"Thor: The World Eaters"

 

                The following is a review of the graphic novel “Thor: The World Eaters” as presented in Marvel Modern Era Epic Collection format.

                The weather on Earth began to go crazy. Thor, despite being able to control the storms, was not able to calm the abnormal weather. The heads of Luna Inc. came to Tony Stark/Iron Man about Luna City venture, a colony on the moon, interested in seeing if he and his company had ever tried to weaponize the weather. Tony’s company had once made a machine to do just that and realized that Luna Inc. had stolen it. Thor turned to Iron Man for assistance in the weather peril, and Tony told Thor about the weapon, and Thor and Iron Man flew to the moon to stop Luna Inc.’s lunar venture from being a threat to Earth.

                Asgard was having a feast to celebrate Thursebolt, a yearly celebration of Thor. The villainous Grey Gargoyle tricked Thor into a battle and touched Thor, turning Thor into stone, then Grey Gargoyle disguised himself as a Rock Giant and brought the petrified Thor to Asgard, hoping to break into Asgard’s Chamber of Treasures so he could steal the Apple of Idunn, a magic fruit that bestows immortality upon whoever eats it. Grey Gargoyle’s power only lasts for an hour, and Thor returned to flesh and blood and had to stop Grey Gargoyle from achieving his evil goal.

                Doctor Eric Solvang, a quantum cosmologist, had been studying the multiverse and concluded that since Asgard and Midgard/Earth now shared the same Realm, cosmological balance meant that something was coming that would destroy everything. Solvang came to Volstagg with his theory. Uthana Thoth and the forces of Ano-Athox assaulted Alfheim. Doctor Jane Foster relocated to Broxton Oklahoma to work in the local Medical Office alongside Doctor Donald Blake/Thor. Heimdall foresaw the death of the Asgardians. Kelda was still mourning the loss of her lover Bill. Volstagg brought Solvang to Thor in the ruins of Asgard, but Thor refused to hear him. Thor missed his brother Loki, who was slain in the Siege of Asgard, and found his spirit was inhabiting a street urchin in Paris, France calling himself Serrure. Thor flew to France to find the boy. Solvang contacted Tony Stark, hoping Stark could explain Solvang’s theory to the Asgardians. Iron Man flew to Asgard to talk to King Balder, who told Iron Man that they were already aware of the threat. Solvang turned to Jane, hoping her prior relationship with Thor could grant him another audience with the Asgardians. Thoth’s forces continued through the World Tree into Nidavellir. Thor restored Loki in Serrure’s child body. The survivors of Thoth’s blitz came to King Balder, but Balder told them there was nothing he could do for them. Thor was able to return his father Odin from his death exile. Thoth’s forces arrived on Earth and Odin and Thor led the Asgardians into battle against Thoth and his army to save the World Tree.

                Pastor Mike began to get the folks of Broxton, Oklahoma riled up against the Asgardians, blaming them for all the death and destruction that befell their town ever since the gods arrived. Thor and Sif traveled into Yggdrasil, the World Tree, to obtain a seed Odin called the Worldheart. During their mission, Thor sustained an unusual wound. Sif and Thor agreed to train the Brigade of Realms to defend the Nine Worlds from all threats. Loki attempted to join, and their first training session was a failure. Odin revealed to Heimdall that the Worldheart wasn’t a seed, but rather an egg. Galactus, Devourour of Worlds, was drawn to the presence of the Worldheart and his herald the Silver Surfer came to Asgard asking Odin for the egg. Odin refused to grant Galactus his demand, and Thor and Silver Surfer fought until Odin called for their conflict to cease. The egg could permanently end Galactus’ hunger, but it could also birth the next world tree for when the end times came. While the Asgardians began to plan for war against Galactus, Volstagg began to plan for war against the residents of Broxton, Oklahoma. Loki stole a lock of Sif’s hair to bring to the Weird Sisters so he could learn the key to saving Thor’s life. Odin and Galactus battled each other with their minds, while the Asgardians battled the Silver Surfer externally. Loki then had to take action to save the Earth from Galactus’ wrath, and the Silver Surfer made a deal with Galactus.

                Okay, so we’ve got the synopsis out of the way, now we’re going to go over the Tim Cubbin part of this review. We’re going to start off with my personal feelings about this book. The last volume in this series was “Thor: The Siege of Asgard” which got the lowest score I have ever given on a review, so I was hoping that this volume would be better than the previous. I can fortunately confirm that I found it to be significantly better, but I still wasn’t completely in love with this book. So, let’s do a breakdown of the stories and I’ll talk about my opinions. So, the “Fair Weather” story has appeared on this blog before in “Iron Man: Stark Disassembled” and I enjoyed it. It was nice finally seeing Thor and Iron Man putting their differences aside after “Civil War” where Iron Man made a Thor clone that went horribly wrong. The Thursebolt issue was actually my favorite story in this book, despite it only being one issue. While compact, I still found it entertaining, the celebration of Thor, and Thor’s solution for beating the Grey Gargoyle was entertaining. As far as the titular storyline, I enjoyed the character of Eric Solvang, and I found it entertaining. I liked the revival of Loki and the return of Odin. I will say that I feel like it felt a little too reliant on action sequences and had some minimalizations of storylines because of this, and the story did feel a little weak due to this, but I was able to have a fun time reading it. “The Galactus Seed” storyline was also enjoyable to me, I found much to like in it. What I enjoyed the most were the side stories, especially Volstagg’s war with the citizens of Broxton, I thought that was hilarious, and Kid Loki had some entertaining moments. Again, there was a lot of action which detracted from telling a more complex story, but what was there was entertaining. As far as the artwork goes, as this is a graphic novel, I will say that I was slightly divided with my opinions of the work. John Romita Jr., Mark Brooks, Olivier Coipel, and Khoi Pham were all artists who were visually appealing to me, but Pasqual Ferry and Salvador Larroca are artists who failed to impress my visual pallet. My longtime readers may recall my longstanding issues with Larroca as he has come up on this blog on several occasions in the past, each time not in a good way. Again, I must express my displeasure in the issue he illustrated. As far as the title goes, I don’t fully understand why the army from Ano-Athox were called the “World Eaters,” I felt the title was more appropriate coming from Galactus being a world eater, but I can honestly find little fault with the editor’s choice in the title as “The World Eaters” was the longest story arc in the book and the inclusion of the Galactus story.

                Next on the docket of things to discuss is accessibility. Now, I have been over this at least six dozen times at this point, and as tiring as it is, I have to do it again because I know that some of you have never read one of my reviews before and don’t know what I mean when I use the word “accessibility” in reference to this book, so if you know what I’m about to say, I’m sorry but just bear with me for a little while. So my usage of this word is to describe if this is a book that anyone, even a person who has never heard of Thor before, can take this book off the shelf of their local bookstore or library or borrow from a friend or relative, and read this book and understand every event in the story as written without having any prior knowledge of the character or his storylines. Let’s begin with the fact that this book is listed as Vol. 3. Yes, this book picks up from where the previous volume left off. However, this book does feature a new creative team, so the accessibility factor is increased there. I didn’t feel like reading this book requires having read the previous two volumes simply due to that fact. However, having knowledge of Marvel prior to reading this book does help. That said, if you are new to Marvel and are looking for a good starting point, well, I can’t exactly attest to this as being “good” per se, but I would say this is a point that a beginner can jump on with. Quite often when you have a new creative team on an ongoing series, it’s usually a point where a newbie can pick up on, even more so than an issue being marketed as #1 in the series as if it has a creative team that has already contributed to the characters, sometimes it continues their work. This actually happens to be the case in this book as we have a “Thor” story written by Matt Fraction followed by “The Mighty Thor” #1 also written by Fraction that directly continues his work and reading the two stories separately, reading “The Galactus Seed” without reading “The World Eaters” first would leave a tremendous amount of story unexplained. Anyway, this book features no tie-in issues to any events, and there are no issues of any other series deviating from Thor contained in this collection, so that leaves no cause for confusion, so in my own personal opinion, I feel like this book has a decently good accessibility factor to new readers.

                Okay, time to get on with the main event of every review, and one of the most crucial parts of my reviews: the numeric score. I’d say it’s the most important part of the review, but that can be debatable, depending on what your opinion of reading a review is. Some people may actually feel like my overview of the synopsis is actually the real highlight of my review. It’s actually the most time-consuming part of my review, to be honest with you. But it’s important to know exactly just how good I feel like this book is when reading one of my reviews. So let me explain my scoring system before we go any further. So, it’s actually extremely simple: the scoring goes on exact integers of one through ten. If I give the book a one, that’s my worst score, and that means that this book is a pile of trash that should be burned out of existence. If I give the book a ten, which, in any of my reviews, is extremely unlikely, this book is sheer perfection and should be in every comic book reader’s collection and reread on a frequent basis. Now, this book in particular does not fall exactly on either extreme. However, it does not lean towards the higher pole. I found plenty in this book to enjoy, some of the stories were entertaining, there was some incredible art, but there was also too much reliance on action that detracted from actual storytelling and there was a lot of artwork that did not give me favor. So what I’m going to do now is take my metaphorical blender that I use for mixing review ratings, and I’m going to throw this book into it, everything about it, including the story and the art, then I’m going to hit mix and blend this book until it’s completely liquid, then I’m going to grab my cup that I reserve for taking my review mixes in, and I’m going to pour my review juice into it, then I’m going to look at this score, and it’s… a four! I’ll say it was below average in quality, but it still had enough of a level of quality to not be considered a completely foul blend.

                Next up is my recommendation segment. Now in this segment, I do a couple of things. The first is that I will tell you if I give my own personal recommendation of this book. The second thing I do is tell you that regardless of the fact if I would personally recommend this book or not, who do I think should be reading this book? As to the first matter of business, I honestly don’t give a personal recommendation of this book. While I found it enjoyable enough to read, I didn’t find it enough of a good time that I would tell you, my readers, or else anyone in person to go out and spend the time or money on consuming this book. I just can’t, in good faith, say that if you are reading this review that you should go out and put the effort in obtaining and going through this book. However, if you want to completely ignore me or pretend I don’t exist, or else are just going to read this review and suggest this book to a friend, I’d say that if you are a true fan of Thor comics or the character from the movies, shows, or video games, this is a book that might pique your interest. And if you are a fan of mythology and want a modern and unique take on Norse mythology, this book has a lot to offer you.

                Well, I think we’re at the point where I’m going to start to wrap up. But before we go, there are a few things I have to say first. As some of you may know, I have been doing this blog for five years now and have compiled over 160 posts in that time. I have written over six dozen book reviews just like this one at this point and have also done other reviews of books outside of Marvel, but yes, Marvel Modern Era Epic Collections and Ultimate Epic Collections reviews are my main focus at the moment. If you enjoyed this review, feel free to also check out “Thor: Reborn from Ragnarok” and “Thor: The Siege of Asgard” for more Thor content. I’ve also written short stories, poetry, articles, essays, and editorials, so there is other kind of content on this blog as well. I post on a very frequent basis, I collect every Marvel Modern Era Epic Collection and Ultimate Epic Collection as soon as I can after they are released, and I just received two more, so if you liked this post, check back on timcubbin.blogspot.com in the next four days after this review is posted, there should be another review posted by then. Feel free to drop a comment, like, share, retweet, do whatever you can to reach out to me or spread the good word, I’d love to hear from you if you have any opinions, you are welcome to share. Everything I post on this blog is my own personal opinion, I know you as a human being may have your own opinion as well that vastly differs from mine, and if you’d like to disagree with me, please let me know, or if you have anything to say, don’t hesitate to do so, any and all opinions are welcome here. You can also leave me questions if you have any or tell me if you have any requests for what you’d like to see on this blog in the future, I am always happy to take requests. No one has taken this opportunity yet, and I really welcome anyone to do so because I’d love to know what you, my readers, think of my work so I can improve on this blog in the future and make it more of what you would like to it to be. My next review is going to be “Star Wars: Kanan: The Last Padawan” in case you wanted to know so you’re aware of what to be looking up for in the future. And I guess that’s really all I have to say for now, so until next time, Tim Cubbin… out!