Marvel Comics

This is the complete Jeff Parker era, when the Thunderbolts stop being a super-team and become a work-release program. Luke Cage is handed a Raft cellblock of killers — Juggernaut, Crossbones, Ghost and Moonstone, with the swamp-god Man-Thing as their teleporter — and sent out to clean up disasters in exchange for reduced sentences. The run then mutates mid-stream: the squad is stranded in time and rebranded Dark Avengers, closing out both series in a single volume.

After Secret Invasion, Norman Osborn was handed the keys to Marvel's security apparatus. Andy Diggle's Thunderbolts: Dark Reign documents what happened when a mass murderer ran the government's sanctioned superhero team — a study in institutional corruption dressed as a superhero comic. The Thunderbolts under Osborn became Marvel's most morally compromised cast of the era. Collects 1,An oversized volume of Thunderbolts during the Dark Reign period.