Superheroes  > Marvel  > Thor, Journey Into Mystery, Loki & Jane Foster  > Previous runs including Straczynski, Gillen, Fraction

Thor vol 1 s/c

Thor vol 1 s/c back

J. Michael Straczynski & Olivier Coipel

Price: 
£13.99

Page 45 Review by Stephen

Loki Be A Lady Tonight - and for the foreseeable future.

Never has this title been so animated, so personal or so surprising. It's been more Norse, for sure, most notably on Walt Simonson's run, but this is by no means without its legend and lore as Thor returns from the dead (see AVENGERS DISASSEMBLED: THOR) and rebuilds his Asgardian heaven on Earth - floating above a small town on the wide open plains of Oklahoma.

He returns alone, for his former fellow gods lie trapped in human bodies, so he sets about waking them up. Most of them.

Straczynski juxtaposes the provincial, the practical and the mundane with the legendary, the lofty and the blithely unconcerned, bravely building the series step by well weighted step, while Coipel and Martin fill the ancient halls with evening shadow and the skies above with light - and really, have Thor's eyebrows ever been so Viking?

But the pièce de résistance comes when Thor visits New Orleans which, while he was dead, drowned as a direct result of Hurricane Katrina and the negligence of his former friends as they fought each other during their CIVIL WAR. Fitting then, that this is where Iron Man - who was responsible, let's not forget, for surreptitiously stealing samples of Thor's DNA when alive and then using them to build a clone which ended up killing one of their own in CIVIL WAR (I would imagine to a god, that's waaaaay beyond blasphemy) - attempts to make cordial contact with his old ally and discovers, Superhuman Registration Act or no, that there are limits to what he can impose on a God.

Coipel and Straczynski play that simmering scene beautifully before bringing it to the most almighty boil, and I personally found the result hugely cathartic.

The best is yet to come, however, for in volume two there's a devastating sequence in which Thor - in his human guise of Dr. Donald Blake - attempts to find his beloved Lady Sif, encounters Blake's old girlfriend Dr. Jane Foster, and fails to spot what's right under his nose:

a) unconditional love
b) Lady Sif herself, trapped in the most awful way imaginable.

Instead he just walks away...
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