Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of the Number One Comics Podcast. This is the only podcast that is dedicated to first issues. I just realized I forgot to say that like the last two episodes. That's alright. So anyway, if you didn't know, now you know. I'm your host Jonah, with me is Bill. Hey Bill, how's it going? Good. Good. Tonight we are talking about Solo. Not Han Solo, not the Solo movie, just Solo. Solo. And that's really all we can say about this, the end of the episode. So bye guys. No, just kidding. There is a little bit to talk about here.
Solo number one. This was published by Marvel Comics back in September of 1994. That's the cover date. It had a cover price of $1.75. Man, I miss those times. I know. When I could buy more than one comic book for five bucks. Nope. The writer on this was Eric Fein. Eric Fein? F-E-I-N. I'm sure I'm mispronouncing that like I do every other name. And the artist was Ron Randall. I know I'm pronouncing that right because that's pretty easy. These are two that I've never heard of. No. So I'm not familiar with their work. Eric had done work on some Spider-Man, New Avengers, Dark Hawk, even G.I. Joe.
A lot of credits on annuals, which I never liked and I still don't. Well, this guy, Solo, debuted in an annual. He did. Amazing Spider-Man annual number 27. Yep. Well, actually, so I think, I'm not sure if it was the annual because he also appeared in Web of Spider-Man 19 back in 1986.
Oh, that's right. He did it. So I'm not saying you're wrong. No, I'm just saying you're wrong. Yeah. But he's always been kind of like one of those little side characters. It just kind of pops up now and then. He was created by David Michelini and Mark Silvestri of Cyber Force fame. Now, despite his name, he's actually been affiliated with several teams, including the Six Pack Heroes for Hire, Mercs for Money, which is probably the best team name ever, in my opinion. Yes. And Force Works.
As indicated on the cover this was a limited series and it ran for four issues So he never got an ongoing. I do love this cover though dynamic You got kind of the big spider-man face behind him. He's got his guns blazing You know when this came out back in 1994, you know 14 year old me was all over something like this. Oh absolutely A little bit about the character himself. He's got telepathic abilities. Or no, I'm sorry, teleportation abilities. And he's got really good skills as a combatant with a variety of weapons that he has at his disposal, as we see throughout the issue. He has a catchphrase. Do you know what that is? Did you write that down? While I live, terror dies. While Solo lives, terror dies. That is his catchphrase. I need a catchphrase like that. Something less ominous. Anyway. Something that won't get you put on a watch list. Correct. Yeah, I have to fly for work. I don't want to end up on a do not fly list.
Let's go ahead and go through the synopsis. Of course, spoilers are going to follow, but at this point, it's a 30-year-old comic. Yeah. So if you haven't read it yet, you know, you had your chance. I'm actually going to, the issue here is titled Blood of the Hunted Part 1. I'm going to read the first page of this in my best narration voice that I have, so bear with me. La, la, la, la, la, la. Okay, here we go.
Oh, I need to actually pick up the copy to read the first. If you dictated it in your notes, man, more power to you. That's a lot of writing. I handwrite all my notes. That's a lot of writing. Okay, here we go. I'm trying to read this. The corporate headquarters of Wealth Technologies in Midtown Manhattan. I teleported in here less than a minute ago, and I've already had to reload my guns. The bullets are flying fast and furious, but I'm used to all the violence. I stopped flinching years ago. All that matters is taking these wackos out permanently.
It's a lonely but necessary fight, one that leaves no room for trust or friendship or love. That's why I've taken the name Solo and vowed, while I live, terror dies. How epic is that? So deliciously 90s. How great is that? Oh my God. All right. I think the biggest injustice is that this guy never got his own action movie.
Yeah. I would have went to a solo action movie. I'd probably go see a solo action movie. Yeah. All right. So Solo, as we established in that first page description, he's in a shootout with a squad of very stylishly dressed bad guys called Ares. They're assaulting an electronics firm. While Solo finds himself outmanned and outgunned, upstairs, an employee of the firm is forced at gunpoint to download a series of files titled Omega Strike. Pinned down, Solo uses a flare gun to blind his attackers. With the download complete, the firm employee is shot dead. A few more bad guys teleport in, led by a woman called Cygnus.
Cygnus? Yes. Cygnus? I'm going to say it's Cygnus. They hand over the downloads to her. Solo arrives just in time to see them teleport out, but he recognizes the woman, calling her Rowena. She recognizes him for Solo. She recognizes him too. And then Solo is left alone in the office with a time bomb ticking down to zero. The entire rooftop explodes. At the United Nations building, a break-in by the same Ares bad guys is interrupted by Spider-Man.
After a brief scuffle, the bad guys teleport away. Spider-Man catches up with an acquaintance, Detective Snyder. We then cut to an underground bad guy lair in upstate New York. Cygnus is meeting with Scorch from the United Nations break-in, and a guy that looks kind of like Grand Moff Tarkin, his name is Mr. Tesler. It's revealed that the files they snatched contain the names and backgrounds on most of their members. A fourth man appears called Deathstorm, who I think he looks pretty badass, and that's a badass name. Deathstorm and Solo have a bit of a history that we'll find out.
I hope so. That's the only reason I'm going to get it. Sign me up. Rowena was more than a teammate, but also someone he was in love with. His first love, Melinda Wallace, was killed in a terrorist attack, and shortly after, he joined Omega Strike. It was during an Omega Strike mission to rescue hostages from a hijacked airplane that a few members of his squad were killed by the terrorists, and Rowena and another member called Gant betrayed him. Gant shoots him, leaving him for dead, and thus giving birth to Solo. Spider-Man is observing a press conference with a UN secretary when Deathstorm and other members of Ares teleport in and attack. Solo teleports in as well.
While Spider-Man attempts to save the innocent bystanders, Solo goes for Deathstorm. Spidey's friend, Detective Snyder, gets the drop on Rowena, telling her to surrender. He's unaware that Deathstorm has teleported in right behind him, and the detective is shot in the back. Deathstorm teleports away as quickly as he appeared. Spider-Man confronts Solo, but Solo also teleports away, vowing to hunt down Deathstorm and bring his reign of terror to an end. Gant and Deathstorm are the same person. Yes. Yes. I picked up on that towards the end. I was like, these guys are one and the same. Yeah. And that's really all that happens in the issue. To be continued. Yeah. What are your thoughts? Well, follows the 90s pattern for any new comic. 100%. New comic. One, if you're going to have it in New York, you have to have Spider-Man involved. Yes. And if you're a guy who uses guns, you're going to piss off Spider-Man. So.
Of course, they kind of clash on that a little bit. Spider-Man kind of has the same problem with Solo as he does with Frank Castle. Yes. Well, I think that's largely because Solo... is like Frank Castle. I mean, other than that he can teleport. He's got the arsenal. He wants to kill the bad guys. His love got killed, and then he got betrayed by his other love. He's very much a Frank Castle archetype. Yeah, and I mean, as much as, you know, 90s Bill and 90s Jonah probably loved Solo, I don't think he lasted very long. I know he did kind of have some bit parts here and there. There was a storyline in Spider-Man called The Great Game, where...
You know, it was like him and like Joystick and these other like D-list villains were causing problems and whatnot. But... Yeah. So what happened? What happened? With Solo? With Solo. What happened? This only lasted four issues? It only lasted four issues. Well, before I get to that, some real quick thoughts that I had on the series. Whether it was Moon Knight, Punisher, Dark Hawk, Ghost Rider, the 90s Marvel was like my jam. Oh, absolutely. So again, 14-year-old me was all over this. Now, I actually didn't learn about this character until like 95. It was the Fleer Ultra Spider-Man trading card set when I saw the kind of the art of him. And I didn't know that this comic existed until a few years later.
I then had to go out and kind of track down the issues. You can really find them in any quarter bin. These are not going to command high prices if you want to go and pick up these four issues. The... The one thing I thought was funny and again making it very 90s this guy's got pouches everywhere. Oh, yeah He's got pouches do come in handy though because that's what he puts his ex-girlfriend's necklace in He does use the pouches which I think it's by the first time in the night I remember seeing that many pouches the 90s actually see them being used right so kudos to kudos to that So despite the character having been around for nearly 10 years at that point in time We are given a quick rundown of his history which you know it was brand new to me going in and reading it Yeah, and his ability so like any good like you said any good 90s
First issue, you've got a Spider-Man appearance, and then you've got a rundown of their origin. Usually you don't see the origin in real time. It's kind of a flashback to the origin. Rarely would you see the origin in real time. There are a few exceptions to that. Well, and that's one thing that I do like about this is that you don't necessarily, if you're picking up this comic, if you're a kid in the 90s picking this comic up off the newsstand, you don't necessarily have to go back and read the first appearances of Solo. And it does make sense even having Spider-Man as a guest in this, aside from the fact that Spider-Man was a guest in everything about that.
point in time. Right. Because Solo, right before that, was in that annual Spider-Man number 27, which also introduced Annex. I don't know if you're familiar with Annex as a character, but Annex is pretty cool. And that was also written by Eric Fein, the name I'm mispronouncing. Overall, to sum up my thoughts on the series, overall, it is a very basic 1990s Marvel comic. Very much so. And while I don't mean that as a bad thing, I just throw that out there to temper anyone's expectations. Because where I enjoy that type of stuff, a lot of it is nostalgia for me to go back and read something like this. It is nostalgic. It's not great by any...
any means. No. It's funny because I felt like a lot of these comics, just like this, again, I was 14 when this came out, it reads like it was written by a 14-year-old. Yeah, it does. And again, I don't, 14-year-old me at the time would have loved that. Adult me looking back on it, I'm just, well, I mean, not as great as I remember to be. Yeah, I mean, honestly, it's got, you know, what a lot of, you know, young boys would probably like, you know, the guy using guns can cause explosions, he can teleport. Who doesn't want to teleport? Right. You know. Again, Musk, sign me up. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I do think, aside from, you know, the very basic nature of it, I think the solo looks cool.
The bad guys looked cool. I liked the designs of those guys. The story itself, it wasn't terrible. Pretty straightforward. I'm not surprised this was limited to just a four-issue series. I don't know that. I mean, you'd have to have somebody really come in and overhaul the character to turn this into any kind of a successful ongoing. I think he's relatively one-note. And I say that, but then again, some people call the Punisher one-note, and he's got tons of either miniseries and he had a long-running ongoing series. And there's a lot you can do with one-note characters to make them more three-dimensional. So there is a lot that could be done with him. I just don't know that anybody at this point wants to step up and do it.
Also, I haven't mentioned yet. Do you have it written down his real name is? Jason Bourne. No, James Bourne. That's right. Not Jason Bourne. James Bourne. I don't know if they're related or not, but that may be something worth looking into. He could be a, you know, a Treadstone dropout or something. Now, going back to what you're saying as far as like what came next for Solo.
Not much. You know, after these four issues, there was a few appearances in titles like Gable and Deadpool. That's when he was part of the Mercs for Money type team. He also appeared in Civil War Frontline. After appearing in Deadpool and the Mercs for Money, he was given a second five-issue limited series in 2016. Oh, wow. Which is available in trade paperback. I have not read that yet. I probably will. Yeah. I love obscure D-list characters. I do, too. And it doesn't get much more D-lister than him. And the reason why I love him so much is because of the...
the potential, the storytelling potential you have for them. Yeah. You know, I think you can do so much more with a character like Solo than you could with any number of other A-list, high-profile characters. You can get away with a lot with a character like Solo, and I don't think anyone's really gonna bat an eye, and you can do some really cool stuff with them. Yeah. I'd love to see them tackled again at some point in the near future. That's all I had on it. Again, there wasn't a lot. There's not a lot with this one, but, you know, this was during an era where there was a bunch of, like, who are now D-list characters, you know, fast forward to today, but...
The 90s was a great time for Marvel, especially if you were a kid. There was all these, you mentioned Dark Hawk, Moon Knight, those kind of guys. It just takes taking a character like a Solo and doing something with them and putting them into a position that allows them to be an A-list or put them into an A-list situation. Case in point, when I was a kid, one of my favorite 90s comics, it only ran for like 20 issues, was Cage, Hero for Hire with Luke Cage. Luke Cage, at the time, was C-list at best. I can't remember how many years it was between Power Fist and Iron Man.
having ended that that series came out. I'm sure we'll get into that when we review that issue. but he was again c-list at best and then it takes you have a writer like a brian michael bendis who used him in alias and made him cool and then used him into avengers and made him even cooler and then he was in mighty avengers and then and now he's you know i would say between the where he's at in the comics or had been in the comics and his own series on netflix he was on the cusp of getting into that a list territory i would say so um yeah and and that's all it takes is putting it in the hands of someone capable like that other characters that from the 90s that we've seen that happen with i mean ghostwriter has been long-standing character at this point oh yeah And he still has, you know, series that are running today. Two movies, for better or for worse. You've got Nova, who was a...
member of the New Warriors, which a lot of those characters had a lot of cool potential. And really, Nova was the only one that kind of came into his own, more so than anyone else. So there is so much potential that you can do with those D-list characters that we haven't scratched the surface yet, or only scratched the surface yet on a character like Solo. Anyway, there's a little padding to get the episode a little bit longer. There we go. Let's go ahead and wrap things up. Again, I want to thank everybody for joining us as we talked Solo from Marvel Comics. Be sure to like and subscribe on YouTube. Check us out on Facebook at The Number One Comics Podcast. Send us an email at...
the number one comic podcast at gmail.com. Let us know your thoughts. If you'd read this issue, let us know if there's any issues that you'd like to see us take on. I'm all about suggestions, but I appreciate you guys tuning in and we will catch you next time. Take care. See ya.