Thor, Volume 1

Nearly all of the Marvel comics I've talked about on this blog were borrowed from a friend who loves the universe, and I mostly stuck to events and crossovers. I started letting him pick though, and this time he loaned me something a little different - just some regular comics. Specifically, Warren Ellis' run on Thunderbolts and J. Michael Straczynski's stint at the beginning of the current, third volume of Thor (not to be confused with this trade paperback being the first volume to collect his work). It's basically a reboot of the story and characters after Ragnarok finally happened and the series took a break for a few years, except one that doesn't forget what already happened. I wasn't quite sure what to expect, and I still don't understand everything about how this works coming into the book pretty much blind, but I liked it.

These issues are mostly just dedicated to reestablishing Thor and the other Asgardians, as well as setting up plot threads for later. Not a ton really happens, though there are some interesting encounters, especially a scrape against Iron Man (who frankly deserves all the crap he gets for the Civil War fiasco) in the middle of a destroyed New Orleans. I'm not too clear on how the existence of Norse mythological figures and events fits with the overall Marvel universe but basically Thor's human alter ego (they are two distinct people who normally coexist in one place and basically trade off on who gets to do stuff) helps him wake up from some sort of eternal sleep/death. After that he recreates Asgard and starts waking up his friends who are stuck inside the minds of other mortals. There's some pretty funny stuff where the various gods are interacting with normal folks, and it's not long before it's clear Loki's up to his old tricks again (though I guess really they're pretty new tricks), so there's enough stuff going on in these six issues to keep it interesting despite not a lot of action. Sometimes Olivier Coipel's faces are a bit weird but he's still a solid artist and fits the book's tone, and Straczynski definitely knows how to spin a yarn. There are two more volumes to this story arc, and having already read one of them, I can hardly wait to finish.