Book of the Week: Thor #615

What did we at Multiversity think of Matt Fraction and Pasqual Ferry’s new Thor? Find out after the jump!

Matt’s Thoughts: The passing of the torch… how I love moments like this. There’s nothing quite like being a longtime fan of a book and watching it go through different writers. It’s almost like watching a child grow up in a sense. With the modern incarnation of Thor, we saw it go from it’s infancy as JMS’ pedestal for various commentary as well as the rebirth of the entire Asgardian universe. Then it became a little boy, moving to Kieron Gillen where it became a more classical epic as Asgard was moved home, destroyed, and Thor found his way to Hel. Now it’s with Matt Fraction, and just like a true teenager, Thor has turned into an asshole.

Whenever Fraction has written Thor in the past (the one-shot, Secret Invasion), Fraction always makes Thor a pretty abrasive brute. Why shouldn’t he be? He’s an Asgardian God who is forced to share his existence with a mortal man. Hell, the entire reason that he ended up with Donald Blake was due to Odin wanting him to teach him humility. So Fraction’s asshole Thor has worked in the past, and it continues to work now.

With the beginning of Fraction’s Thor run, we’re given a very intriguing notion: since Asgard has moved to Midgard, what happened with the space it used to fill? It’s the type of question that makes sense to ask but hasn’t been dealt with yet, and who better to tackle the idea of an intertwined multiverse of possibility than Matt Fraction and his Casanova brain? The first issue is big, and I don’t mean in just it’s double sized nature. A lot happens in this issue, and it makes for a very intriguing read. See, Fraction doesn’t write like JMS or Gillen. Fraction is his own beast, and the entire issue itself reads like three separate stories kind of combined into one – you have Volstagg’s scenes, which are the most entertaining parts due to the humor; you’ve got Thor’s scenes, where Thor yells at people and tells Donald Blake to shove off; and then you’ve got the invasion, which is written in the style that Fraction employed in his one-shots. Yet they all mix very well, and it makes the book a very nice read.

I’m not 100% on Pasqual Ferry’s art yet. I get the vibe that it’s very appropriate for Fraction’s story, but I can’t say I’ve ever been a huge fan of his work. Ferry often makes big scenes that sometimes feel a tad empty, but he does have a very nice style for specific design. I was first acquainted with Ferry’s work in Ultimate Fantastic Four, where he did the Thanos/Cosmic Cube stories, and they all felt very big and spacey. I’ve heard that Fraction’s Thor will be more of a space opera, so Ferry’s art is appropriate. His sequences with the invaders are really the best part of the issue artwise. There are just some sequences that I kind of want more from visually, such as the shot of the destroyed Asgard.

All in all, Thor is an interesting start. I’m not as crazy over it as I thought I would be, but I am definitely intrigued. Fraction has set up several threads here, all of which I think will have very great pay-offs. I look forward to him elaborating more and really putting Thor into a more space-y environment as opposed to the very grounded and medieval feel that JMS and Gillen employed. The transition between stories was smooth – now let’s see where we go from here.

David’s Thoughts: Matt Fraction is a very interesting creator for me – sometimes I really, really love his work, and other times I can’t stand it. The highs are super high (Iron Fist, The Order, parts of his Iron Man run) and the lows are super low (almost all of his Uncanny run), but I can say this: I’m always intrigued by what he is doing. This issue doesn’t just bring the intrigue, with its superb idea of “if Asgard is on Midgard, what is happening in Asgard,” but it also brings the execution as I enjoy the living hell out of it.

I mean, you’ve got Thor and Donald Blake’s mental showdown, the mental turmoil of Balder, the feisty (akin to how he acted in the one-shots Fraction previously wrote) Thor, the new villains we’re given, and most importantly, Dr. Eric Solvang meeting up with Asgard’s preeminent scientific mind (Volstagg earns line of the week with “and explain unto me your theories again, perhaps using pies…”), and the elegant bridge between Heimdall seeing the Asgardian’s approaching death and Solvang stating, quite matter-of-factly, that the end is nigh. This issue is packed and feels every bit worth the $3.99 price tag – it was a joy for me to read.

One of the things I find impossible to complain about with Fraction’s work is his plotting. He excels at laying out a story in a way that makes the emotional high notes all the more resonant, and that is very present here. My biggest complaint about him is his predilection for overly stylized dialogue, and because the bulk of the characters are Asgardians (save Solvang, whose word choice is appropriately intelligent) that stylized nature is forcibly absent. In fact, Fraction’s dialogue shines here, especially in the back-and-forth moments between Solvang and Volstagg at the end and Blake and Thor’s conversation mid-flight. Superb work from Fraction.

I was also surprisingly enthusiastic about Pasqual Ferry’s work. While an artist I always enjoy, Ferry has a tendency to have backgrounds that are so clean that the image around the primary focus often feels dead to me as a reader. With this issue, we occasionally get that from him, but it is not something that takes back from the issue. Ferry always stands out when his writers give him moments to do so, and Fraction enables him well here, specifically when Heimdall is hit by his vision. In another artist’s hand, it could have been a weaker moment. Yet with Ferry, I Felt it transcended to a level greater than it perhaps should have reached.

All in all, I dug this book way more than I thought I would. Fraction, Ferry and colorist Matt Hollingsworth have a nice start with this issue, and given Fraction’s history with Thor I feel like we’re in good hands going forward.

Gil’s Thoughts: Thor is not my cup of tea. I’ve never been a fan of mythology that is based anywhere other than Earth, and even when it’s like this, where otherworldly characters based on Earth. I feel like I don’t connect. It never feels like I can connect with any character in the cast; especially when the secret identity like Donald Blake is thrown by the wayside. It happened throughout Kieron Gillen’s run, and I didn’t care for it. Thankfully Matt Fraction didn’t throw him completely by the wayside, but he’s still only a disembodied form.

It’s a little disconcerting to know that the only characters who seem to have a secret identity and use it are Peter Parker, Barry Allen, and somehow, Stephanie Brown. I just can’t connect when all we have are these mythological characters and no humanity to ground them.

That being said, the book did enough so I give Thor another shot. I just want more Donald Blake and real life shenanigans.

Josh’s Thoughts: Here we go…the long promised Matt Fraction/Pasqual Ferry Thor run. That epic beast that took so long to craft that they needed to give Kieron Gillen four extra months on the book to get it ready. So how does this monumental, legend-in-the-making issue stack up?

In short? So-So.

As my hyperbolic opening sentence seemed to indicate, Marvel had a lot riding on this issue. Back in 2007, when J. Michael Straczynski relaunched this title it was one of Marvel’s biggest books that year with its ancient myth meets modern mid-west chique style and phenomenal art. Then JMS jumped ship and Gillen penned some fine “fill in issues” (and by “fill in issues” I mean he wrote the book for almost a year and created some of the best Thor stories I’ve ever read. I still got the feeling that Marvel was treating his run as a stop-gap though.) Which leads us here, Marvel’s obvious attempt at capturing the feel and impact of the all too brief JMS-era on the book. Here’s the thing though: I know people expected the JMS run to be good, but I’m unsure people expected it to be AS good or well received as it was (that run got MAD press) and trying to recreate what very well might have been a fluke is already not the best idea. That having been said, this issue was definitely good…but stacked up to what came before (which is impossible to avoid doing) it falls short.

One thing I want to address first though: I love Matt Fraction. His and Brubaker’s Iron Fist turned the character into a favorite for me, his Invincible Iron Man has been nothing short of phenomenal (like, X-Factor level phenomenal) for almost three years straight now and while I will always hold Uncanny X-Men near and dear to my heart, I can honestly say his run has been one of the most enjoyable I’ve read in recent memory. (Suck it, haters!) While he did manage to introduce some great story elements and theories as to the nature of the 9 Worlds of Norse Mythology, I have to say his biggest fault with the issue was the characterization. Given his work in books like The Order and the aforementioned Iron Man, this is very VERY out of character for him. I usually go to Fraction to make me care about characters I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about (like, for example, Cyclops), and yet when given the reigns of some of my favorites I couldn’t for the life of me invest myself in them.

This leads me to one of the biggest problems I had with the issue: Thor himself. As Multiversity EiC Mighty Matt pointed out, Fraction has an established tendency to write Thor as, pardon my French, a f*cking asshole (as apparently evidenced by those Ages of Thunder one-shots I know I read but can’t seem to remember.) This tendency, unfortunately, made the transfer to this book along with Fraction, but here it’s even less easy to buy. At least with the one-shots we had the logic of “we know Thor was brash in his youth and these stories take place in the past, so we can justify how different he’s acting from the way he currently acts”, but this is Thor NOW (well, “now” since comic time is extremely relative and anyone who disagrees is an idiot.) For the last three or so years since his return from the great beyond, Thor has been written as a kind, stoic and respectful character that held a great love for his friends, his fellow Asgardians, the world around him and ESPECIALLY his human host, Donald Blake. Yet here we have a Thor that blows off the love of his life to go be moody, bickers with Blake like an immature school boy, says “F*CK THE HUMANS I ONLY CARE ABOUT ASGARD” (in so many words) and then beats the hell out of his new-found half brother and long-time ally Balder for saying some of the things HE HIMSELF SAID THROUGHOUT THIS RUN OF THE BOOK. The change in character, to say the least, was incredibly jarring and dragged the whole book down in my opinion.

However, bringing the book back up again was the absolutely fantastic art of Pasqual Ferry. Though, to be fair, I have ALWAYS loved his art and was expecting him to hit it out of the park…and he did. His character designs are proportionate and engaging. He manages to represent the looks established by past artists on the book (namely Olivier Coipel) while adding his own signature feel to them. I can honestly say his Thor is the best interpretation of the character seen since his return. On top of that, his panel structure and magnificent backgrounds gave the book a very widescreen feel. That, combined with Fraction’s blunt, non-connected scene transitions made the whole issue feel like a 2000s Star Wars movie with better actors. On the art side, I have absolutely no complaints.

So ultimately would I give this book a second issue? I think so. Despite my complaints, the team involved has more than earned my admiration over the years and the storyline they’ve set up shows immense promise…if they can just get the characterization right I’d say this book has the potential to surpass what came before it. We’ll just have to see.