Thunderbolts #18 – Review

by Charles Soule (Writer), Jefte Palo (Artist), Guru eFX (Colorist)

The Story: Red Hulk tries to get Mercy to cooperate and the Punisher and his crew tries to finish off the Paguro . Meanwhile, Deadpool has pizza.

The Review: It’s always disappointing to see a book do well in so many areas, only to see it fail in one where it’s critical to its enjoyment. Perhaps it has really great character interaction and development, but dull antagonists. Maybe it’s really great-looking, yet has really weak colorization. Either way, it always lead to something that you know can be better, yet are powerless to see change in any way. You either stay patient and hope that the problems gets resolved, or go away in order to not feel any disappointment in the future.

This book, unfortunately, has a problem of its own as there is plenty of humor, some great action and the handle on the characters is interesting enough, yet some really weak art and colorization. Many of the elements here are just waiting to be appreciated, yet the deformed and square-looking art remove a lot of potential for the book.

Where this comic goes right is the juxtaposition of humor and rather dark themes. With a team of almost psychotic killers going out of their way to bring the pain to criminals, a good deal of humor is the one thing that really bring some sense of identity and fun to the title, which Soule really brings forward thanks to the great use of Deadpool along with a good sense of comparison between relatively normal situations and surrealist ones. Still, Soule is able to not just rely on humor, balancing things out with darker scenes as well as some pretty neat action.