Guide to ThunderCats (New for Patrons!)

New Guide, HO! I’m back with another special mid-week licensed property guide exclusively for Pledgeonaut Patrons of Crushing Krisis. This guide is for a property I love dearly, which rocketed from the obscurity of nostalgia to be the most pre-ordered comic book of the decade, due out a week from today! That’s right, it’s a Guide to ThunderCats – HO!

Guide to ThunderCats comic books

I was surprised when I heard that the new ThunderCats comics by Declan Shalvey & Drew Moss from Dynamite Entertainment had the highest pre-orders of any comic so far in the 2020s. Did people still love this property that much? And, hadn’t there already been plenty of ThunderCats comics?

That led me down a rabbit hole that got surprisingly deep, thanks to one particular long-running ThunderCats series most readers have likely never seen or heard of.

Let’s start at the start: ThunderCats was a mega-popular kids cartoon than ran four season from 1985 to 1989.

Even if it was ostensibly a toy commercial – the same as He-Man and the Masters of the Universe – ThunderCats always had more heart and coherence than almost all of its action-packed peers. Maybe that’s because it was the singular conception of creator Ted Wolf. Or, maybe it’s because TV stations had so much faith in the show (and a profit-sharing agreement on the toys) that they ordered three seasons at once – allowing the show to be produced with confidence.

(A fourth season included a definitive finale – rare for cartoons of the time.)

I know the ThunderCats nostalgia is strong amongst folks my age, so I assumed it had been revived repeatedly both in cartoons and comics in the nearly 25 years since it went off the air.

It turns out, I was mistaken! ThunderCats has been revived briefly in cartoon form in 2011 and 2020, with both lasting only a season (and the latter being utterly reviled by adult fans). WildStorm held a license to make ThunderCats comics early in their years as a DC imprint, and they churned out five mini-series arcs – though only three of them existed in a continuous canon with each other.

However, way back in the 80s, Marvel Comics published a pair of ThunderCats series that was more-or-less canon with the cartoon. The first volume was published by Marvel’s kids comics imprint Star Comics. Launching in 1985, it boasted a surprisingly weighty cast of creators, including David Michelinie, Gerry Conway, & Tom DeFalco. Just over half of the issues were original stories, with 10 being adapted directly from episodes of the show.

While that series was still running, Marvel launched a second ThunderCats series – this one published in 1987 by Marvel UK. Marvel UK’s original publications were geared towards the British newsstands, so this comic was a weekly anthology magazine that included activities and pull-out posters along with reprints of the Star Comics series.

Except… it wasn’t all reprints. The Marvel UK series commissioned their own serialized comics stories from a UK creators including Simon Furman, Dan Abnett, & Doug Braithwaite. Some of these stories were beautifully drawn, and included slightly more plot sophistication than their American counterparts. Plus, after the first year of the comic magazine, Marvel UK began running prose features alongside new and reprinted comics!

Unfortunately, these Marvel UK comics were never collected and aren’t available digitally. Even searching the web for scans of the original comics preserved by fans yields only a portion of the run. I really went down the rabbit hole on this one, trawling through wikis and fan sites to figure out exactly which issues contain original material. The guide includes a succinct list, as well as an issue-by-issue breakdown!

It’s wild to me that the lengthiest run of ThunderCats stories outside of the original show has become lost media! It’s my dream that the new licensed Dynamite series explodes with popularity and leads them to collect those Marvel UK comics. Stranger things have happened – we got a Knights of Pendragon omnibus!

I’m excited to read Declan Shalvey & Drew Moss’s ThunderCats relaunch next week. Will it be a simple all-ages comic retreading the ThunderCats landing on Third Earth while being pursued by the mutants of Pund-Darr and the evil Mumm-Ra? Or, will Shalvey put his own modern spin on the familiar tale?

Want instant access to this Guide to ThunderCats comic books? Become a Patron of CK for as little as $2 a month or $20.40 a year to gain access to this exclusive guide and over 70 other guides months before the general public gains access to them. I have launched 38 Guides to Patrons in the past 365 days – 14 Marvel, 3 DC, & 21 Indie/Licensed! Plus, I’ve also updated more than 100 of my 220+ guides for both patrons and the general public.

Exclusives for Crushing Cadets ($1/month): 50 Guides!

DC Guides (7): Batman – Index of Ongoing Titles, Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight, Birds of Prey, Green Lantern Corps, Green Lantern: Hal Jordan, Green Lantern: Kyle Rayner, Omega Men