Written by Robert Rodi
Penciled by Stephen SegoviaTHE AGELESS ENEMIES OF THE ETERNALS TURN ON ASGARD! Beneath the ruins of Asgard, the Deviant villainess Ereshkigal seeks a mystic means of saving her race from extinction–and finds instead a weapon capable of dissolving all reality. With the Eternals who would oppose her mysteriously vanished, Thor stands alone to stop the entire Deviant race from dominating the world!
Because you haven’t had enough Thor in 2011, this new mini-series is here to… uh, do what, exactly? Is it an essential buy for Thor fans? Is it a stealthy grab at Eternals and Marvel-history fans? If you prick it, will it not bleed?
Let’s find that last one out after the jump.
Robert Rodi seems to have finally found his niche, no? After his tongue-in-cheek Vertigo spy-breasts series Codename: Knockout, he transitioned to writing earnest yet inconsequential stuff for Marvel (remember Identity Disc?) and has now settled into a comfortable spot as occasional Thor scribe — in the past decade, four mini-series and counting. Rodi, as a comic book writer, is the sort of guy who likes to take old ideas and brush them off for re-use in a modern style — which is the only real explanation i have for Thor: The Deviants Saga, other than that a new Thor #1 would look mighty fine next to the Thor blu-rays on the comic shop shelves.
That said, something like The Deviants Saga is almost an open provocation against new or fairweather fans of Thor. (I count myself among the latter.) Back in the 80s and 90s, editor Mark Gruenwald pushed the idea of a shared universe as far as it could go. He connected disparate concepts and invented shared primal histories that helped stitch the Marvel Universe into the semi-coherent Frankenstein it is today. At the center of all of it, as is proper with Marvel, is a Jack Kirby concept. In the 70s, Kirby wrote and drew an amazing series called The Eternals, about a race of godlike beings created by an unknowable force called the Celestials, and their conflicts with their mirror race, the ugly and awful Deviants. (It’s been called Kirby’s “Marvel Fourth World,” which is both fair and not.) When Kirby’s series ended, Roy Thomas and Gruenwald himself took up its flag and conceived an entire “Eternals Saga” to be run in the pages of Thor, locking them into the Marvel Universe once and for all. (This book only pays the barest lip service to that history, which is why new readers could probably be forgiven for not caring about any of it.)
Since then, all bets have been off. The Eternals themselves were reimagined by everyone from Chuck Austen (whose interpretation is not considered canon) to Neil Gaiman (whose is). They’ve been connected to just about every corner of the Marvel Universe. The Skrulls evolved from an offshoot of the Deviant race. The Inhumans have been revealed to be the indirect result of Kree experiments on a captured Eternal. Concepts from the series have appeared, either directly or indirectly, in everything from Agents of Atlas to X-Men. Despite all this, the Eternals have always been considered “lesser” Kirby by most, and have never really attained a massive following. (The most recent stab at an Eternals series was by the Knaufs and Daniel Acuna, and it lasted all of, like, seven issues.)
All of this arcane history begs the question: Why does The Deviants Saga exist? In part one of five, the Deviant Ereshkigal, desperate to reclaim her glory days of power and influence, steals a weapon of mass destruction from the ruins of Asgard. Thor catches her but fails to stop her from escaping, and then reflects on his relationship with the Deviants and the backstory of that particular WMD. End part one.
Art comes from Stephen Segovia, an artist who’s been flitting around Marvel for ages, honing his style. In his earlier work on various Wolverine books, he favored extreme POVs, exaggerated anatomy, and dark, scratchy cross-hatching, all of which combined to make his vision of the Marvel world seem particularly unhinged. Since working as a finisher over Leinil Yu’s layouts on Ultimate Comics Avengers vs. New Ultimates, he seems to have calmed down a bit. Thor: The Deviants Saga is still full of extreme POV, exaggerated anatomy, et al., but it’s a grandeur that suits the gods, and his more scrawly tendencies are reined in by inker Jason Paz and gorgeous coloring by Andy Troy. It doesn’t hurt that many pages only have one or two panels, giving Segovia lots of berth to stretch his figures out on the page. The downside is that this decompression really does make the comic feel slight, story-wise.
The best-case scenario I can predict for The Deviants Saga is that it’ll be a fun, unpretentious Thor romp that doesn’t have any real consequences for anything, other than trotting out some old Eternals and Deviants. For people who can’t get enough Thor, this is probably enough. For people coming to it as Eternals fans, like me, it’s almost certainly not enough. The story has yet to find the manic genius that animated Kirby’s series, or the epic swoop that strengthened Gaiman’s. Segovia will likely put out some inspired fight scenes, if the brief glimpses of a riot we see are any indicator, but the first issue is mostly people flying around. We’ll see how it all looks when it’s done, but read on its own, the first issue of The Deviants Saga is too slender, and not bombastic enough by half.
Final Verdict: 5.5 – And don’t even get me started on the connections between the Deviants and Atlantis
