they were and how cool it was going to be to have new stars in the Marvel Universe. Honestly, it felt like standard comic book hype, and were it not for the fact that I enjoyed the creative team so much, I probably wouldn’t have read the comic at all, which would have been a huge mistake because it turned out to be phenomenal. But such a magic trick simply couldn’t happen in the current landscape. If Marvel tried to tell this story today, three days before the issue was published you would have a headline on the site formerly known as Comic Book Resources, shared on Facebook, announcing something like “Ending of Thunderbolts #1 will shock Avengers fans!” with a thumbnail image of Citizen V wearing Zemo’s mask just to make sure that everything was good and thoroughly ruined before it could be read.

The modern media is so, so stupid.

Anyway, the Avengers and Fantastic Four eventually returned to the main Marvel Earth, forcing Zemo to accelerate his plans for conquest, but in the time when they pretended to be heroes something funny happened to many of the members of the Thunderbolts. They began to realize that it wasn’t such a bad thing that they got to WIN a fight once in a while instead of getting beaten up. They started to enjoy the cheers and applause of the hero-starved citizens of New York. They actually found satisfaction in helping people instead of committing crimes. And when Zemo took action, the rest of the team rebelled against him, deciding that they’d rather remain heroes than go back to their old lives of villainy.

From there, the book underwent the first of what would be countless shifts in status quo. Instead of the adventures of villains pretending to be heroes, it was now a book about former villains seeking redemption, and this is the golden age of the franchise. They tried to make good. They even were joined by Hawkeye, who left the Avengers to help them out. Hawkeye himself had begun his career as an adversary for Iron Man, and he credited Captain America giving him a chance to join the Avengers for turning his life around. He saw leading the Thunderbolts as an opportunity to pay it forward. And so the book went on for some time – some of the members backsliding at times, new members joining, the roster shifting around, but for the entirety of Busiek’s run, then that of his successor Fabian Nicieza, it was one of my favorite books Marvel was publishing.

Then in issue #76, they inexplicably dumped the entire concept. Issue #75 ended the story of the Thunderbolts we knew and loved and the next month we got a whole new story with new characters in what could best be described as “Supervillain Fight Club.” It was baffling, it was awful, and it was Thunderbolts in name only. It also only lasted six issues before the book was cancelled. Not too long after that, they brought back the original team for a second run that lasted a few more years, and it was good, but once again they took a sharp turn. This time around the team was replaced by a new group of villains – not reformed ones this time – rounded up to do tasks for the government. It felt like a carbon copy of DC’s Suicide Squad at this point. And it didn’t get better.

Since then, the team has been reinvented seemingly dozens of times. The Suicide Squad knock-off has been done more than once. At one point the team was re-christened “Dark Avengers” and made of villains pretending to be heroes (ESTABLISHED heroes this time, like the Scorpion pretending to be Spider-Man, Daken pretending to be Wolverine, and so forth) . One time it was made up of antiheroes like the Punisher, Deadpool, and Elektra. Another time it was villains trying to HUNT the Punisher. Once it was villains deputized by the Kingpin of Crime while he was mayor of New York, and another time it was a group of HEROES deputized by Luke Cage when HE was mayor of New York. And on occasion we’ve even got a group of super-spies like the Winter Soldier and the White Widow, which seems to be the version that the upcoming movie is based on.

The problem, then, comes when somebody asks the question “Who are the Thunderbolts?” because you just read about 1300 words on that very subject, and we STILL don’t have a definitive answer. Ever since the original version of the Thunderbolts ended, Marvel has recycled the name over and over again but has never found any concept that STICKS. Even the super-spy incarnation of the team seems to have been willed into existence so that they have something to synergize with the movie.

And let’s talk about the movie, while we’re at it. Some time back, the title was slightly changed from Thunderbolts to Thunderbolts* with an asterisk. People asked Marvel if the asterisk was, in fact, part of the title, and they confirmed that it was. This led to mass speculation on the internet as to the significance of that asterisk. Why was it there? WHAT DID IT MEAN? It’s the kind of rabid online speculation that movie studios love because they don’t have to do very much to get the audience talking about the film. It did wonders back in the day for movies like The Blair Witch Project and The Matrix, which managed to get an enormous amount of word of mouth with relatively simple ad campaigns back in the early days of the internet. It’s a great strategy when you have a good payoff.

Spoiler alert: this time there was NOT a good payoff.

When the most recent round of posters for Thunderbolts* was released, we saw what the asterisk stood for, and the revelation was met with a resounding “Meh.” At the bottom of the poster, with the asterisk attached to indicate the footnote, was the tagline “The Avengers are not available.” It’s actually not a bad tagline. It seems to indicate the tone of the movie – slightly tongue-in-cheek, indicating that this is NOT a story about paladins like Captain America or knights in armor like Iron Man. If they had never made a big deal out of the asterisk and simply released that poster without comment, I would have thought it was a cute detail. But after the buildup it got, it may have been the biggest letdown in the MCU since everybody forgot there’s a giant hand sticking out of the Earth after the events of Eternals. 

I obviously haven’t seen the movie yet, and I am not here to talk trash about it. I never want there to be a bad superhero movie. I want every one of them to knock my socks off, and I really hope that this one does too. But the trailers seem to have that same feeling of a wannabe Suicide Squad with a group of characters that seem assembled not because it makes sense but because these are the pieces Marvel has on hand and they don’t know what to do with them.

Which, frankly, is a pretty good description of what it’s been like to try reading Thunderbolts comics for the last two decades or so. 

The Thunderbolts were at their best when it was a story about villains trying to make good. It was a compelling book then and it could still be one now. There are even seeds, I think, in recent comics, such as the recent Venom War tie-in miniseries Zombiotes. The old Spider-Man villain Shocker was on a quest to bring back his friend Boomerang from the dead, and wound up fighting alongside the heroes She-Hulk and Hellcat during an invasion of…let’s just say “monsters,” because I don’t want to spend another 1300 words explaining THAT one. But that story could easily be a germ for a new Thunderbolts team. And it’s a book that would allow for reinvention WITHOUT changing the concept, with characters rotating in and out – some of them succeeding in their heroic goal, others falling from grace. There’s drama to be mined there and SO MANY villains that could be used, if Marvel did it right.

Or, you know, we could spend another 20 years throwing Thunder spaghetti at the wall in the hopes that something, ANYTHING sticks.

I suppose the real test will be to see if anything sticks to the movie screen.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. If Marvel is looking for a writer to try this obviously brilliant concept, they should know that Blake can be hired relatively cheap.