For a top-tier Marvel character, Thor's been gone for an awfully long time.  His last series was axed as part of "Avengers Disassembled", clearing the way for a reboot which has been stuck in the pipeline for years.  And now, J Michael Straczynski and Olivier Coipel finally produce their first issue.

It's unusual to have a major title rested for quite so long.  I rather suspect it's mainly the result of Marvel waiting for Neil Gaiman and J Michael Straczynski's schedules, rather than a deliberate plan from the word go.  But it's worked out quite well.  Thor needed a few years' rest.  It's a shame some other major characters can't get the same treatment - although come to think of it, Captain America may well be doing it through the back door as we speak.

In many ways, this is the sort of first issue Marvel were producing a few years ago.  It's all set up and not much plot.  It would be going too far to say that nothing happens - after all, Thor returns from the dead, and that's certainly something happening.  Nonetheless, it's basically an issue of Thor talking with his Donald Blake alter ego, and deciding whether or not he wants to return to life.  The problem with that, of course, is that we all know Thor's coming back, so any tension comes from us putting that out of our mind.

Other than some pages of brawling with demons, which seems to have been included as a polite concession to genre expectations, this is a very talky issue - and, at the same time, an issue that's fairly light on dialogue.  For much of this issue, we're back in the realms of extreme decompression here, which have been out of fashion for quite some time.  The first seven pages, which are little more than an extended scene-setting flashback, contain a total of 79 words.  That's so decompressed that it's got the bends - and also, come to think of it, most probably woefully inadequate to give these flashbacks the necessary context for anyone who doesn't know the original stories.  Two nearly silent pages recapping the "Road to Civil War issues of Fantastic Four strikes me as misjudged.

Still, having said all that, I do like the general direction - which seems to be to place Thor on earth and have him try to rebuild Asgard.  Marvel's Thor is usually at his most interesting when he's positioned as a mythological figure in the real world, instead of appearing in ersatz myths which few writers can carry off convincingly.  It's the tension between the two that makes him work, and I'm glad to see that while Thor has (inevitably) been brought back, the rest of Asgard remains stone cold dead, at least for now.

And Olivier Coipel's artwork is excellent, as you'd expect.  Although he's given a lot of talking to draw in this issue, the flashbacks and the token action sequences give him a chance to show what he can really do.  He's a good choice of artist for Thor, giving the character a real sense of mythological splendour and every so subtly distancing him from the more obvious superheroic aspects of his character design towards a slightly more medieval look.

So it seems promising.  But it's a very slow start, in a way that you don't see that often these days, and I think that's a mistake.

Rating: B

back | continue