Reviewer: Jesse Baker
Story Title: Bare Knuckle
Quick Rating: If you can’t say anything nice……
Written by: John Arcudi
Penciled by: Francisco Ruiz Velasco
Inked by: N/A
Colored by: N/A
Lettered by: Dave Sharpe
Editor: Andrew Lis
Publisher: Marvel
It’s really, really bad. Best way to describe this farce without breaking out obscenities and fanboy ranting and rambling about how this whole relaunch is one big mistake and how it will fail miserably. The fact that the book was sited by Marvel as one of their books that they are raising the prices of to $2.99 before the first issue of the new direction hits the stands kind of shows me that at least SOME people at Marvel know that this is going to bomb badly and are preparing for the inevitable crash and burn of the series under it’s controversial new direction.
But then again given the fact that the book is being edited and was heavily championed in the Marvel offices by Andrew Lis (who has become the new poster-child for the “Idiot Editors Who Are Failed Comic Writers Who Take Out Their Frustrations Over Their Lack of Any Talent By F-ing Up The Writing of Writers Who Actually Have Talent†club) should tell you right away that Marvel has been smoking the wacky tobacco. I mean, this is the guy who fired Gail Simone from Agent X because her scripts didn’t meet his myopic idea of what is funny. If anything, Andrew should have been given his walking papers right then and there for letting Simone walk away and killing any chance of success that Agent X might have had, especially given the controversial editorial decision to purge Deadpool of everything recognizable and reintroduce the character as a guy with an “X†carved onto his face and sunglasses.
And then there is John Arcudi, who’s once again drawn the short straw by having his name attached to a franchise that his bosses are dead set on needlessly reinventing from scratch even though the franchises’ fanbase believe that it doesn’t need fixing in the first place. And if Arcudi hated having everyone bring up the topic to Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol run every time his recently cancelled Doom Patrol revamp is talked about in conversations, he’ll love having to deal with the Thunderbolt readers who have been betrayed by Marvel, and have been told that their version of Thunderbolts is being dismantled because it was heavily connected to the one word that both Joe Quesada and Bill Jemas consider to be the worst word in the English language: continuity.
Of course the real tragedy in this pathetic mess is that any writer with any real depth COULD make a somewhat passable storyline out of the premise that Arcudi and Lis promoted heavily in the months before Thunderbolts #76 hit the stands: the idea of The Armadillo (a Captain America villain) becoming an underground pit-fighter and what happens to him when he begins this new life. The character’s backstory (an average petty thug who let himself be turned into a 7 foot tall two ton monster in order to get money to save his terminally ill wife and who desperately wants to regain his humanity after his wife rejects him) would make for an interesting character study and give the book a sense of direction as we see this monster of a man beating the crap out of others in order to get money to use to try and restore his humanity, while dealing with suicidal thoughts that come with having to deal with the fact that the woman, for whom you sacrificed your humanity in order to save, wants nothing to do with you because of the price paid to save her. But instead Armadillo (who Arcudi and Lis repeatedly pimped as being the star of the book) barely appears in the book and is set up as a heel fighter who the real main character (a one-dimensional momma’s boy named “The Battlerâ€) will eventually fight later down the road.
