Obscure Super Team Sunday: T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents and Wally Wood

T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents is a fictional team of superheroes that appeared in comic books originally published by Tower Comics in the 1960s. They were an arm of the United Nations and were notable for their depiction of the heroes as everyday people whose heroic careers were merely their day jobs. The series was also notable for featuring some of the better artists of the day, such as Wally Wood. The team first appeared in T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents #1 (cover-datedNov. 1965). The name is an acronym for "The Higher United Nations Defense Enforcement Reserves".

The thunder agents is a long enduring super hero team.  Created in the silver age of comics and published originally by Tower Comics.  The title has had several publishers including DC comics and IDW.

The big secret behind the Thunder Agents is that the superhero stuff is their day job.  They are real people with real lives.  Most of their powers are from devices that they discovered in a lab during a raid on the enemy.  This was back in 1965 when it was a little more universal who the enemy was.

Most of the devices had some sort of flaw that put the user at risk.

The team consisted of the following members, some wit a super ability and some just highly skilled in their field.

• Dynamo 
  
  — Leonard Brown wears the Thunder Belt, which makes him super-strong and invulnerable for short periods
• Menthor 
  
  — John Janus gains mental powers from the Menthor Helmet. Actually a double agent for the Warlord, when he wears the helmet, he turns to good. After Janus dies in issue #7, two later agents wear the Menthor Helmet.
• NoMan 
  
  — Dying scientist Anthony Dunn transfers his mind into an android body of his own design. With a wide number of these identical bodies, he can transfer his mind to any of them should something happen to the one he is in. The addition of an Invisibility Cloak completes the transformation into NoMan.
• Lightning 
  
  — Virgil "Guy" Gilbert wears the Lightning Suit, which gives him super-speed but also ages him at an accelerated rate
• Raven
  
  --Craig Lawson wears an experimental rocket pack
• Vulcan
  
   — Travis F. Riley is a sonic-powered agent

Thunder SquadEdit

• James "Egghead" Andor 
  
  — a brilliant strategist, Andor dies in issue #2, reappearing as a villain in later issues
• Dynamite 
  
  — Daniel John Adkins is the "weapons man"
• Kathryn "Kitten" Kane 
  
  — technical device expert
• William "Weed" Wylie 
  
  — locksmith and safecracker

There have been other incarnations of these heroes in various updates, but the original work is classic and is remembered fondly, mostly due to the artwork of Wally Wood.  Word worked on the first 20 or o issues and created an artwork legacy that was a hard act to follow

Wally Wood

If anyone ever tells you that the greatest artists are also the most tortured, they're are referring to the might and dark madness of Wally Wood.  The man has a brilliant body of work and if you are any kind of comic book nerd, you owe your soul to the brilliance of Woody.  The brief bio I have stolen does not do the man justice or reveal his inner darkness.

Wallace Allan Wood (June 17, 1927 – November 2, 1981)^[1] was an American comic book writer, artist and independent publisher, best known for his work on EC Comics's Mad and Marvel's Daredevil. He was one of Mad's founding cartoonists in 1952. Although much of his early professional artwork is signed Wallace Wood, he became known as Wally Wood, a name he claimed to dislike.^[2] Within the comics community, he was also known as Woody, a name he sometimes used as a signature.

In addition to Wood's hundreds of comic book pages, he illustrated for books and magazines while also working in a variety of other areas – advertising; packaging and product illustrations; gag cartoons; record album covers; posters; syndicated comic strips; and trading cards, including work on Topps' landmark Mars Attacks set.