Failing Upwards: The Thunderstrike Story

As usual, trying to find some salient information on short lived 90s Marvel Comic book is incredibly hard to find on the internet. Google Thunderstrike and you get the usual Fandom garbage, other content aggregators that copy and paste each other, and page after page of websites and companies trying to offload copies of Thunderstrike #1, which some maniacs are trying to sell online for $150. Save your money. If you’re that curious about Thunderstrike read the one issue available on Comixology for 2 bucks.

Thunderstrike was a series that lasted 24 issues and it was created by long time collaborators Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz. How did we get to Thunderstrike? Well have to roll back the clock to the late 1980s for that answer. Back when DeFalco and Frenz were working on Thor (from issues #383 through 459). In issue #391 they introduced a character named Eric Masterson. Masterson was a mild mannered architect divorcee who was fighting for custody of his son Kevin with his wife Marcy. Eventually Masterson’s life was turned upside down when he was mortally injured by one of Thor’s enemies forcing the thunder god to merge with Masterson in Thor #408. The pair shared an existence but the demands of the thunder god continues to disrupt Eric’s personal life. Eventually, Thor — in a plot that is TL;DR to go into here — was banished, leaving Eric Masterson to take on the role of Thor in issue #432 until the thunder god was brought back in issue #459.

This happened during a period of the 90s where creative teams were scrambling to shake up the status quo of long time characters in an effort to chase the resell market. Doing something different might increase the collectable value of a comic and drive more sales from comic shops and magazine stands. If you know anything about the 90s comic book bubble you know how this backfired in a devastating way and Marvel Comics really suffered for it.

At any rate, without rehashing too much of my “Thor in the 80s” and “Thor in the 90s” primers, DeFalco and Frenz’s run on Thor worked real hard to undo the work of Walt Simonson during his epic run on the book all so they could do some very highly derivative and exceedingly long homage to Jack Kirby. When they then had Masterson fully take over the role of Thor they then tried to do stuff that was relevant. A lot of it was light commentary on comic book trends of the time, but it felt hollow. Following Thor #459, DeFalco relinquished the reigns on Thor and handed them off to other creators so that he could focus on continuing Eric Masterson’s story in Thunderstrike.

Having the title greenlit wasn’t very hard to do since DeFalco was editor-in-chief at Marvel at the time. This was a time when the company was seeing low sales on flagship books that weren’t related to Spider-Man or the X-Men, as well as other flagging new series that were introduced. Marvel was pumping out something like 70-80 books a month (and that’s not including imprint titles, licensed properties, limited series, or one shots). Thunderstrike also boasted a edgy and hip 90’s take on Thor in a sea of edgy and hip 90’s takes other pre-established characters or franchises. The book promised hard hitting stories, claiming that Thunderstrike was the “every man Avenger”.

Except, he wasn’t really an every man, his connection to the Avengers was tenuous at best, and the handling of the subject matter hardly pushes the envelop beyond “this is a thing that happens in the real world”.

Let me break these points all down for you, dear reader, so you can understand the core of why this book didn’t work:

First of all, the every man claim wasn’t accurate at all. Eric Masterson is an architect and a divorcee. That’s not everybody. Back when this comic book was published the average annual income for an architect was about 76k a year. Now a days they make anywhere between 85-96k a year. This is not an “every man” job, it is a skilled trade you need to go to school for and then apprentice at for years. The few times they actually focus on Eric Masterson’s personal life (more on that in a second) he’s actually living quite comfortably. Sure he’s living with a roommate, but they live in downtown Manhattan. That’s not exactly every man real estate.

The other problem with the series is that it tried to cram far too many supporting characters and guest stars into each issue that Eric Masterson himself never gets any further development as a character. He starts off as a hero who sucks as his job and he dies as a hero who sucks at his job. There’s no learning curve. He just sucks. The only interesting wrinkle to the character is that he tries to reason with his foes before fighting them and that never works. It’s also used as a crutch because Masterson never improves as a character. He starts off not knowing how his enchanted mace works, and he never really nails it down.

It also suffers from the same problems that the later works of Jack Kirby did: It had no focus. It was too busy moving on to other plots and other stories that nothing really gets developed. Now villains and supporting cast members get thrown into the mix, are hardly developed, and after the series ended its run are seldom seen again.

A great example of this is the inclusion of Code: Blue to the title. Code: Blue was a special NYPD taskforce that was created during DeFalco’s run on Thor, they were a specialized unit to deal with superhuman threats. They are featured heavily in this series (especially for the four “Double Feature” issues in Thunderstrike #13-16) yet they receive almost zero character development. They are all just cookie-cutter archetypes at best and stereotypes at worst. We learn almost nothing new about them during this entire run. When something happens to one of them — such as the death of Jock Jackson in issue #7 — it has almost zero impact on the reader. Teasing a character death and delivering it with a character that has almost zero character development has no emotional impact. All we knew about Jock before this was that he was an athlete before he became a cop. End of list. Then, after he dies, there is almost no reference to it again. The characters keep doing what they do as though nothing ever happened. We never have any stories with characters dealing with the loss of Jock.

Another example is the character Mad Dog Rossitano, we get the slightest nibble of his past: That he was on the vice squad and he got caught up in a scandal and although he cleared his name, it damaged his reputation. Other than a few mentions and this being why he joined Code: Blue in the first place, this plot development is never explored.

The series keeps leaving bread crumbs of character development and never exploring them. DeFalco was too busy whipping up a new villain of the week that also went nowhere. Such as the character Sangre. She was a vigilante who kills people who targeted children. There are two very deep subjects that are touched upon in her two appearances Thunderstrike #3 and 11. In the first story, we find out that one of Kevin Masterson’s teachers sexually abuses children. This leads to Sangre killing those responsible. Issue #11 features Kevin almost getting shot when a kid brings a gun to school. That story has Sangre trying to stop gun dealers from selling weapons to kids. These were two very real world issues and none of these hard hitting subjects are explored deeper than “Pedophilia bad. Guns bad.” Also, these stories also affect the life of Kevin Masterson however, the stories barely touch any potential impact these events might have had on his life. Once the issue is over Kevin goes back to being the annoying kid who wishes his mom and dad would get back together. This shit would have a heavy impact on the life of a real child and these stories are played as “look at this cool ass Punisher-style character we came up with.” Then after two appearances, Sangre is never seen again. We never learn her full back story or develop the character anymore.

The series also wastes 4 issues (#4-7) to be a backdoor pilot for the Blackwulf series another example of everything wrong with the 90s. It lasted 10 issues before getting cancelled as well. Rather than spend those issues to further develop your main character and supporting task, it’s jammed with a Spider-Man guest appearance and introducing a whole cast of new characters for a series that nobody wanted or asked for.

There are also stories that are highly traumatic to Kevin Masterson and they are floated by with by and quickly forgotten. Issue #3 being one of them. A pedophile ring is exposed as being associated with the school board and after that one issue the problem is never mentioned again.

Another problem is the obviously rocky relationship between Marcy and Bobby Steele. A lot of it was played up to make readers think that Bobby was Bloodaxe (we’ll get into that) but this caused these various serious issues to be glossed over. In issue #2, Bobby hits Marcy and kidnaps Kevin to drive him to his grandparents out, freaking Kevin out the whole way. Yet after the incident nobody really acts on it. Dude hit his wife and terrorized his stepson, why isn’t Eric trying to get custody of his child after that? Bobby then ghosts on his family until issue #8 when he has convinced himself that Marcy is having an affair with Eric and locks himself in Kevin’s bedroom, terrorizing the poor kid for a second time. It’s also revealed that Bobby has been doing steroids. Then, in one of the most bizarre reversals, when Eric tries to stand up to Bobby, Marcy suddenly turns on him and kicks him out. When he comes back at Thunderstrike to save Kevin, Kevin — who was being terrorized minutes earlier — suddenly thinks Thunderstrike is a bully. It’s like no matter how fucked up Bobby Steele got, they just gave him a free pass to be an abusive psycho and whenever Eric tried to do anything about it everyone shits on him.

Then just as quickly as they introduce a trifecta of spousal/child/drug abuse, it’s quickly brushed away and not brought up again. When Bobby is going to be traded to a team in California in issue #13, Marcy is like “dope, when do we go?” and decides she’s taking Kevin with them. Eric has no say in the matter and doesn’t do a single thing to stop it. His roommate, a fucking lawyer, offers to help him fight back for custody of Kevin but he does nothing about it.

The only plot line that this series spends any time developing is the Bloodaxe saga. Bloodaxe was a vigilante character that started appearing during Eric Masterson’s time as Thor and the mystery of who Bloodaxe is carries over into Thunderstrike. The series spends most of its run tossing red herrings and raising questions as to who Bloodaxe might be. Which could have been interesting if it wasn’t just aping similar stories done during the Stan Lee/Steve Ditko Amazing Spider-Man run. Namely, the stories where Spider-Man is trying to figure out the identities of the Green Goblin and Crime Master. The whole time it keeps throwing shade at various supporting cast members until it throws what it hopes the reader will think is a something out of left field, kind of like with the Norman Osborn reveal. In this case, we find out that Bloodaxe is Eric’s love interest Jackie Lukas. Like you’re supposed to be shocked that Bloodaxe turns out to be a woman. However, when the story does drop legitimate clues as to the identity of Bloodaxe they are so obvious you’d have to be an idiot to not have picked up on it. The reason the Goblin/Crime Master reveals were interesting stories is that Spider-Man was so caught up thinking they were people he knew that they turned out to be people he didn’t personally know, or knew very little about at the time. It’s hard to believe it now, but when Norman Osborn was outed as the Green Goblin, Peter hardly interacted with him.

Then there’s the claim that Thunderstrike is an “every man’s Avenger”, as I said above, he’s barely even a member. Technically, his membership carried over from when he was Thor, but his actual appearances in the Avengers title proper can be counted on one hand. In fact, most of Thunderstike’s interactions with the team are in his own title and these are mostly cameo appearances where the characters harp on him for being such a fuck up. He’s only an Avenger by association and it suffers from the same problems I pointed out about the Wonder Man series that came out in this decade. If they really wanted to make people give a shit about Thunderstrike, they should have made him more active in the Avengers book and had cross-referencing between the two.

Another problem with this series is that it puts up a façade that it’s an edgy gritty comic book. The best example is the cover to issue #5 which is captioned with:

Is this a bunch of edgelord bullshit? YES.

Is the story about political scandals? A hard hitting social commentary ripped from our headlines? Nope. It’s part of the aforementioned Blackwulf backdoor pilot. It’s just 20 pages of mindless fighting. The closest it gets to “politicians lie” is that SHIELD is trying to keep a secret war between Blackwulf and Tentalus a secret. A spy agency trying to keep something a secret? Real deep stuff man.

The edgiest thing about Thunderstrike as a character is that he has an earring in his left ear. Which, believe it or not, a guy having an ear pierced in the 90s was out of the ordinary. Only bad boys had an ear pierced. But always the left ear because the right ear was the gay ear because homophobia in the 90s was equally stupid as it was bigoted. We’re going to ignore the AIDS virus but you got to pay attention which ear lobe you stab through with metal. Real priorities in that decade.

The problem with this attempt at being edgy is that the writer of the series fails to deliver in page one. This is because DeFalco cannot seem to escape the type of comic book tropes from 30 years earlier. His writing style and plot development was very much stuck in the Silver Age. It’s very tough to sell your edgy superhero if he’s fretting over his secret identity like Peter Parker did back when he was in high school.

Issues #13-16 are interesting as there were two releases of them. One was an ordinary issue that features a single Thunderstrike story. There were also “Double Feature” versions of these issues which were flip books. Flipping the book over you got a second story, much like they did with the Avengers around this time. In the case of Thunderstrike, these four issue featured backstories involving Code: Blue. They were written by Roy Thomas and drawn by Larry Alexander. Rather than take these four issues and develop some back story and personality into Code: Blue the entire four issue run focused on Code: Blue fighting a threat-of-the-month, cram in a guest star, and nothing much else. There is some development of Captain Shelly Conklin and a divorce subplot involving Marcus Stone, but all of this is drowned out by the overarching story about the mayor’s office trying to shut down Code: Blue because it is too expensive. This story sucks the big one. The final part is the biggest waste of pages I’ve ever read in a comic book. Not only does it have an unnecessary guest appearance by Daredevil, it revives a forgettable Thor villain named Kronin Krask. If you ever needed to punctuate how useless Code: Blue was, that story ends with them calling in Code: Grey a team of accountants and lawyers who use virtual reality to beat Krask with data. I’m not making any of that up. Who thought this was a good idea?

It must have been at this point that they discovered the writing was on the wall and Thunderstrike was going to be canceled because issues #17, 18, 20 and 21 are only 12 pages long each. The rest of the comic is filled with Tales of Asgard stories. These back up stories have a very “inventory story” feel to them and they were added all filler to pad out the issue count until the final issue. It was almost like DeFalco and Frenz gave up when the book got the axe and quiet quit on the title, only doing the bare minimum to wrap things up. Stories that should have filled a single issue were cut in half and had back-up features crammed in to meet the page count.

As a result some plot elements were dropped. Before issue #17 it looks like the were setting up an origin story for Stellaris that was cut short and the character quickly jettisoned. Issue #16 also features a story where Thunderstrike teleports to a Nevada testing ground and a footnote asks readers to remind them later how Eric knew about the place. These are all minor things TBH, I’ve seen better titles cancelled with dangling plot threads that are more disappointing.

These final issues were then more or less used to wrap up the mystery of Bloodaxe and then kill off the character.

So I just spent the last 2000+ words talking about what is wrong with this comic, but is it bad? Not in the sense that it is unreadable. It is so bad it’s good. Like watching a low budget horror movie part of what makes it an interesting read is due to how poorly it is written.

Here you had a series that was pushed into development by an editor-in-chief who tried to copy all the other contemporary comics of the era but failed to deliver because his writing style is still stuck 30 years in the past. Here is a series where the title character gets less development than guest stars that were crammed into the title to sell another failed series.

The other thing I find hilarious about this title is the fact that DeFalco thought it was hot shit. In one interview he claimed that even though Thunderstrike was cancelled, it was selling higher than both Thor and the Avengers combined. Brian Cronin did some research into that back before he sold his soul to CBR and found that — at least by the records available online — Thunderstrike absolutely did not outsell Avengers or Thor during its run.

Tom DeFalco is a divisive subject in the comic book community. However, I can say that he has done some great work for Marvel. His work on Spider-Girl is well received as is his run of Thor, even though I’m not a fan. However, not every book is a winner and frankly Thunderstrike is a dud, an entertaining dud for sure, but a dud nonetheless.

When the series was cancelled, DeFalco then killed off the Thunderstrike character and even to this day, nobody really cares or misses the character. Thunderstrike only turns up when they need to briefly resurrect dead characters to make a new Legion of the Unliving (such as they did in Avengers (vol. 3) #10-11) or there is a time travel adventure that involves literally all the Avengers (such as Avengers Forever #8-9 and JLA/Avengers #3-4).

It’s also noteworthy to point out that while many comics from that era have been digitally reproduced, only the first issue of Thunderstrike has been digitized and made available for sale. As Marvel continues to grow and expand their digital back catalogue for sales, Thunderstrike remains a very low priority it seems.

Somehow, some way, in the 2010s Marvel decided to revive the Thunderstrike title with a second volume. DeFalco and Frenz came back to do the title. This was a limited series that ran for 5 issues. As I am writing this, I haven’t read the series so I can’t really comment on it. All I remember is that one of the coves made fun of 90s comics. Which was already low hanging fruit by that point, I hope that’s not the caliber of material to be found in its pages. I’ll find out one way or the other eventually. Rather than brining Eric Masterson back from the dead, they instead had his son Kevin — now a teenager — take up the mantle instead. Kevin would only be used in a handful of stories namely during the Fear Itself event and in 2018’s Asgardians of the Galaxy. With only a few minor appearances in the 2020s. Eric also experienced a very brief resurrection in the pages of 2022’s Strange series but not a whole lot else.

Is there a future for Thunderstrike? As of this writing (in November, 2022) it doesn’t seem like there are any big plans for either Eric or Kevin Masterson. However, the way Marvel digging into the more obscure depths of comic book lore to create MCU content, I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw a live action Thunderstrike in our life time.