The Immortal Thorsday Thoughts 13

As we begin the second half of The Immortal Thor, changes happen to the title. The first is that, having firmly established the Elder Gods, Al Ewing no longer focuses on retcons to plant the seeds for the story nearly as much. Instead, he shifts from looking back to looking forward, beginning to build more on existing stories. Issues 13 through 15 build upon two Avengers stories that he co-wrote No Surrender and No Road Home along with his Guardians of the Galaxy run, taking up those plot points and weaving them into the larger story of Thor and his collision course with the gods of Utgard.

While teased since the prologue story to The Immortal Thor, Thor’s confrontation and death with the Elder Gods of Utgard becomes the main focus of the second year of the title. Everything points towards Thor’s journey to Utgard and his confrontation with his fate. The seeds for this confrontation have been planted, the motives of Gaea and the gods created and made appropriately dire, and Thor’s path set.

Ewing’s ability to take what’s come before and continue to build upon it across different works is impressive. It was January 2020 when Zeus said that the wheel has turned in Guardians of the Galaxy #1 and, taking that phrase, Ewing made it a central idea of The Immortal Thor over three years later. He’s not the first writer to build these epic stories out of bits and pieces of mini-series and one-shots and cut short runs until they all collide in surprising ways that reward the faithful that stuck with it from project to project across a decade. Mainstream superhero comicbooks is a modernist medium that way. Stories built of stories built of stories. You don’t even need to have read them – I’ll admit that I have not.

I’ll also admit that these three issues, while practical in their advancement toward Utgard, suffer from feeling out of place. If you squint a bit, you can see some thematic elements with Thor progressing through godly business from his own family to another pantheon of the same age, all on the road to the Elder Gods. There’s some muddiness in the way that Thor is suggested to be a progression from Zeus, though, that stands out, and the entire story all adds up to Ewing wrapping up old business. Maybe not so forward thinking, unless you subscribe to the idiom that you need to bury the past before you can move on or however that goes. All of which is my way of saying that change isn’t always for the better and we’re in for some aimless, rambling three weeks, perhaps, so get ready.

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The second change is the debut of Jan Bazaldua as the regular artist of The Immortal Thor, in that she will draw at least some of every issue going forward. I would throw out some stat about the number of artists in the first year versus the number of artists in the second, but issue 19 kind of skews things when looking at lists of names. But, ignoring that, Bazaldua is the visual look of the second half of the year after the first devolved into a rotation of artists after Martín Cóccolo departed. Her visual style isn’t a great departure from that of Cóccolo, which surprisingly adds to the visual continuity of the series. There’s a bit more Olivier Coipel in Bazaldua’s style with the broad faces yet with thicker, more carefree line work.

Her work on the second year of the title is a bit underrated, I find. Gone is the energy and hype of the initial issues, well into the dull middle section of the story where it feels a bit like the book is treading water until it can get to Utgard. I don’t entirely buy that idea and part of what keeps it somewhat exciting is Bazaldua’s visuals. She adds drama and energy when it’s needed.

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The third required reading comic is Giant-Size Thor #1, something of a throwaway issue. While referenced in The Immortal Thor #13, it is actually pretty far from required reading. The entire premise of the issue is based on treating the title of the comic as the literal point with some aliens kidnapping Thor and using him to pilot a Giant-Size Thor mech. That’s the plot. Get the joke? Eventually Hercules arrives and Thor frees himself and the day is saved and the bad guys punished and all of that. It’s a fine issue where the initial play on the title actually hits in the right way to produce a laugh.

The most notable element of the issue is the way it reuses panels from Ragnarok, the story that ran in Thor (1999) #80-85, where Thor, in an effort to gain the knowledge that Odin once sacrificed an eye for, tears out both of his eyes, specifically in issue 83. The panel where Thor realises what he must do and goes to tear out his remaining eye is one of the most memorable panels, for me, in all of comics. Brian Level does his best to recreate Andrea Dell’Otto’s work here, but doesn’t quite capture the shock and horror of the original, which partly resided in the previous panel having the same blocking.

The callback to that story rests on the idea of Thor’s sacrifice to gain the knowledge necessary to save his people from the endless cycle of Ragnaroks, to see the circle of the threads of fate, and cut that thread. That was a sort of freedom that Thor sought to give the Asgardians. It initially meant the freedom to die and stay dead. Eventually, it was, theoretically, the freedom to determine their own fate. Now, Loki seeks to give them all even more freedom and the story ends with Loki’s narration asking what Thor would give “In time to come, when a new sacrifice is needed?” It’s a loose pointer to the eventual sacrifice of his life (and more?) in Utgard and beyond. Ever the one to join in when there’s an event or a series of throwaway one-shots, Ewing does his best to deliver something not entirely throwaway.

Next week, I’ll discuss the other throwaway tie-in one-shot The Immortal Thor annual #1 along with The Immortal Thor #14.