Peter Cannon Thunderbolt #1 // Review
There are some people who have set-up camp. They look like military people, but they’re not. They’re “freedom fighters.” Which is to say that they’re mercenaries. Which is to say that they’re assassins. (Maybe.) Judging from the way they’ve decorated their place with maps and pictures, it kind of looks like they’ve been hired to either kidnap or kill the governor of the state. They’re not going to, though. They’re going to serve as the villains for the opening scene in Peter Cannon Thunderbolt #1. Writer Fred Van Lente and artist Jonathan Lau deliver their spin on the Silver Age character, who celebrates 60 yeard of existence next year.
They really should have seen the stranger walking into their camp. Anyone who is that heavily armed and that obvious about what it is that they’re doing really needs heavy security. Some casual-looking guy walks right int their camp. Introduces himself as “Peter.” They ask him if he’s a police officer. He tells them that he isn’t. They’re upset so they attack. He’s got no firearms on him. He’s just one guy. They don’t stand a chance. A few pages later, he has a duffel bag full of their cash. He rides-off with it on one of their motorcycles his adventure is just beginning.
There’s something very sharp about the tabula rasa-like innocence of a powerful and powefully innocent hero who is entering the world for the first time. Anne Nocenti tapped-into that energy in the mid-1980s with Longshot--the story of a vey lucky man with total amnesia. With his version of Peter Cannon, Fred Van Lente is delivering a very sharp sort of an existentialist hero who is carving his own way through a world that he’s only just engaging for the first time. The cult that taught him the powerful skills that he’s using...they’re all dead, but they left behind a survivalist’s dream stockpile of non-perishable food. Enough to last him a very, very long time. So he’s trained alone for years. And now he’s ready for the world.
Lau does a clever job of bringing a totally innocent face to the page that still manages to look like a total mystery. He’s walking through danger like a child who happens to be an extremely deadly martial artist capable of the supernatural. The action slams deftly across the page. The drama feels delightfully quirky and idiosyncratic. A rich atmosphere is bound to page and panel in a very promising opening issue to a whole news series.
It’s really, really difficult to bring any traditional superhero story to the page in a way that’s going to make it feel new and fresh, but Fred Van Lente and company are sculpting a legend that feels rare and engaging. The innocence of Cannon and the preternatural genius of his work...along with the perpetual “now” of his worldview make him one of the more original personalities to be re-imagined for the comics page in recent years.
