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THOR: GODSTORM #1
Mildly Recommended (5/10)
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Marvel Comics
Writer: Kurt Busiek
Pencils: Steve Rude
Inks: Mike Royer
Colors: Greg Wright
Letters: Comicraft
Editor: Tom Brevoort
Price: $3.50 US/$5.25 CAN |
I should start off by saying that I'm not a Thor fan by any stretch of the imagination (I don't even like the Simonson stuff much) and so I wasn't really all that excited by this project in the first place. But the creative team of Busiek and Rude is too strong to ignore, and I wanted to see if they could overcome my lack of interest in the lead character. To put it bluntly? Not really. Busiek's work here is reminiscent of his work on Defenders, sort of a
knowing throwback to the retro style, and while that is a style which Thor works
in quite well, it's not my favorite type of work that Busiek does. There are
some interesting things to me about the story, notably the exploration of how
Marvel's version of Thor interacted with his Norse followers back when he was
worshipped, but it is soon passed over for a 1960s Avengers pastiche that
doesn't really do much for me.
It doesn't help that Rude's work here didn't
dazzle me. The painted cover is beautiful, but I found his pencilled work, with
Royer, to be quite ordinary, seemingly designed mostly to evoke the feeling of
old school Kirby. It succeeds in feeling like a Silver Age comic in that regard,
but fails to grab my interest as much as it would have if Rude had painted the
book in the style he used for the cover.
While I'm not much of a Thor fan, I did find
it interesting to see his life explored before he was saddled with a mortal
identity or before he was an anachronism in modern society. I loved seeing him
come down amongst his people and seem more like a powerful member of that
society with status than just another super-hero, and had Busiek and Rude
focused on this more unusual version of Thor, I suspect I would have been more
intrigued. In particular, I liked that Busiek managed to make Thor heroic and
noble while not downplaying how important human courage was at the same time
with the character of the chieftain.
The central concept of the series is instead the "Godstorm," the most powerful and sentient storm there is, and it's encounters with Thor through the ages. Not a bad concept, and certainly fitting in with the mythological style of Thor, but having
the Norse narrator tell the boys in detail of Thor's adventures in the 1960s
seemed a bit forced, and more to the point, it didn't seem all that new to me.
Anyone who has read much of those days of Thor has seen him teaming up with the
Avengers to fight supervillains or threats from mythology, and while the craft
here is certainly solid, it doesn't really strike me as anything I couldn't get
from the originals instead.
If you happen to be a fan of this character or the Silver Age style, this will probably be right up your alley. However, if you're expecting the Kurt Busiek who wrote Astro City or the Steve Rude who drew Nexus, you might want to
set your sights a little lower and expect an inoffensive but ultimately somewhat
bland Silver Age style story of Thor.
Email Randy Lander comments about this review. |
