Thor #1 – Of God and Man
So, Thor #1 came and went, no real hullabaloo. I’m sorry to say that for the triumphant return of a major Marvel character, it really was more of a whimper than a bang. Slow, decompressed art pages, a wandering conversation between Donald Blake (yeah, what’s HE been up to since Thor ascended and all that? Can you really go back to your day job, even when you’re a doctor? I mean, I’d say there’s a story there, Blake dealing with the loss of the godly powers and the whole darned pantheon to begin with-… but I’m not writing this book. Back to the show, sorry to barge in there.)
Blake tells Thor that if he doesn’t want to deal with Oeming’s awesome Ragnarok story, he doesn’t have to. Screw continuity, man! Just make it up! Don’t get me wrong, he has a point what with the idea that man decides whether gods exist more than gods themselves, but still. Basically, how do you call out a God of Thunder? You call him a chump. Donald Blake calls Thor a chump for sitting on his butt in the Void (wait, THE VOID?! That’s gotta be little ‘v’.) when he could get up and start living again. It works, Thor does, and Donald Blake checks into a little bed and breakfast in the middle of nowhere, Oklahoma. There’s a bit of a gag about his I.D., some chatter, and then he goes to his room, cracks a stick on the ground and we’re left with a shot of lighting with a great thunder sound effect.
I dunno. Maybe I’m a little weird,but I thought when Thor would come back to the Marvel U, he’d come in a like a frikkin’ Zepplin album cover, just RAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!, lighting everywhere and beatin’ fools with a big ol’ hammer. Come back as he left us, part of some greater story that has legend wrapped around it like a little kid’s super-hero cape. Instead, we get an existentially split monologue telling us that while the Earth has been going to Heck (everyone thank Tony, kids), that while Captain America was shot like a horse in the street, Thor’s been kicking it in nowheresville, land of the semi-spacescape background.
And yeah, I was pissed off about this when I read the preview. Where’s freakin’ Thor? Why isn’t he bashing anyone in the present tense? What’s with all this “And then…” captioning?
Every once and awhile, there comes a time when one has to step back and looking at things from a broader perspective. My perspective wanted Thor hitting fools upside the head. Marvel, in general, has to take things another way. He’s been gone for so long, a lot of the groundwork for this story has been laid by Neil Gaiman and is being written by J. Michael Straczynski, two men not known for their balls-to-the-wall action. It’s going to be a more cerebral book. It’s going to have a lot of repetition because we’re catching Average Joe Reader up with years and years and years of story. This is a #1 issue and by it’s very nature should be accessible to everyone and that’s got to take some time.
As much as I’d like to start with some heavy hero action, it all has to start somewhere and if their going for a more of a tale of yore than an adventure comic, they did a pretty good job and laying some groundwork. And you know what? I can wait. I’m a fan and I have all the background and information I need to know that eventually, Thor is going to meet up with Tony Stark and kick his metal hiney. The Average Joe Reader? He has no idea about Civil War yet, all he knows is Thor looks cool, hey it’s a #1, let’s get the Turner cover.
That reader can’t wait to catch up with the rest of us, but I think it’s pretty cool for us to wait for them.
