I've been slowly dipping my toe back into reading serialized comics again (God help me), starting with the new Thor (she's lovely! - but only two issues so far) and the "off-duty" Hawkeye series. I heard good things about this one, and thought I'd give it a whirl, as it's a fairly-stand-alone story.
Thor: God of Thunder; Vol.1: The God Butcher
Writer: Jason Aaron
Artist: Esad Ribic
Color Artists: Dean White & Ive Svorcina
Letterer: VC's Joe Sabino
Graphic Novel: collecting Thor: God of Thunder, issues 1-5
Thor: God of Thunder; Vol. 2: Godbomb
Writer: Jason Aaron
Artist: Esad Ribic
Pencils: Butch Guice
Inks: Tom Palmer
Color Artist: Ive Svorcina
Letterer: VC's Joe Sabino
Graphic Novel: collecting Thor: God of Thunder, issues 6-11
In this graphic collection, we get not one, not two, but THREE Thors!
We first encounter our God of Thunder many thousands of years in the past, before he has become worthy of wielding Mjolnir, and has to make do with flying goats and the great axe Jarnbjorn. Poor guy. He's on earth, enjoying the adoration and warmaking of the early Vikings, when he gets his first indication that something is very wrong with the universe, as an encounter quickly becomes deadly.
Next up is of course Thor of the Avengers in the present day (whenever that happens to be), familiar to most via the recent Marvel movies. He's tooling around the universe, and stops to answer a child's prayer for rain - the gods of her world have stopped answering them. Naturally brash and curious, Thor investigates, and to his shock, he's dragged into another deadly encounter with a foe he had long-ago forgotten, back on earth.
Finally, we get Ancient Thor, a dead ringer for Odin (and about as snarky) who weilds Mjolnir in an abandoned and ruined Asgard, pinned down and repeatedly tormented by inky liquid void creatures who won't ever kill him, but leave him there to rot in bitter solitude.
From these introductions, we gradually learn, as Thor does, the story of a disillusioned young person who becomes ever more bitter and vengeful, until he finds great power and uses it to revenge his slights. As he travels his dark road, he becomes so much worse than the evils he set out to annihilate.
There is time-travel here, and it's handled decently well (I was grateful to the call-outs to the X-Men's greater familiarity with such things, and with the inevitable forgetting that occurs to prevent this being expected by the elder two Thors).
I will say the climactic sequence was a little confusing with multiple iterations of the same person flying about being Godlike, in what I think were several different locations.
Still, the gist of the story was always clear, the character(s) of Thor are actually amazingly differentiated, there are secondary characters who are interesting and seem to have lives outside of their appearances here.
There is also drama and humor, evil and benevolence, great power to overcome or co-opt, a villain that is always treated sympathetically by the text, even as he's being pummeled by Gods, and an underlying question of whether these "gods" even deserve to be named such and worshipped (said question is left unanswered, in a bravura moment of introspection by a normally less-than-thoughtful Thor).
Not bad for a comic book, huh?
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