March 2012
3 posts
Distant Fumblings
The night before: “Okay, guys, now tomorrow when we get ready to break into Project: P.E.G.A.S.U.S., we should all paint our faces. It’s gonna be awesome, we’re gonna kick Quasar’s ass! Yeah!”
The next day: “Wait, you mean you actually did it? We were just joking, what the hell is wrong with you? Hahaha, you look ridiculous!”
Bad people with badder aliases.
Back in the early days of the Thunderbolts, they were always trying to keep anyone from finding out who they were. This was important, because they were posing as new heroes as part of their plot to take over the world, and if anyone found out they were supervillains, that would totally screw it up.
That said, they were always pretty sloppy about it.
This is from issue #17. After the Thunderbolts were exposed (by their own leader), most of the team resolved to keep being heroes anyway. They briefly considered adopting all-new superhero personas and starting over, but they decided that would be too risky. Instead, they set themselves up with new civilian identities so they could get jobs and try to finance their new venture as legally as possible. This lasted about a week, because Moonstone threw a guy through a wall during a job interview. Then Atlas decided to quit the team, fearing he would only get in their way. I guess the fact that Moonstone beat him to it didn’t affect his decision much.
On his own, Atlas tried to reconnect with his estranged brother, only to find out his supervillain career had doomed his entire family. Long story short, his brother got killed, and Atlas resolve to rejoin the Thunderbolts, since they were all he had left.
Unsurprisingly, when he brought his dying brother to the hospital, the staff recognized him as Atlas immediately and called the police. Ironically, his brother didn’t recognize him at first, because he had his face and voice altered as part of the original Thunderbolts ruse.
Flash forward ten issues, and Atlas is visiting Dallas Riordan in prison.
I guess press credentials make a decent alibi, but I always thought this was kind of dumb. Atlas has been recognized in street clothes before, and now he’s visiting his ex-girlfriend in prison. You’d think the prison staff wouldn’t just connect the dots, but they’d be expecting the Thunderbolts to try a stunt like this.
Besides, the T-Bolts were using really lousy aliases around the same time, so Atlas was probably right to be nervous. Hawkeye thought “Charles Cole” was a good alias for Charcoal, for example. At the time, I joked that the Thunderbolts probably had fake ID’s lined up for “Hawkerton J. Eyeworthy” or “I. M. Atlasarrestmeplease.”
And that’s the story of how I picked out the name of this tumblr account.
