REVIEW: Thunderbolt #57

Artist/Writer: P.A.M.
Review: Madman

Yet another random haul from another dirt mall my wife and I recently visited. I was so excited to find this comic in the dollar bin but not because I’m a die-hard Thunderbolt fan. In fact I’d never heard of this particular superhero until now, but because the cover is oh so rad with its glorious oriental-style dragon intertwined around our mysterious masked marvel, Peter Cannon aka Thunderbolt…fantastic. Peter totally looks like a Hanna-Barbera rip-off, you know, how HB’s characters all looked relatively the same…? Well, P.A.M. has captured that very same boring-ass generic feel here with both his artwork and plot.

As soon as I cracked the cover of this bad boy I was confused almost instantly…
Who the hell or what is P.A.M?
...and who actually published this comic? Google provided little to no information on Modern Comics and from what I can tell they just mostly reprinted various titles in the 70s. The comic was originally published in 1967 as Thunderbolt #57 and this here reprint is from 1978. Now for P.A.M…    

P.A.M., as it turns out, was a heck of a lot easier to dig up info on, and P.A.M., as it turns out, is none other than Peter A. Morisi. Peter was a NYPD officer for most of his professional life. He started signing all his work with the pseudonym P.A.M so the NYPD wouldn’t catch wind of him moonlighting as one of those weird comic book types. Peter’s most notable works according to Wiki is in fact Peter Cannon…Thunderbolt which debuted via Charlton in January of 1966, but there are various other titles, by various publishers, on his credits too. DC bought the rights to Charlton’s superhero properties in the early 80’s and Thunderbolt was in the mix.

The thing that added a wrinkle to my brain was the fact that Thunderbolt was one of the characters originally planned for use in Alan Moore’s miniseries Watchmen, but DC decided save Thunderbolt for other uses(did they ever use him I dunno, but DC did publish a 12 issue Thunderbolt series in the early 90s).
Instead Moore adapted Thunderbolt into Ozymandias. Yeah, that’s right I just said that…mind blown….cue the nosebleed. That fact right there is reason enough for me to love myself for saving this book from a dirt mall dollar bin.

As for the entertainment value of this actual comic I’d give it a solid 4 outta 10. The writing and art are just too dated and generic for me to even say I remotely enjoyed my reading experience. Nevertheless I will proudly add this comic to my collection for the cover and just to have an appearance of Ozymandias’s bastard cloned father or brother-cousin or some such nonsense.