Me, I always kinda dug it. It was different. Weird. Didn’t know where it was going. And, because I’m that sort, I enjoyed trying to see where it was just DC characters with the serial numbers filed off.
Before Hickman returned to Marvel to take over the X-Men line of the books, he had one foot in the door at DC, set to take over the Legion of Super-Heroes and who knows what else. Now, when you see that G.O.D.S. stars a roughish magician with great hair and a trenchcoat, it’s not too hard to see who Wyn is meant to be. Pay attention and you can see bits of the Fourth World and Dr. Fate and Eclipso amongst other elements of DC’s magic/high cosmic side. Trying to match everyone up in G.O.D.S. with their possible DC counterpart could be a fun game for another time. I mention this for two reasons: I enjoy pointing it out since I didn’t see nearly enough people (aka everyone who read it) do so and it could be part of the book’s flaw that led to its decisive commercial failure. (A failure I’m apt to point out that stems not just from sales, but from the creative team involved. This is an A-List (for Marvel) creative team and much like a book like Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E., it’s not simply a matter of sales alone, but sales that don’t justify the page rates of the people making the comic. It’s important to remember details like that if you’re going to wade into the sales side of the industry... which I’m not.)
While I’m sure that Hickman took whatever germs of an idea for the never-happened DC book and changed them enough for Marvel, G.O.D.S. is, at its core, still rooted in those DC ideas of an organised magical system. You would think that with its roots in the grounded, real world sensibility that Marvel would lend itself to systems that explain the organisation of the Natural Order of Things and the Powers that Be and concepts of magic and gods, because organising these things into systems with the boxes and labels and neat charts make it all make sense in a clean, practical, material way. But that’s wrong. That’s what you do in DC with its roots in large mythological beings where you’d think that clear explanations would kill the magic, drag it down to Earth, and sully the whole appeal. That, too, is wrong.
In Marvel, these attempts at explanations and ordering fall flat, because these are things well beyond the world outside your window. Gods and magic are beyond us, so trying to bring them down to that level in that manner doesn’t work. Dr. Strange works because he’s just a dude. Brief glimpses/encounters with the likes of the High Tribunal work because it’s just a fleeting moment with this immense otherworldly power that remains aloof and mysterious whose actual existence is unknowable. You try to ground that too much and it loses that real world sense of wonder and terror. It becomes just another beaurocracy but in space or something. I think that Hickman understood this to an extent and tried to keep the focus of the book as much as he could on the human-level elements. But, even then, it often felt a little bit too much like Sandman and Hellblazer for it to work completely in this context. DC is just endless pantheons and no one loves a good chart outlining name, rank, and serial number like pantheons. Read the Eddas and, half the time, that’s all either of them are: lists of names and relationships. A universe of pantheons welcomes organisation and explanation. Trying to fit everything into a neat spreadsheet is not how the real world works and, as much as it is decidedly not the real world, Marvel’s heart is always that gentle lie.
Which brings me to Al Ewing, a writer who has dedicated a not insignificant portion of his time at Marvel to trying to force it all to make sense. Part of the reason why I’ve always struggled to get into Ewing’s work at Marvel is that my previous attempts all seemed to occur on books where part of the goal was to be this generation’s Roy Thomas or Mark Gruenwald, trying to deliver a unified theory of how it all works on a cosmic level. While I have no doubt that he truly loves the work of Jim Starlin, one of the things that Starlin is great at is not over-explaining a lot of the concepts that he just let loose at Marvel. He’s never given Thanos a detailed origin story or gotten into the workings of Eternity and Infinity. His stories were always filtered through Thanos and Adam Warlock with the larger mysteries remaining. Even stories that posited to suggest some tidy origin usually revealed themselves as a red herring with something larger lurking above. Or, to put it another way, Starlin didn’t do a proper Star Fox story until 40 years after he created the character.
Now, there are lots of people who love what Ewing has done at Marvel and I can see why. It sounds inventive and inspired, logical and neat and tidy, and, for the reasons outline above, that bores me. It doesn’t fit. In The Immortal Thor #11, Bragi gives a brief explanation of what seems to be the broad concept of G.O.D.S., but also the order of things as established by Ewing:
THE COSMIC CHANGED, FROM SEVEN INTO EIGHT--FROM ODD TO EVEN, POETRY TO PROSE. /
THIS NEW REALITY, A SCIENTIST CHOSE--SO THERE’S A SYSTEM TO THE WEAVE OF FATE, A
HIERARCHY BROKEN INTO TWOS. / THE
MAGIC FIGHTS THE SCIENCE, TIME
FIGHTS SPACE, OBLIVION’S AGAINST THE TRIPLE FACE OF JUDGMENT. (WHO WE HOPE CAN NEVER LOSE.)
Part of this actually comes from Hickman as Ewing alludes to the destruction of the old universe and creation of a new one in Secret Wars by Hickman and Esad Ribić (the scientist is Reed Richards). The series of destruction/rebirth attributed to the nature of the Marvel Universe, while accurate to existing continuity, being put into a system resembles the endless Crises of DC and the way that those have been numbered in the years preceding this issue. That that has become such a central tenet of DC is a hint right away that it doesn’t necessarily belong at Marvel.
An apparent contradiction that exists by bringing the lore of G.O.D.S. into The Immortal Thor is reconciling one set of higher beings with another set. Namely, who came first: the High Tribunal and company or the Elder Gods? You can fit this conflict into the duality described in the issue, one set of creator/elder gods against another to determine from whom all flows... But it seems like, in this book, Ewing runs up against a wall of fitting everything into a tidy explanation. It’s an odd series of contradictions that traditional mythology is all about trying to explain the unknowable, yet often leaves the relationships vague in the grand scheme. The Asgardians are gods and, yet, not. One of many pantheons that seems to shift and change depending on the run. Very rarely organised in any real fashion.
A small thing about this issue: while it becomes about seeking out Tyr, we’re never actually told explicitly why Thor brought together the children of Odin. It flows into Bragi bringing up Tyr and Thor seemingly aware of Tyr’s absence and ready to seek him out, but it’s never stated outright that that’s what Thor gathered them to do (though is heavily implied, albeit at the same moment that Bragi enters the story and exerts control). In fact, Thor seems surprised by the arrival of Bragi and, then, downright shocked by Ullr, the god of doom. If, when he said that all of the children of Odin weren’t there yet and that he wanted to wait, and only three children were missing... well, why was Thor surprised at the arrival of two if the purpose was to find the third?
These two issues are as much about the conflict between Loki and Bragi as anything. The key phrase comes shortly after Bragi’s arrival and he begins to duel with Loki over the narration of the story – the telling of the story we’re reading and the characters experience: “Each story told is wover as a lie.../...all poetry is spun to speak a truth.” Bragi arrives along with Ullr, seeking to thwart some elements of Loki’s larger scheme. What happens? They seek out Tyr who was put in the box by Loki to learn something Loki wants to know – and save Tyr from that knowledge, while revealing Loki’s schemes for Thor. There’s only so much that can be done to aid their brother against the schemes of their sibling as it is a battle of narratives. Bragi narrates that Loki wished “...to learn the trick of how a God must die” and it’s a curious phrasing. Not ‘might’ or ‘could’ or anything less definitive than ‘must.’ The emphasis may be on ‘die,’ but it’s the ‘must’ that catches my eye. The version of Tyr that is in the Skinner Box is Tyr and not. As we see, the essence of Tyr is gone, replaced by oblivion – basically, Tyr dies a death of sorts and is free of himself (from himself?). Later, Thor dies at Loki’s hand and becomes free of himself as well. The idea of Tyr lives on, as we’ll see next issue, but is separate from the god; we see that Thor lives in on, but the idea of Thor is also separate. While Tyr is separated by Oblivion, Thor is separated by Eternity... nothing versus everything... another duality.
I don’t intend to always make these pieces about the grand schemes of Loki, it just sort of becomes that. I’m a bit of a one-track-minded fellow, a little too literal, meant more for prose than poetry, honestly. And, on that, I’ll end this here. Next week, we’ll continue with The Immortal Thor #12 and also pay Tiwaz a visit in Thor #355.
