The God of Thunder in Hiding?!?

Before I get into the Annual, I want to say that the Thor monthly title is one of the best Marvel books currently being published.  If you are not reading it, I highly recommend that you do!  It has been constantly entertaining, with great stories and art to match.  Now with that in mind, I was highly looking forward to Thor Annual #1 coming out so that I could get some extra Thor action this month.  Now that that’s out of the way, what do I think about the Annual?  To put it nicely, it is a pale shadow of the current monthly title.

First up, I don’t try to think I could do a better job than the writer could. I might write reviews, but I don’t harbor any ideas that I could be a comic book writer.  I try to keep a fairly open mind when I’m reading books.  This is especially true of ones that I plan to review.  If I read a book and I find that I don’t care for it, I just set it aside for awhile.  I don’t just jump on the computer and trash it.  Then sometime in the future, I take the time to read it at least another time to see if something had biased my opinion of the work.  Maybe I just had a bad day.  Or, maybe I had something else on my mind and I only half read the story.  Or, maybe I was more in the mood to read a different type of story than the one I read.

To be honest, I always hope that it was me and not the creative team that caused the problems with the issue.  In this case, I read it three times.  I’m sorry to say that this was not a good issue.

This is a book with some good ideas, but with very poor execution.  The story itself has some serious pacing issues and seems at times as if there are some pages missing from the script.  It almost comes across as a several issue story arc that is jammed into the annual format.  The villains could be truly threatening for Thor, but you never feel that way.  They come off, especially Seth and Grog, as very two-dimensional.  You never feel that Thor was ever really in trouble.  It does nothing to positively effect the monthly book or even add to the history of Thor as a good stand alone story.

There are two other things that stick out in my mind that I didn’t care for.  One is Thor being referred to by Blake as a coward.  Thor has never been and will never be one.  Blake would never call him that either!  That is poor characterization.  Secondly, when you’re drawing characters, especially major ones, please pay attention.  Seth is shown at the beginning as missing his right hand (which is correct - it was cut-off by Odin).  Now take a look at page 36,38, and 40 and you will see Seth has both of his hands!  That is sloppy work folks!  It sums up my review of this sloppy book!

1 out of 5