Obviously there has been a proliferation of Thor titles lately – we’re getting a bunch of collections of recent mini-series, we’ve just had a fifth Essential volume, and so on, but Marvel must be hoping that a new Thor title out now will really hit big.
Three comics in, and I am very irritated by this Fear Itself event. The prologue set up the Red Skull’s daughter, Sin, tracking some mighty weapon. In FI1 she gets it, and it’s like Don Blake getting Mjolnir: she becomes some ancient scary Asgardian god (of fear, I suppose). Odin immediately runs away, taking all of his Asgardians with him. Oh, and Sin meets some old guy, an alternate or evil Odin type by the look of it, and summons something or other. This is a double-length issue, so 66 or whatever pages in, and we still don’t actually know what is going on, but just keep getting “OMG Odin is scared and look the Watcher is hanging around so just imagine how big and exciting this is!!!!” stuff thrown at us.
This is the first of Marvel’s .1 sequence of issues over the next couple of months, intended to provide jumping-on points for new readers. I plan on trying most of them, as they will be new to me. I’ll be interested to see if they really are comprehensible for someone who has been out of touch for ages on most of the Marvel Universe, and interested to see how many keep me coming back for the subsequent issues.
In which the series undergoes the inevitable switch-over from the innocuous number of 33 to 500, as is the Mighty Marvel Trend with all the marquee names or marquee names-in-waiting, incorporating all the previous Iron Man titles along with mini-series, one-shots, and, what the hell, probably Contest Of The Champions, for the sake of a number redolent of legacy and grandiosity. We should all wear our wrinkles so well.
This reprinted series, trailing new work, strikes me as a bit of a mixed bag. It’s insanely full of ideas, but I don’t think very many of them are Fraction’s.