Reviewer: Jesse Baker
Story Title: City of Heroes
Written by: Fabian Nicieza/Kurt Busiek
Penciled by: Tom Grummett
Inked by: Gary Erskine
Colored by: Chris Sotomayor
Lettered by: Comicraft
Editor: Tom Brevoort
Publisher: Marvel Comics
The first arc on the new Thunderbolts series ends and it ends with a dud. And we can all thank Mark Millar for it being a dud.
Spoilers for Wolverine #25
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In Wolverine #25 Baron Strucker meets an anti-climatic end as Gorgon decapitates Strucker for control over Hydra, after stealing control over it with help from Strucker’s never-before seen cliche of Satanist wife. The whole take-over is done in typical “Let’s mock/humiliate the established character to get over the new writer’s pet characters” fashion as Gorgon steals Strucker’s wife AND organization, while mocking Wolfgang as an out of touch dinosaur who needs to be put in the graveyard.
Anyhow, while this is going on Fabian is using Strucker in the pages of T-Bolts and establishes him as the new backer of the T-Bolts. This creates some massive problems you would think but luckily (or unluckily) it’s decided by TPTB to cross-promote the two books with a special “Enemy of the State” tie-in issues of the T-Bolts with T-Bolts #4-6. Sadly this backfires horribly, since Mark Millar couldn’t have been bothered to give Fabian Nicieza the heads up on how his story was supposed to go let alone acknowledge Fabian’s plot in the pages of Wolverine. This makes the whole cross-promotion situation a total and complete waste of time and energy as Millar and Fabian’s stories fail to achieve ANY sort of coherence to make you feel that they were interconnected.
To be fair, Fabian DOES do better with regards to giving Strucker SOME sense of dignity in the fight to keep control over Hydra. He portrays the feud between Gorgon and Strucker as out and out war as opposed to Millar’s degrading humiliation of Strucker, with Wolverine on the side of the Gorgon as his personal assassin sent with the mission of killing Strucker (with Strucker only being saved by Swordsman, who Fabian Nicieza has stated isn’t Hawkeye when pressed recently about it in recent months on www.comicboards.com’s Thunderbolts message board).
Anyhow, getting back to T-Bolts #6, the issue has Strucker unfurling his plan to destroy Manhattan with the T-Bolts being the only ones who can stop all of Strucker’s forces. It leads to the return of Captain Marvel, who has undergone yet another metamorphisis that doesn’t make me care for the character. Hopefully, with next issue’s preview saying someone will quit, the hero formerly called Legacy will go straight to comic-limbo and never be seen again.
