Hard to believe it has been fifteen years of Thunderbolts. Considering how many times a book has gone away and then quickly returned in a new numbering it is shocking the T-Bolts have been around with original numbering for so long. Heck, not even X-Factor can say with a straight face it has lasted just as long without a reboot or two. So what better what to celebrate the team by letting the original and current team duke it out? Boy it really is a boxing match in the Marvel U isn’t it?

It took a while with this new team, but I am finally loving everyone involved in this time travel story. Boomerang is a nice, clearly stupid villain who quips at just the right length and gets into wacky trouble. I do like his comment on how the cops should arrest the storage owners of the supervillains too, something you don’t realize till now. Centurius is the nice Brianiac of the team and he plays well off of Ghost. Finally, Mr. Hyde has quickly become one of my favorite characters in comics because Jeff Parker writes him so well. His insults and slightly witty British humor is what really makes him stand out. The story itself this issue starts off a bit slow, and if you aren’t well known in the Thunderbolts history it can be a bit taunting. But for fans of the team or just a fan of Jeff Parker’s writing then this is some Grade A material here.

Declan Shalvey gets his time to shine with this issue and boy does he impress. I think he is going for the Mark Bagley approach to this storyline as he apes his style a bit. Not too much though, so even though some of the characters look a bit cartoony you still get some of the gritty designs you’d see in Shalvey’s previous issues. Also, he must really love caves since Parker lets him draw the same area he did for the enjoyable Ninja fight in that Shadlowland tie-in (Remember that event? Cause I sure didn’t). He does a great job differentiating from the characters from ‘present’ day and the 90s designs of the original T-Bolts. It is a bit sad to see some of these designs though, not cause Shalvey did a bad job, but it makes you weep for just how poor comics were back in the 1990s. Once the big fight starts in this I must say the art even got better for me. Shalvey can really do well in fight scenes and never once did I get lost in a chaos. Although if I can nitpick slightly, I would say his Mr. Hyde is a bit weird for me. He’s clearly drawn as a massive gorilla and I’m not sure if I like that choice.

So to celebrate 15 years of Thunderbolts both Jeff Parker and Declan Shalvey start the tribute with style. This introduction is a lot of fun and you get a lot of remembering the….’good old days’ (?) of the Marvel Universe. I hope with this arc, if it stays this great, Declan Shalvey will get some much needed A-list work for Marvel. That guy really would do wonders on a X-Men book (for example). So yes, let us all enjoy Marvel’s celebration of all things Thunderbolts….so then they can quickly throw them under the rug and rename them the Dark Avengers….wait a second…