Review: Thor: God of Thunder Vol. 1- God Butcher

Quick Summary

Pros: The storyline starts with a wonderful mystery and then delivers compelling action and adventure from there on out. The villain introduced is fantastic and presents a very real and clear danger. The art is also great and fits the work incredibly well.

Cons: The story jumps between timelines sporadically which can be confusing if you are not paying close enough attention.

Overall: This is an incredible start and first half to a storyline that seems like it is going to be a real knockout. It has mystery, action, and a very compelling villain to push it all forward. On top of this, it actually makes you afraid that the hero will not succeed, something few comics manage to do. Overall, the story and the artwork in this collection are wonderful and make this a book truly “worthy” of Thor.

Story

Thor: God of Thunder Vol. 1- God Butcher starts out as a mystery and asks the question “who is the God Butcher?”. After this is reveled, the story shifts gears and begins to focus on the God Butcher himself, who turns out to be incredibly interesting. This allows readers to get a feel for what kind of story Jason Aaron is building here and to develop a taste for the characters that will be shown. It ends up making the read even more interesting and keeps the reader on their toes throughout the duration of the story. It then ends by providing a perfect transition into volume two, one that will make any reader eager to continue the story.

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The title of this volume is “The God Butcher” so it makes sense that the God Butcher himself would steal the show. The God Butcher is really a near perfect villain for a god character to go up against and, since Thor is Marvel Comics archetype god character, he clashes perfectly in this series. This villain represents the opposite of everything Thor is; he is a cruel, conniving, anarchist that is trying to tear down the world of gods and everything that represents. This makes for an interesting story as he is almost a more true foil to Thor than Loki even is. Overall this creative team deserves huge praise for a villain who is not only scary and menacing but also deep and interesting.

On top of this, this villain does something that is hard to do in many comic books, he adds a sense of danger. Usually, while reading a comic, the villain does not get away with much and the reader knows it. This then takes away all sense of fear or suspense away from the story, because the reader knows the hero will defeat the villain before anything bad can happen. This story is different. It shows the reader that this villain is not someone to be trifled with and shows that there is a future out there where the villain has basically won. Now, I do know that this is still a comic book and thus the status quo will be preserved. So therefore Thor is not in any mortal danger and he will still likely win the day, however the cost is still unknown as numerous lives have already fallen. In fact, the possibility still exists for Thor from another timeline to die which would be as close to the real Thor dying as things could possibly get.

The only problem this story has is the same problem that any story involving multiple timelines has, it can get a bit confusing. At one point, the book is telling the story of Thor in three different time periods at once. While this does make the story very interesting and exciting to read, it can be a tiny bit hard to keep track of everything at once. Again, this is a very small problem and does not really affect the quality of the overall story much.

(spoilers end here)

Art

Thor is a character that constantly lives in two separate worlds. He exemplifies the gritty action of ancient combat while also needing to travel and live in the trippy and colorful cosmic world. Sometimes it is hard to balance these things as they are so often extremely different from each other in both style and tone. This collection has no trouble with it at all and manages to do all of this in a way that both styles compliment each other.

The art here is fantastic by itself but then becomes even better when paired with the story. This is not a lighthearted tale, it is constantly filled with murder, torture, and despair, so the darker style in the art fits perfectly. It is also just nice to look at in general as the characters seem so real and authentic on nearly every page.

Continuity

Thor: God of Thunder Vol. 1- God Butcher is a story which is relatively unconnected to the rest of the Marvel Universe. Thus, fans do not really need to read anything in order to understand what is going on in this story.

The story started here continues on in Thor: God of Thunder Vol. 2- Godbomb (Review).