Welcome to another week of New Comic Book Day Book Club! Each week my friend Alec of White Whale Comics and I select a new book to buy, read, and review on our YouTube channels. This week we chose the new Jason Aaron Thor saga King Thor and we invited the biggest Thor fan we know, JayDee comics, along for the ride.
This four issue story is the culminating mini series to Jason Aaron's epic Thor saga that began in 2012 with Thor: God of Thunder. His run introduced us to the Necrosword, Gorr the God Butcher, Jane Foster as a female Thor, God Bombs, and wars that spanned the nine realms. I've read some of it but not all. However, what I've read I've enjoyed, so I was excited to see how this issue one would set up his finale.
Starting with the positive I'd say that the Loki versus Thor battle, which occupies the main part of the book, is wild and huge in scope. Stars and planets are used as weapons as these two immortals attempt to destroy one another. It is the best part of the issue and seeing a Necrosword infused Loki fight King Thor is fun.
On the negative side this issue suffers from the usual Marvel issue one problems. It's very wordy and spend a lot of time catching you up on Thor's history. A sequence at the start with Thor's granddaughters is particularly slow and boring. This issue also falls victim to one of our least favorite Marvel cliches: revealing a villain on the final page. Those elements make it seem very common and rob the story of it's excitement.
Overall, I would say it's a decent issue and sets up where this mini series is heading. I doubt I will buy the other three issues but I will probably read them in a trade paperback at some point.
If you want to see how the three of us broke down the entire issue check out the link to the show:
Thanks for reading and checking in with our posts. I hope you enjoyed yourself. Feel free to check out my youtube channel for more content released all week long!
-John's Comics with Kids
I need to read this book.