Comic News And Reviews

By: J.M. DeMatteis (writer), Brian Ching (pencils), Rick Ketcham (inks), Rob Schwager (colors), Simon Bowland (letters) & Mark Paniccia (editor)

The Story: Thor engages in cosmic-level battle with Oblivion before falling to Earth as an amnesiac Donald Blake and being taken in by a beautiful widow.  Together they will find healing.

What’s Good: If you feel like Thor is too strong to be on Earth because he would break things if he really unloaded with his full might, you’ll probably enjoy the first part of this issue.  Here we see Thor as his cosmic best, doing battle with Oblivion, a cosmic entity who is in league with the Chaos King.  This portion of the issue is really good cosmic action.  It has BIG scenes, bright colors and Thor standing alone against a real heavy hitter.  It also allows the art team to shine, especially the colors from Schwagner.  Cosmic action is all about the colors.  Just think how nice these comics will look digitally instead of printed on cheap paper!

The best thing about this issue is the art.  It is really nice.  It is just a shame that the story isn’t better.

What’s Not So good: As good as the first half of this comic is, it is unnecessary tie-in to the Chaos War event.  Tie-ins are very difficult to do well.  If they are too central to the main story, you are abusing the readers who just read the main event.  But, if they are too disconnected (as this comic is), it just feels like, “In case you were curious, this is the detail on the fight that Thor was in that we didn’t have time to show you in the main Chaos War.”

The second half of the story just doesn’t work at all.  Although he is victorious (I think) against Oblivion, Thor is struck down to Earth where he lands in the snowy, North Carolina mountains and is found naked and not remembering his own name by a beautiful widow who is suffering from the loss of her family.  This could be the plot for a romance novel.  It is also intensely frustrating to have major characters doing things like this that have NO EFFECT in the other Marvel Universe comics.  Of course, we should be used to it, but this amnesiac episode is probably not going to feature in the pages of Thor or the Avengers.  These tertiary titles really need to give storytelling right-of-way to the major titles.  This is the editor’s fault.

This comic also has two flaws from a basic “how to do comics” standpoint.  First, the majority of the story is told via wordy narration boxes.  Perhaps that isn’t technically “wrong”, but it is boring.  Second, it doesn’t do a good job of telling us the names of the bad guys.  If you aren’t familiar with Oblivion, you might not know “who” it is that Thor is fighting.  The name does appear once in a narration box, but so do a lot of other bold and italicized words that could be the name for a cosmic entity.  Then on the final page, Donald and the lovely widow are confronted by some demonic nasty thing.  It is presented as if we should know what this thing is.  For a book that is rife with narration boxes, why not have one to explain what this critter is?

Conclusion: This is why we don’t buy event tie-ins. And that’s a shame because Chaos War proper is really good, so there was hope that the tie-ins would be of high quality also.  This comic just needed a little stronger editorial control and if this was the best story they could come up with for Thor’s role in the Chaos War, they should have just skipped it.  In this economy, with single-issue comic sales going into the toilet, it is amazing that Marvel continues to shovel things at the wall to see what sticks.

Grade: D-

- Dean Stell

Filed under: Marvel Comics Tagged: | Marvel, Thor, Rob Schwager, review, Comic Book Reviews, Weekly Comic Book Review, Simon Bowland, J.M. Dematteis, Dean Stell, Mark Paniccia, Brian Ching, Chaos War, Rick Ketcham, Chaos War: Thor #1, Chaos War: Thor #1 review

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