Corporate Ragnarok
A preview of my Immortal Thor review & NINJA TURTLES!!
Why can’t all comics be as good as Al Ewing comics? I am trying to catch up on/ read at least most of Knight Terrors over at DC just so I can understand why they stopped releasing all of their comics for 2 months for this event that I’ve seen no one talk about at all. I haven’t been impressed by what I’ve read. It’s such a strange thing bogged down in like 50 tie-in issues that gets in the way of reading the books I want to read. And they just finished another set of bizarre event miniseries no one talked about in Lazarus Planet.
Then you go and read a comic like IMMORTAL THOR and you remember why you got into this stuff at all.
You can read the full review on Patreon, but a portion of it is included here. Before we get to that, let’s catch up on what’s happening on the main site—starting with the regulars.
Random Comic Panel of the Week
NO CONTEXT COMICS: A LOOK AT 3 BOOKS I DON’T READ FROM THE WEEK OF 8/23
If there’s one thing I really want to get better about it is expanding beyond the Big 2 Superhero comics and getting into more independent and creator owned books. I usually only catch up on books with buzz toward the end of the year but there are some I just never look at and others I quickly fall behind on. It’s a big release week for Image, so I figured why not try out a few of those issues and see what they have in store for me.
That’s right. It was an all Image Comics week on No Context Comics. Click the banner to check it out.
Change is Constant: How IDW Revitalized and Reinvented Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
I was going to pitch this piece to some websites ahead of the release of TMNT: Mutant Mayhem (loved it! Should have written about it here) but I never did. So I wrote it anyway. Reinvention is uniquely baked into the TMNT and IDW fully embraces the idea of reinvention and change—and their approach laid the groundwork for a revitalization of the brand. Lots of talk about change this week…As that’s also central to my review of IMMORTAL THOR.
Read the TMNT piece here. I’m pretty proud of it.
IMMORTAL THOR AND THE CORPORATE RAGNAROK
Immortal Thor by Al Ewing and Martin Coccolo is an excellent comic. There's no point building up to that analysis. Al Ewing knows he has to make a good comic if he's going to tag "Immortal" on it, given the universal acclaim of Immortal Hulk, a strange and powerful comic that is among the best things Marvel ever published.
Attempting to follow that up must be a daunting task. Ewing steers into the skid here, acknowledging that he knows he has created a work that may be the best he's ever created. What must that feel like?
On the surface there are some similarities to Immortal Hulk in this first issue--Thor battles with an agent of a higher power that poses an impossible challenge and threatens Thor's sense of self. It twists mythologies and religions into the tapestry of the Marvel Universe, raising questions of meaning and self-determination.
But this is not Immortal Hulk, and it is not like it at all beyond the most surface level comparisons. Holding the two up to one another serves neither.
It starts at the base foundation of the art. Hulk was a horror comic from the outset. Joe Bennet, for all of his heinous politics, was masterful at both the grotesque and at building suspense. That book was a horror story to its very core. It was beautiful and hideous.
Martin Coccolo's art, along with Matthew Wilson's colors are completely different. I'll be honest--I don't love it yet, and it's mostly just the way he draws Thor's face--he is boyish, which doesn't fit the grandeur of the dialogue or plot. It's a seemingly small nitpick, but it is jarring to me on nearly every page. The rest of the issue is beautiful. Where Immortal Hulk was a study of tension within every page, Immortal Thor seeks to be a truly cosmic epic.
Splash pages abound--both single and double page. And it grants an air of importance to every movement of the gods and the epic vistas they inhabit. The rest of the pages are drafted in a widescreen tower--layouts of six panels at most, where Thor and his godly brethren dominate the imagery. The issue's most stunning image, however, is a two-page spread close-up of the immense and dominating Utgard-Thor, whose presence is so overwhelming that not even the most epic tools in the language of comic books does his form justice. His black face and starry eye, the grotesque distortion of the thunder storm that is his contenance, takes up all the space that was granted to the dazzling Rainbow Bridge and the architecture of Midgard.
This, more than anything, distills the scope of Ewing and Coccolo's ambition. It's a trick I've never seen before--to use a double page spread to focus in on a single figure's face. It requires a confidence of art, no doubt, but more importantly it flips the language of comics on its head. This kind of splash page is reserved for moments of wide screen action and sprawling grandeur. We have that expectation. But here, the page is devoured by the raving god, a creature older and more frightening than any god of Asgard.
It's more effective than any narration in making the character feel important and imposing. I think back to Donny Cates' run on Thor, where the caption boxes narrate and explain why the Black Winter is to be feared. Here, the words are secondary. Utgard-Thor consumes the very fabric of reality. Where Hulk ended in an immense foldout of a figure coming down from the heavens, a deafening crescendo overtaking the hero, that is where this story begins.
Even the nature of the "Immortal" title is entirely different. In Hulk, it was a torturous curse of the Hulk to drag Bruce Banner through the darkest elements of his own psyche in grotesque and painful rebirth. It begins with Banner at his lowest and most frightened.
In Immortal Thor, the thunder god reflects briefly on his relationship to the people of Earth, and the way time passes mortals by as he continues on. But he is not racked by survivor's guilt, nor burdened by the weight of Mjolnir and the concept of being worthy of his kingship over Asgard or right to hold the hammer and its power. No, he is at his most assured and confident. There is a sadness for those that he has left behind in his long years but there is no great burden weighing upon him at the outset. Just a resolute confidence, and a desire to share the bounty of his strength to protect others.
But it is that spark of confidence that is slung back at him as the gods above the gods strike down upon him, reminding him that though he wields the lightning he is not in control of creation.
During Avengers Disassembled, Michael Avon Oeming had Thor rail against Those Who Sit Above in Shadow, the gods whom even the gods feared. He sacrificed his life to end the cycle of Ragnarok that gave those shadowy figures their power. In so doing, he willingly gave his life so that he and his people would no longer be mercy to the fickle whims of those who sought to control their destiny.
And yet, Thor returned as did Asgard and its enemies, and more suffering befell them. Throughout this issue, Thor and the narration speak of stories and their power. The power to free us from our constraints and fears. The power to do anything, go anywhere. A story is a bridge to anywhere.
But Thor--at least this version of Thor--is property of Marvel Comics, owned by the Disney corporation, which exerts a great deal of pressure on their property to fit a certain mold, to always exist in a certain way. To always be reborn in a corporate Ragnarok where nothing can ever stray too far from what it is and always has been.
It's a cage that has shrunk over the years since Jack Kirby unleashed his cosmic sci-fi utopia and the winged-helmet-clad Thor and his flowing blonde locks. Marvel has attempted to ground the character on a few occasions, to make him "fit" their more street-level universe where gods do not exist side-by-side with kids from Queens dancing about in long-johns. He has borne armor and chain mail, been depowered and cast aside to learn-and-re-learn the importance of being humble and worthy.
Ewing has no time for any of that. He returns to Jack Kirby's manic dreams of a rainbow colored hero in an unearthly costume. The throwback design, a somewhat streamlined take on the original Kirby, eschews the fantasy realism for the extravagantly cosmic.
Ewing takes a meta approach to the narrative throughout the issue. The narrator speaks directly to the reader, as does Thor. In one scene, the Odinson looks directly ahead, his finger pointed dramatically outward.
"I am deeply disappointed in thee," he begins, before the Frost Giants laugh at him. But Thor's words are not for them. "I am speaking ... to thee," he declares, the blue eyes of the thunder god aimed directly at the reader.
Read the rest by supporting on Patreon. (This is an especially good review)