The Thunderbolts have struck fear in the hearts of unregistered heroes, who are now voluntarily surrendering to them. But at the base, which doubles as a prison for the supers they’ve captured (like Hellrazor), we see the team falling apart.
Doc Samson assesses Penance (a.k.a. masochist Speedball), and decides the dude is not well. I mean, he wears an iron maiden suit–that’s not a stretch.
Scorpion-as-Venom is alos losing it, as the Symbiote is taking control of him.
Moonstone is paranoid. Norman Osborn has been crazy from the start, and he’s only getting more crazy–apparently turning into Green Goblin.
And while these characters have enough going on to be crazy all on their own, in actuality their minds have been infiltrated by a telepath who calls himself Mindwave.
The villain is able to team up with some other minor psychics imprisoned at Thunderbolts mountain. They’re able to drive Samson crazy, too.
They get the team to fight each other.
Including their leader…
Yup. Norman is Green Goblin again ….
He becomes Goblin during the chaos, and Songbird gets pictures of it. He doesn’t want the world to know that he’s still a homicidal maniac, so she is able to blackmail him into allowing her to be team leader.
In the end, though, Bullseye kills all of the psychics with scalpels from the brain surgery he just underwent to fix the nanobite malfunction caused during last arc’s battles. Funny thing, though, he just kills them for fun–he has been under surgery for most of this arc and has no idea that they’re attacking his team-mates.. He’s kinda the badass of this series.
Most of these issues take place in the minds of these twisted and delusional characters, and rather than show us what’s actually happening, Ellis and Deodato tell this arc from each character’s own perspective–so we dont’ know what’s real and what’s just them being nuts.
With that, Warren Ellis and Mike Deodato are done here. Very sad, as this was truly a wizardly run.
English (US) · 