That cover image for Thunderbolts v.3 #1 is all over the damn place, but there really aren't any other relevant images for me to use, so here's the Crimson Cowl from Thunderbolts #69.  Because, you know, red. 

All right, so I wrote about Fightbolts and what was wrong with that whole thing.  The short version is that it was a comic book publisher trying to boost sales on a book by completely scrapping everything that made people like it in the first place.  The comics industry is always pulling dumb stunts to boost sales, but I think there's a big difference between "Let's give Wonder Woman a stupid new costume," and "Let's replace Wonder Woman with a golden retriever who plays soccer on Mars."  What I find astonishing is that editors still keep making this mistake.  For a year straight, the main character in Superman was Mon-El.  Superman himself moved to a Kryptonian colony world and starred in a whole other book where he was like a super-powered cop in a world populated by other super-powered characters.  Action Comics abandoned Superman for two years straight, featuring a new Nightwing and Flamebird, then Lex Luthor.   It was like DC was genuinely embarrassed to have the most popular and iconic superhero character of all time.  The closest they came to doing a straight-up Superman story was "Grounded", where Superman decided to walk across America for no apparent reason.  He could still fly, he just wasn't going to, because I guess readers really hated that flying nonsense.   I haven't read any of the New52-era Superman comics, but at least they seem to be getting the basics right.   I don't know why they had to restart time to make Superman finally go back to flying around on Earth and appearing in his own damn book again, but whatever.  I'm not crazy with what Marvel's been doing with the Thunderbolts.  They renamed the series "Dark Avengers", and at the time, I assumed this was a gimmick to draw attention to the Dark Avengers' role in the storyline.  The thing I really couldn't figure out was why they were still calling them the Dark Avengers, when the point of their appearance was to be a new squad of Thunderbolts.  Of course, the incumbent squad of Thunderbolts never actually left the book, so maybe the Dark Avengers name was just a convenience to tell the two groups apart.  Now it looks like the idea was to do sort of a rolling transition, where the Thunderbolts hand over the title of their comic to the Dark Avengers, then withdraw from the book six months later.  I'm not sure why that's a good idea, but okay.  The Dark Avengers now have their own book, so maybe the Thunderbolts go away for a while and come back in a new title just for them.   Right?  Right? Well, no.  They made a new Thunderbolts #1, but none of the Thunderbolts are in it.  Instead, it's a whole new team led by the Red Hulk.  What about the old school Thunderbolts?  No one seems to know.  Here's the thing.  I kind of dig this Red Hulk team.  I thought Red Hulk was a lame idea for a Hulk story, but if they want to keep General Ross as a superhero, it makes sense to have him form a badass strike team to enforce his personal sense of justice.  Lately, I buy all my comics using the Marvel app on my iPhone, so I'll browse the available comics and think, "You know, that YouTube video with Thomas Jane as the Punisher was pretty cool, I wonder what they've been doing with the Punisher lately.   That Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe thing looks like it could be good.   Maybe I'll try that out."  If they're gonna put Punisher and Deadpool together in a comic I was already buying anyway, maybe it's not such a bad thing.  That's not Marvel being smart, it's just that they did this revamp on me while I happened to be in a mood for Punisher and Deadpool.  And Flash Thompson as Venom looks like Punisher and Deadpool had a baby together, so there you go.  I guess what I'm trying to say is that nothing on that cover for volume 3 really offends me the way Fightbolts did.  If they had pulled this back in 2003 for Thunderbolts #76, I think I would have had a similar reaction.  At least it's a team of superheroes and "Thunderbolts" is the name of the team as far as I can tell.  Fightbolts refused to even give me that, and that was the main thing that pissed me off. It reminds me a lot more of the Osbolts, the team Norman Osborn put together to do his covert ops during Dark Reign.  Ghost, Mr. X, Headsman, Paladin, you know who I'm talking about.  Then, the thing that bothered me was that the original Thunderbolts were just MIA, allowing Osborn to usurp the name with impunity.  But there was a good reason for that, and they occasionally showed Songbird trying to figure out how to deal with this mess.  For me, the main appeal of the Osbolts was that they looked less like the Thunderbolts and more like a cool team of guys to fight the real Thunderbolts later on.   That never really came to pass, but they did fight Songbird, at least, and MACH-V and Fixer showed up to help out a little.  I look at the Redbolts and I see a similar potential.  Years from now, they could have these guys square off with a more traditional T-Bolts lineup, and it'd be pretty awesome.   Hell, they've all got a history with one T-Bolt or another.  Deadpool had a crush on Black Widow, Moonstone gave Ross a breakdown back in one of her early appearances, Mac Gargan might want the symbiote back from Flash Thompson, Bullseye killed Elektra that one time, and Punisher hates all the Thunderbolts on general principle.  The Redbolts don't bug me so much as the lingering question of what happens after Redbolts runs its course.  The other thing that bothers me is how casually Marvel seems to dismiss the Thunderbolts fanbase.  From what I've read, Daniel Way's appreciation for Thunderbolts begins and ends with the first issue.  Oh, and the Warren Ellis run.  The other 161 issues?  Filler, I guess.  I gather that the Marvel brass had a meeting to figure out what to do for this Marvel Now! thing, and someone asked about the Thunderbolts, and someone tossed out General Ross's name, then they tossed out some good antiheroes who could team up with him.  So it's really just a one-word prompt to them.   It's not about any particular characters that the fans have grown attached to, it's about coming up with some premise to go with the name.  It strikes me as the height of arrogance that Marvel is only publishing Thunderbolts out of routine, and they expect me to buy it out of obligation.  They made that same assumption ten years ago, and I guess the lesson didn't stick.  And it's not about the fact that it's a whole new team.  They've overhauled the team multiple times.  I see people on Tumblr pining for their old favorites, which I find hilarious, because ten years ago the idea of Luke Cage, Man-Thing, and Crossbones as Thunderbolts would have been reviled as a travesty.  Five years from now, we'll be wishing Marvel would bring back "classic" T-Bolts like Flash Thompson and Elektra.  So yeah, I'm cool with a whole new team with a whole new direction.  Frankly, it's a relief to hear that this new group is operating independently of the government.  The Thunderbolts have been under Uncle Sam's thumb since 2004, and we're long overdue for a change. The problem is that I don't see why Marvel has to jettison the old guard to make room for the new.  We know how this works.  They'll keep the old Thunderbolts out of sight so they won't distract from the new Thunderbolts.  It's dumb.  They wouldn't pull this shit with the X-Men.  If they did some big reorganization of the X-Men, and Wolverine wasn't accounted for, and someone asked about Marvel's plans for Wolverine, they'd have a damn answer.  When Marvel overhauls the Thunderbolts, and someone asks about Zemo or Songbird, they're like "lol, i dunno" and that's it.  If they're not going to be involved with the Thunderbolts, that's fine, but why sweep them under the rug?  How does that help anything?  I think with Songbird, she's kind of trapped in limbo.  They killed off Fixer, which bummed me out, but I get it.  They weren't going to be using him for a long time, and at least this way they gave him a proper send-off, so if he ever comes back it'll actually be because it's important.  Moonstone's gotten some traction as a Dark Avenger, so she can transition onto that bandwagon when she's not involved with the Thunderbolts.  I think she's going to be around for a long time thanks to that.  Zemo and Atlas kind of settled back into bad guy status, so it makes sense that we won't be seeing as much of them.  They appeared sporadically pre-Thunderbolts because that's how villains work.  Most of the other Thunderbolts alumni never really went anywhere after they left, because they were generally obscure to begin with.  I think Joystick hasn't appeared anywhere since Thunderbolts #109.  That's not a big surprise, because she barely appeared anywhere before she joined the T-Bolts.   The point is, Songbird's different, because she's the one who managed to elevate to this almost-an-Avenger level.  If she's not in the Thunderbolts and she doesn't get called up to the Avengers, there's really not a whole lot of other options for the character.  It'd be stupid to have her revert to a villain of the month, and it'd be hard to justify her as a guest star in someone else's book.  You could put her on another team, but if they were going to do that they wouldn't be turfing her out of the team she was already on.  And really, I don't think I want Songbird to stay in Thunderbolts just because they don't know what else to do with her.  Now, with the current team, Centurius and Boomerang and Troll and all of those guys, I guess I'll reserve judgment until Dark Avengers #182 comes out.  I have a hard time believing that they can wrap up their saga in a couple of issues and they're just conveniently gone when this Red Hulk thing starts.  It would have been better to have Red Hulk recruit some of those guys for his new team to connect one incarnation of Thunderbolts with the next.  I don't think that would have been difficult to justify, really.  Guys like Boomerang and Troll only put up with the Thunderbolts because they get to bust heads instead of puttering around in a cell.  They might not care for Ross' agenda, but it'd be a chance to ply their trade, and not much different than taking orders from Luke Cage.  Centurius would be a good fit, too.  The first thing that struck me as odd about this new team is that it's basically Red Hulk and a bunch of guys with guns and swords.  They could use a gadget guy or someone who can fly.