{"id":14366,"date":"2022-09-02T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-09-02T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=14366"},"modified":"2021-05-31T13:24:30","modified_gmt":"2021-05-31T17:24:30","slug":"smtu-7","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2022\/09\/02\/smtu-7\/","title":{"rendered":"SMTU 7"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Thunderbolts! This was a fun gimmick with an extremely short shelf-life. When the Avengers and the FF seemed to die at the end of Onslaught (To go star in rebooted series courtesy of Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld and their studios), a new team stood up to fill the void left by their absence. Led by a flag-draped new version of World War II hero Citizen V, The Thunderbolts were here to save the day. Marvel marketed them as the next big thing, it was a very flashy launch for Kurt Busiek and Mark Bagley\u2019s new superhero team. It wasn\u2019t until readers had the first issue in their hands that people learned the truth about the T-Bolts: They were secretly Avengers foes The Masters of Evil! Civitzen V was actually the 2nd Baron Zemo, son of the original WWII villain (Who fought the real CItizen V, even), and every member of the T-Bolts was a familiar villain in a new suit with a new name. And Zemo planned to use their ploy of being the new Avengers to take over the world! Or something. I didn\u2019t actually read Thunderbolts. And while that twist was undeniably great, it was aslo their biggest swing and it was in the first issue. From there, inevitably, some of them found they actually preferred being heroes, some didn\u2019t, Zemo was defeated. Hawkeye led them for awhile to make sure they stayed out of trouble. But by then, they were just another super team, more or less. The most exciting thing about them was a one-off that happened in the very beginning. Among those fake heroes\/soon-to-be real heroes were faces familiar to this blog like The Beetle as \u201cMACH-1,\u201d Moonstone as \u201cMeteorite\u201d and Goliath as \u201cAtlas,” and even The Fixer , who had a small role in MTU 118<\/a>, as \u201cTechno.\u201d That’s them on the cover. Hopefully their complicated history with Spidey will factor in, but as the McKay\u2019s sticker on the front indicates, I\u2019ve never read this before. Oh, wow, what\u2019s this? This is drawn by a certain Sal Buscema! That\u2019s a surprise. He\u2019s inked by DC vet Dick Giordano, the story is by T-Bolts co-creator Kurt Busiek, and colors are by Tom Smith. Man, the difference between these pages and the hatchet job being done to Sal in the inks on his final year or so of TAC is amazing. I\u2019m suddenly much more excited to read this. It begins with 2 night security guards at a warehouse for Micron Industries catching a guy intruding. The guy is sticking to a wall, and he pushes over a shelf of stuff, killing one of them. The other one is sure his friend was just killed by Spider-Man. And soon, so is The Daily Bugle. Peter Parker is not happy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Songbird (Formerly the villain Screaming Mimi) gets zapped, but MACH-1 saves her. Then the T-Bolts get the call from their liaison in the mayor\u2019s office\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cModem over.\u201d Hilarious. \u201cCitizen V\u201d divvies up the team to follow several tracks to catch Spider-Man, but he fully intends to kill him, guilty or innocent. I had a lot less experience with Beetle when this stuff was coming out, it\u2019s hard for me to believe MACH-1 goes straight-ish over the course of this run. Man, look at the art, tho. Giordano is a great fit for Sal. I cannot believe they let him get massacred so bad on his final monthly issues of Spider-Man after his decades of service. This is kind of a redemption. With the T-Bolts on the prowl, we go to meet the actual villains of the piece, The Enclave, an evil super-science collective last referenced around here way back in FF 207<\/a>. They\u2019ve fallen on hard times, but remain committed to taking over the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I just read Dead Man\u2019s Hand<\/a> like 2 weeks ago and I already don\u2019t remember how this is connected to it, sheesh. Busiek and Roger Stern seemed to be buddied around this time, tho, so that makes sense. Well, there\u2019s the thing that got everyone thinking Spider-Man\u2019s a killer. Speaking of whom, MACH-1 is telling Songbird how Spider-Man has beaten him so many times, and he can\u2019t wait to be the \u201chero\u201d to bring him in, to give him some of that back. As they head to the scene of the crime, Songbird asks how he can be so sure Spidey will be there, and he says it\u2019s because he\u2019s innocent. The former Beetle knows Spidey well enough to know he didn\u2019t kill anybody, so he\u2019ll be here trying to clear his name. And sure enough, he is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Meteorite is such a Mark Bagley design that it still kinda looks like Bagley even drawn by such a different artist as Sal. As the android engages those 2, we find Citizen V and Atlas checking out places Spider-Man is often spotted, like The Daily Bugle. There\u2019s a bit of business where Atlas tries to sign an autograph for a rooftop fan at his giant size, but a honking horn on the street gets his attention. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Pretty funny. Goliath is already ready to turn over a new leaf. I just looked it up, this issue came out the same month as Thunderbolts #3, these guys are still brand-new. Back at the fight, Spidey is slowly starting to feel like MACH-1 seems familiar, but he keeps trying to tell them he\u2019s innocent. MACH-1 says he was spotted at the scene and sarcastically asks if he expects them to believe it was a Spider-Man robot, while at fight #2, the robot in question is getting over on Techno & Meteorite pretty handily, and they\u2019re bickering about it the whole time. After 2 pages of them doing pretty a pretty bad job, Techo says he\u2019s calling for backup.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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As the T-Bolts leave, MACH-1 is furious they didn\u2019t just kill Spider-Man, but Meteorite points out that if they killed him and the public learned of the robot, they\u2019d look like idiots. So now they should catch the robot without anyone finding out about it so Spider-Man can stay framed. No one notices the spider tracer on MACH-1\u2019s back as they head off on their mission. Soon, Peter Parker does his classic move of going to ask Robbie if he knows anything about the Thunderbolts, but he doesn\u2019t know more than they\u2019ve printed. JJJ does, tho. He knows he likes them, and tells Peter to go get pictures of them arresting Spider-Man. Peter thinks if JJJ likes them, there\u2019s definitely something wrong with them. There\u2019s certainly a historical precedent there. Meanwhile, Techno has tracked the robot\u2019s energy signature back to The Enclave\u2019s base.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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As it\u2019s Fightin\u2019 Time, Spidey notes they seem to do a good job of fighting as a team for such new heroes. He\u2019s still suspicious, but he\u2019s impressed. Meanwhile, one of the Enclave leader guys get the last thingie plugged into their \u201cbio-modem,\u201d which is just a comically dated name for a mind control machine, which he fires at the assembled heroes. Spidey\u2019s danger sense somehow counteracts it, and he tells MACH-1 to get some static in his helmet to interfere, freeing the guy who hates him the most in the room, and now it\u2019s Spider-Man and The Beetle against the rest of the T-Bolts and all the Enclave\u2019s other mind controlled minions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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That \u201cwhose little boy are you?\u201d line really got me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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MACH-1\u2019s belittling enraged Zemo enough to snap to his senses, and they were able to get the others in line, too, so Atlas steps on the robot before it explodes. Seeing the writing on the wall, the Enclave guys run through one of their transfer grids (I remember that from Dead Man\u2019s Hand! Maybe that\u2019s what they were alluding to). Not only that, but they activate \u201comni-retrieval,\u201d which sucks the whole place through the portal after them in pieces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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You know what, that works for me. Spider-Man saving his life and making him re-think his position is pretty cool. This was easily the best issue of this title. And its last! Rather bizarrely, as the blurb indicates, it\u2019s being cancelled to make way for Marvel Team-Up, Vol. 2. Which, itself, is only going to last 12 issues. And only 7 of them will star Spider-Man. But\u2026 we\u2019ll see how that goes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Thunderbolts! This was a fun gimmick with an extremely short shelf-life. When the Avengers and the FF seemed to die at the end of Onslaught (To go star in rebooted series…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14368,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[410],"tags":[1260,33,111,882,13,1003,21,829,37,1261,2,703,1262,304,1259,706],"class_list":["post-14366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1990s","tag-baron-zemo","tag-beetle","tag-dick-giordano","tag-goliath","tag-j-jonah-jameson","tag-kurt-busiek","tag-mary-jane-watson","tag-moonstone","tag-sal-buscema","tag-songbird","tag-spider-man","tag-spider-man-team-up","tag-the-enclave","tag-the-fixer","tag-thunderbolts","tag-tom-smith"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14366"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14366\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14385,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14366\/revisions\/14385"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}