Thunderbolts #160 – Review

By: Jeff Parker (writer), Declan Shalvey (art), Frank Martin, Jr. (colors), Albert Deschesne (letters), Rachel Pinnelas (assistant editor) & Tom Brennan (editor)

The Story: Juggernaut has escaped the Raft and has one of those Fear Itself hammers.  You’d kinda expect his Thunderbolts teammates to try to bring him back, right?

What’s Good: I know that some comic fans hate events because of issues like this one: Jeff Parker and the two-headed monster of Declan Shalvey & Kev Walker were telling great Thunderbolts stories every issue for the last year.  Now their momentum is broken by Fear Itself, and the fans are furiously venting in the message boards.

I like events and you can’t have events that feel “important” unless you tie-in your ongoing series.  I read a goodly sized chunk of the Marvel Universe and right now, the series that aren’t tied into Fear Itself just feel weird and disconnected.  And….given that one of the important events of FI is the Raft getting destroyed and Juggernaut getting a hammer, Parker had to find a way to connect the Thunderbolts in this story arc.

Given those constraints, he does a really nice job.  It isn’t a great issue, but it accomplishes some key things.  For one thing, if you wondered how Juggernaut got from the Raft (which is near NYC) to San Francisco in Uncanny X-Men #540, this issue explains that.  If you wanted something connected between what is going on with Man-Thing in Fear Itself: Fearsome Four, well, this issue fills in those gaps too.  Granted, those are things that only pay off for readers who are reading the WHOLE Fear Itself series, but it is still nice to see that Marvel is capable of being organized at that level.  We also get an interesting view of “The Serpent” in this issue.