The Mighty Thor #60 Review

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Reviewer: Daron Kappauff
Story Title: Discovery
Quick Rating: Better than the last…although that really isn’t saying much.

Written by: Dan Jurgens
Penciled by: Joe Bennett
Inked by: Jack Jadson
Colored by: Avalon Studios’ Dave Kemp
Lettered by: Randy Gentile
Editor: Tom Brevoort
Publisher: Marvel

As my quick rating said, this issue was a HUGE improvement over the last issue. With that being said, it still could have been better, and was nowhere near as good as the issues preceding, let down as it was, the “Standoff” crossover.

To be honest I almost didn’t even bother picking up this week’s Thor. A friend of mine told me that it was going to focus on Jake Olson, the mortal that was Thor’s human half for a time period. I was happy to find that even though he did occupy a large portion of the issue, it was not solely about him. And I was also surprised that I actually enjoyed the sections with Jake. (The reason I was weary…well if you read the last issue you probably have a good idea, but I’m just sick of them wasting time with secondary characters when the lead story has been so good in the past. It’s disheartening for the creators to just brush over the thought provoking main story to give us stuff that no one really cares about.) But as I said this issue was handled well, and the events in which Jake finds himself are directly related to Thor and the current storyline.

The basic story surrounding Jake is this: he arrives on the scene of an accident in which a small boy has been trapped inside a car. His leg is caught under some sort of support beam that fell on the van, and there is no way to get him out without amputating the leg. The real drama begins when the child’s mother won’t give Jake the clearance to perform the operation because she is 100% sure that her lord and savior, Thor, will come to help her. This was actually the best part of this issue. It echoed a lot of the issues that we have seen brought up throughout this storyline. I’m not however going to tell you how it played out…you’ll have to check it out for yourself.

So how was the section about Thor you ask? Well…it was okay, but it was a bit too metaphysical for me. It seems Thor has begun to question his actions (you know bringing Asgard to Earth and ruling over the humans…all that stuff) and seeks some answers. It appears he finds them when he finds his, dead, father waiting for him on the other side of a waterfall. Of course we find out it isn’t really his father, but really the Odinpower itself. Yeah, I had no problem ruining that one for ya, because well…it was pretty dumb to begin with. Anyway, Thor asks ‘his father’ if what he’s doing is right, and of course the answer is that the answer is actually within himself and he only look there…blah, blah, blah, how cliché can you get?

Surprisingly, as I’ve said, Jake’s story was much more entertaining and thought provoking than was Thor’s. And I’m really starting to worry about how this story is going to end up. Someone once told me that I shouldn’t delusion myself into thinking that Marvel would have the balls to let this storyline form the norm that is Thor…i.e. having him keep Asgard on Earth and ‘rule’ over humanity. But why not? With everything that Marvel is doing recently why can’t this story be the norm for this character? I think this is the perfect advancement for this character; he is in fact a god. It is beginning to feel like this will not be the case however, and I fear that this once great storyline will be brought to a completely anticlimactic, foreseeable, unoriginal ending.

And in hopes that I’m wrong, I’m going to share with you my thoughts on how this all will end. This way if I’m right, you can all say you heard it hear first. In the end, I fear Thor will be defeated by Jake. I feel that this whole story is leading back to Thor and Jake once again sharing a body so that Thor has the ‘humanity’ he once had. Not only is this a bad idea (and therefore most likely the one we shall see) it is a complete insult to the character. Thor is a god. For the first time in his history he is acting like one. He doesn’t have that human side always telling him what humans should do. He’s on his own, a god, king of the gods for that matter, and I for one think he should continue to be written as such.