AVENGERS DISASSEMBLED: THOR


By Michael Avon Oeming, Daniel Berman & Andrea DiVito with Laura Villari (Marvel)
ISBN: 978-0-7851-1599-1

A few years ago the “World’s Mightiest Heroes” were shut down and rebooted in a highly publicised event known as Avengers Disassembled. Of course it was only to replace them with both The New and The Young Avengers. The event also spilled over into the regular titles of current team members and affiliated comic-books such as the Fantastic Four and Spectacular Spider-Man ran parallel but not necessarily interconnected story-arcs to accompany the Big Show.

Said Big Show consisted of the worst day in the team’s history as a trusted comrade betrayed the World’s Mightiest Superteam resulting in the destruction of everything they held dear and the death of several members. The side-bar saga collected here ups the ante somewhat…

An Avenger since the team’s very inception, the Asgardian godling Thor has more often than not gone his own way in recent years, but this saga (collecting Thor #80-85) reunited the mythic hero with his mortal team-mates one last time as a prologue to the really-and-truly final Ragnarok story.

Any long-term fan knows that’s almost an oxymoron but in this revelatory yarn the Thunder God loses everything he holds dear and experiences the death of his entire race as a way of breaking a cycle of death and rebirth which had reduced his immortal race into nothing more than cattle for a predatory force that cannot be defeated…

The grim inevitability of this high-powered fantasy with its heroic dooms and unwavering nobility makes it one of the better post-Lee/Kirby Thor epics and effectively wipes the slate clean in a fair and decent manner for the next incarnation, especially as writers Oeming and Berman have a proven feel for the barbaric scale of mythmaking, whilst DiVito’s pictorial narrative skills blend well with Laura Villari’s colour palette to capture that end-of-everything momentum in a captivating and painterly manner.

A trifle overblown and not to everyone’s taste, this is nonetheless a great treat for saga-lovers who yearn to feel their pulses race and their hearts soar.

© 2004 Marvel Characters, Inc.  All Rights Reserved.