The Mighty Thor #21-23 + 700-706
Originally released in 2017
Written by Jason Aaron
Art by Valerio Schiti (#21-23), James Harren (#700-701), Russell Dauterman (#700, 702-706), et al.
I had been reading Jason Aaron's Thor run before, so I decided to pick up where I left off for today's post. Malekith, doing his best to claim the title of Thor's arch-enemy now that Loki's more of a good-leaning wildcard, has started a war involving the ten realms of Yggdrasil. In the process, a group of children under Volstagg's protection were killed.
Volstagg is not pleased, to say the least. He got his hands on the hammer of the Ultimate universe's Thor, which is influencing his mind and making him more bloodthirsty, and now he goes by the War Thor, aiming to annihilate the forces of Muspelheim and their queen, Sindr.
Meanwhile, Jane Foster is dying, a process that is being accelerated every time she uses Mjolnir. She has cancer, and is undergoing treatment for it, but whenever she transforms into Thor, the magic of Mjolnir considers the treatment to be something poisoning her body and purges it from her, leaving nothing in there to fight the cancer. This leads to Thor Odinson dramatically saying "you!!" to a floating hammer.
There's a very simple solution to this - Jane could stop turning into Thor, get treatment, and try to keep the cancer at bay. However, none of the gods are considered worthy of Mjolnir, so she's the only one that they know of at the moment who can wield it, and there are some problems that Thor is needed to solve, even if it costs her life to solve them.
Malekith and Loki meet with Sindr, who quickly finds that her realm is being rained on for the first time in living memory. Volstagg has arrived, and he's hungry for vengeance. Fighting the ruler of Muspelheim in their own realm is generally a losing battle, though Volstagg makes a good effort, and the resulting image of Volstagg fighting lava sharks is a great one.
Jane arrives to help turn the tide, but it quickly becomes clear that, in his berserk rage, Volstagg is going to destroy Muspelheim and all who live within it, even innocent children. To stop this, Jane takes Volstagg to an empty realm, though Volstagg takes this as Jane siding with Muspelheim even though Jane was just fighting its queen moments before.
The War of the Thors commences, and honestly, the artwork here just blew me away. The pencilers, inkers, colorists, and whoever else was involved in the art did a great job with capturing the fury of the storm, both in the surroundings and in the combatants.
Jane doesn't know who this War Thor is at first, but once she learns that it's Volstagg, she triumphs by sheathing her sword (or rather, dropping her hammer) and appealing to Volstagg's good nature, knowing that this isn't like him and that he wouldn't murder a frail cancer patient.
This leads into Thor #700, and no, I did not skip 677 issues. Around this time, Marvel switched over to "legacy numbering" - I'm guessing that enough people had grown annoyed with Marvel releasing new issue 1s every few years, so this helped to show the longevity of certain series (and allowed them to celebrate major milestones like this one with extra-long issues).
The War of the Thors may have ended, but the War of the Realms is still ongoing. Issue 700 features a truly staggering amount of artists as it jumps around the various fronts of the War of the Realms and gives updates on the various Thors. (Oddly enough, Beta Ray Bill is completely absent; I'm curious about what happened to him)
As Jane faces off against a berserk She-Hulk in a play on the classic Hulk vs. Thor fights, the Odinson fights a losing battle to keep Malekith's forces from killing the Norn Queen and stopping the Norns from weaving fate.
Even though it's in the middle of a larger story arc, issue 700 feels like a celebration of all things Thor, past, present, and future. Admittedly, the ending of the issue is where my relative lack of Thor knowledge comes back to bite me - it concludes with the return of the Mangog, an apparently formidable threat (he seems like the Asgardian equivalent of Doomsday from Superman), but all I have to go on are the Mangog's own words and the narration. (And the Mangog kind of sounded like a WWE wrestler at first)
After beating up Volstagg when Volstagg is the War Thor to show off his power, Mangog is pointed in the direction of Asgard's new location by Malekith, who is not a god and therefore not a target for Mangog.
On the new Asgard, Thor tries to convince Jane that she can't forego the cancer treatment any longer. Jane seemingly agrees that there's something that can only be done in her mortal form... And that something is marching to Odin's throne room, where he's locked himself in, and call him out. This gets Odin to leave his room, and Freyja, who had been poisoned, convinces Odin to take part in the war rather than staying out of it. However, when Freyja turns to Jane, she finds that Jane has collapsed, her illness hitting her harder than ever.
Jane wakes up in a hospital bed, surrounded by her close friends as they encourage her to stay in the hospital and get treated. Jane refuses any magical cures, either Asgardian or earthly, but Dr. Strange tells her about how her condition has progressed and how bad things have gotten. Transforming into Thor one more time could be enough to kill her.
And that's when Mjolnir shows up at the window with a warning about the Mangog. Jane ultimately makes the decision to get the treatment, getting back into her hospital bed, as Thor heads off to face the Mangog alongside Odin.
Given that the Mangog has ripped his way through Asgard's forces, including the Destroyer, and even Odin is scared of him, this seems like a battle that's lost from the outset. Even from the confines of a hospital, it quickly becomes clear to Jane that the battle if not going well, so she's forced to make the toughest - and possibly last - decision of her life.
As Asgard is hurtling towards the sun, Jane charges into battle with Mangog, knowing that standing by would result in the deaths of everyone on Asgard and possibly any other god that the Mangog can find.
To stop the Mangog, Jane traps him with unbreakable Asgardian chains, attaches those chains to Mjolnir, and flings Mjolnir and the Mangog into the sun. However, with Mjolnir destroyed in the process, she returns to her human form.
True to Doctor Strange's prediction, her next transformation back into her mortal state proves to be her last, and she succumbs to the cancer inside of her. It's a heart-wrenching series of events - over the course of the series, it's become clear that Jane's transformations are draining the life from her, but she keeps going through with them because the alternative is death on an unimaginable scale.
Refusing to accept this, Thor channels the storm that was once at the heart of Mjolnir, using it as a cosmic defibrillator to try and bring Jane back to life. Jane is on the threshold of Valhalla, having died a noble death in battle, but she is hesitant about crossing over, feeling like there's more that she needs to do in the world of the living.
I was engaged in this from start to finish, reading through more of the series than I expected in one day. The overall plot of the War of the Realms felt forgotten once Mangog entered the fray, but maybe that was handled in another series that I'm not aware of. Jane's story was a touching and heartfelt one, uplifting and tragic at different points. I can see why this is considered one of the better Thor runs, and I'm planning to continue with another highly-regarded Thor run (Walt Simonson's) in the next month or so to hopefully get context for what I was unfamiliar with here.
No comments:
Post a Comment