Thor 620.1

I’ve seen various approaches to the .1 jumping-on-point issues so far: just exposition to bring readers up to date; leaving the main character out of it completely; and a comedy single-issue story. This is closest to that final approach, except there is minimal attempt at comedy here, as far as I can tell.

What we get instead is a fill-in issue, with a villain who is powerful but has always been fifth-rate; his attempting to invade Asgard (which is in Oklahoma these days, in case you weren’t aware of that idiotic change) to steal one of the apples of immortality is playing rather out of his league. He nearly wins though, partly because his powers have started conveniently working a bit differently and he’s got a lot stronger, partly because the Asgardians are idiots (which is fair enough, as they always have been). In the end he is outwitted by Thor in a very lame way (and one that the art makes look impossible), rather than easily defeated by him, which should have been the case.

We end up with a Thor who is not great at fighting, but is smart (though not so smart as to suspect the Surtur he meets is a fake, despite being a fraction the size of the real thing), and smug about it. This is not a Thor I know at all. The issue also doesn’t tell me enough about Asgard, which now seems fine, although the last I saw of it, it had been totally destroyed by the Sentry in Siege. It’s also snowing in Oklahoma, which some locals (lots of trucks delivering food and beer for a party in Asgard) comment on, so I expected it to be significant, but it’s then forgotten. All this feels a little shoddy.

I actually had fairly high hopes for this: Dan & Andy are good at coming up with clever but logical surprises, great last-page revelations. I had hoped here for something like that, something to make me want to come back for more, and there is nothing at all along those lines. Unlike the other .1s I’ve read, it doesn’t even have a two-page spread showing the character in what are supposed to be exciting scenes from coming issues; we just get a Next Issue ad in which Thor seems to be climbing something, which could be a leg of a giant creature, I’m not sure. I suppose fighting a giant monster is more exciting than climbing, but it would be about the thousandth monster he’s fought, so not by so much.

The art is decent: mainline modern Marvel style, but with none of the ineptness on faces or bodies that is so common, and no storytelling fuck-ups or rough spots other than Thor’s winning ploy, which cannot happen as drawn – I think this is keenness to make the twist a surprise, but it irritated me.

I keep saying this kind of thing: not a terrible comic, but not a terribly good one either, and I can’t imagine that it will make many readers come back for the next issues.