In Thunderbolts #1, the new team quickly wins over the world by defending New York City from an attack by the Wrecking Crew. But as they celebrate back at their headquarters, swashbuckling leader Citizen V replaces his mask with a new one, a purple covering familiar to any long-time readers of The Avengers. He is Baron Zemo and the Thunderbolts are, in fact, classic Avengers villains: the Masters of Evil.
From that twist launched one of the most compelling Marvel series of the 1990s, as some Thunderbolts such as Atlas and Songbird took to the hero game, butting heads with Zemo. So good was the concept, in fact, that when Busiek and Bagley completed their story and left the book, other creators struggled to follow them and the series languished for about a decade. One incarnation focused on an underground fight club where Z-list baddies beat each other up. Another saw General Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross create a Suicide Squad-style team of supervillains seeking redemption by going on government black ops missions.
That is until 2009, when another major Marvel event gave the Thunderbolts a new lease on life.
Lightning Strikes Twice
Under the stewardship of writers such as Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Millar, Marvel of the mid-2000s was an unending series of major events, for better or for worse. First there was Avengers: Disassembled and House of M, in which the Scarlet Witch loses her mind, destroys the Avengers, recreates reality, and depowers most of the world’s mutants. Then comes Civil War which, like the third Captain America movie, sees the superhero world break into two factions, one led by Captain America and the other by Iron Man. With half of the heroes in prison or on the run, the shapeshifting alien Skrulls make their play for domination of the Earth in Secret Invasion.
Between the mess of Civil War and the failure to prevent the Secret Invasion, the Marvel Universe’s general public had lost its faith in superheroes. So when billionaire Norman Osborn, known to Spider-Man fans as the Green Goblin, kills Skull Queen Veranke live on television, he is elevated to the head of SHIELD and by extension governance over the Avengers.
Osborn didn’t have to look far to find his new Avengers line-up. He just rebranded the bad guys in the Thunderbolts Initiative and presented them as the Avengers. So Bullseye put on a purple mask and called himself Hawkeye; Venom made his tongue and teeth disappear and called himself Spider-Man; even Norman got into the action, taking Tony Stark’s armor and painting it red, white, and blue, calling himself Iron Patriot.
