Reading Through 2021 97: Asadora 1, by Naoki Urasawa and N Wood Studio

Asadora 1, by Naoki Urasawa and N Wood Studio

2019, English edition 2021

Some creators are just so polished and developed, that their work seems like a force of nature.

Urasawa is a fairly well-known creator in the West from series like 20th Century Boys, Monster, Pluto and others. He's prolific, and started a new series in 2018, Asadora. It's already five volumes in in Japan, and two with the English editions. What's this about? I have no idea, but book one reads like the tip of the iceberg. The book opens in 2020, with a beautiful scene of a kaiju attack. 

I wish there was more full-color manga than just the opening five pages

From there it goes to Showa era post-war Japan to focus on a latchkey young girl named Asa living in, I think, Nagoya. She quickly is given some character hooks: she is one of a dozen siblings and considers herself lost in the shuffle. Her siblings are said to have good names, but hers, Asa, is simply "morning," referring to when she was born. She is naturally a fast runner, and is taken with an English pop song she sometimes hears on the radio.

People confuse her for her siblings. Urasawa has a way of animating every character and keeping them perfectly on model

The last Urasawa book I read was Mujirushi, a story about a precocious young girl who never lets anything stop her, and almost immediately I was frustrated that this character is so similar, but Urasawa does it so damn well that notion falls to the wayside. This is a plot-based book, doused in character, so there is no time to dwell on what similarity one character has to another. 

Asa has a run in with a lowlife robbing a house, and instinctively calls for help. The burglar panics and ties her up, and already, stakes are established. 

The thief has a great character design; you know he's had a rough few years from his weathered face

But these are all people. Throughout the book, there are stock characters filling in minor roles, but any character that appears for more than a few pages becomes well-rounded. Asa has a later scene with the owner of a rice ball shop who similarly starts as a one-note character, but within a few pages begins to show her own nuances. 

The marvel of this book is that it is so successful in the main challenges of popular genre fiction: it has the vivid characters, it has the effective storytelling, and it has the stakes that matter to all characters. The themes are there too, about being who you want to be rather than what life might push you to be.

Halfway through volume one, an event occurs that sets up the second half of the book, organically allowing character development, and also laying the groundwork for the second volume and beyond.

A flashback reveals some of the loser burglar's back story, and an incredible transition of worthless race tickets falling into balloons rising

Urasawa has multiple characters that are distinguishable at a glance, all with animated expressions that can tell a story even without dialogue. What gets me about his art is that it is quite loose. I can see the hand in what he's drawn. These are not mechanical lines. Despite that, things have a consistency comparable to a Miyazaki movie. This is the hand of someone who's drawn countless hours.

The pacing of a scene like this is so perfect, it almost moves: panel one established the traffic jam, two introduces the little car, three shows the car in contrast to the trucks, and four shows it managing to do what the trucks can't

That's not to mention the storytelling itself. This is a comic, it is not a storyboard, but it would be very easy to see this adapted to animation. Scenes flow from panel to panel, and he often uses cuts within scenes to give scenes depth. Like many of the best comic artists, it's difficult not to read his work at a glance, though Western readers need to keep the reversed right to left movement in mind.

The eye of the storm

My reaction to a book like this is something like I might to a Disney movie where the immediate reaction might be, "Oh, another one of these." And given a few minutes with it, that morphs to "Yes, another masterfully produced story."  Urasawa is doing something a lot more idiosyncratic than Disney or the like though. I slowly started to read the book a chapter at a time, but by the fourth chapter, I just burned through the rest and ordered the next volume. It was that good.

It's so frustrating when you try so hard to do something, and someone else does better than you without any effort

And the thing is, the kaiju from the opening page of the story is not a factor in the rest of the book. That's a taste of what's to come. Future volumes are going forward in time, and on the cover of book five, Asa is a student. It's likely going to get to the year 2020 before it's done.

On sale now!

I've never read a manga with the story in progress, I'm excited to read this one. I liked it so much that I've decided to try to read the Japanese version and get ahead of the English editions.

Reading Through 2021 96: Phoenix Resurrection, by Matthew Rosenberg, Lenil Yu, and more

Phoenix Resurrection, by Matthew Rosenberg, Lenil Yu, and more

2018

2015 to 2019 were the dark ages of X-Men for me, and this book might just be the eye of the storm.

It burns! It burns!

Let's go back to those dark days of 2018 and think about what was going on. The franchise was headless. The books had been spilt into Blue and Gold books to try to capitalize on aging fan nostalgia, and there was a concurrent Astonishing X-Men book out to capitalize on slightly younger fans nostalgia for that title. Basically, the line had been overextended for years, and the concept of a central "main" title had been lost.

At the same time, in order to "shake things up", the franchise had 

-killed Wolverine, only to immediately replace him with Old Man Logan, a time displaced version of him as an old man.

-killed Cyclops.

-left time displaced versions of the 1960's X-Men in the books rather than having Brian Michael Bendis finish off the storyline he'd begun with them. This was particularly egregious, as nothing those characters did after Bendis stopped writing them was compelling to me, or to most readers. The solo Jean Grey book had its fans, but I only lasted a few issues with it.

-left Jubilee a vampire.

-made Sabertooth a good guy, as opposed to a bad guy on a leash like he was the times he was an X-Man before.

-made X-23 the new Wolverine, despite Old Man Logan immediately filling the role on the team.

We have vampire Jubilee, teenage original X-Men minus Jean, and Wolverine is dead, just the old version of him

Most of this was pretty ugly stuff, though I was fully approving of killing Wolverine off for a few years, and letting X-23 step in. Ultimately, the company went with Old Man Logan, and never really let X-23 become the star she might have.

Kitty, Colossus and Nightcrawler were in a pretty traditional place.

With this special mini-series, that's the environment it was trying to thrive in, and it's an uphill battle. It's not a great book, it's not an all-time classic, but it has elements in it which place it firmly in the neighborhood of Claremont X-Men (good), as compared to Bob Harass X-Men (very bad).

Why would X-Men still bury bodies? Why wouldn't they at least have alarms and scanners on the corpses at this point?

The book is very continuity heavy, as in, if I weren't already a hardcore X-Men reader, I wouldn't even bother with it. Beyond the fact that a casual reader would have no idea who half the characters are, the versions of the famous characters aren't themselves, and there's no attempt to explain any of it. Why are there two Iceman characters? Figure it out, check Wikipedia. The book assumes you know exactly who everyone is, and why most of the main characters are nothing like they were five years earlier, much less twenty. Every Marvel team book needs a character page at the front or back, this one being a prime example.

Annie (in the glasses) is the key to the story. Annie's death during Jean's childhood triggered Jean's powers originally

The prologue and much of the story is focused on Jean Grey's origin story, which is also not explained in the book. If you're a diehard fan, you'll know that Jean was playing frisbee with her friend Annie when Annie ran out onto the road and was hit by a car. Jean's telepathic powers were triggered and she experienced her best friend's dying pain. You've read the black and white Marvel magazine from the 1980's Bizarre Adventures #27, which had the origin of Jean Grey, right? I'm sure it's been retold elsewhere, if only in single panel flashback, but it's just not that well known. Writer Rosenberg's choice to make this a key part of the story is the correct choice in order to make a story with an emotional core that's true to the character. The choice not to retell the story in the book, or even reprint a single page for newer readers in the ancillary material at the back, is... I don't want to say baffling, because Marvel makes comics for 40 year olds these days. I'm too accustomed to it to be baffled by Marvel. But it is symptomatic of a bad publishing strategy.

The art is very understated for a modern X-Men comic, and that is really nice

So far, almost all the problems I've described are things that are the responsibilities of the editor and publisher. Given that the X-offices decided Jean needed to come back, that the "X-Men" were in a sorry state, how did Rosenberg do with these lemons? I think he did fairly well. The plot of this is that dead mutants are appearing and disappearing, and it's the Phoenix Force at it again, the cosmic entity that can't quit Earth.

In terms of double page spreads, I found this one lacking

The dead mutants are merely a distraction from the Force's real plan: bringing back Jean from the dead to be the new avatar for it. The Phoenix has had multiple avatars and they've never been stable, not like it was with Jean. So it's incubating her a new body to bond with. Why the Phoenix creates a town populated with dead mutants and a diner run by a grown up version of her dead childhood friend is vague, but sure, maybe the emotional resonance is soothing. It's a superhero comic. 

It's such a weird concept to make another book about dead X-Men... Necrosha was probably a year ago in Marvel continuity

What I liked about this is that, despite the fights, this is not a fight book. When it's all resolved, it's an emotional resolution. I've been reading pieces of the Claremont run recently, and when that book was at its best, it wasn't because characters were punching each other. It was because the characters talked and expressed themselves. It was a sensitive book. 

I'm not going to make the thesis that that is what an X-book has to be; books and characters evolve with the times. But if you think about what made X-Men stand out on the stands in the 1980's, when it was the number one selling book in America, it was the heart of it. It was the way the characters expressed longing and fear, and supported one another through it all. 

The book has battles, but ultimately it's about personal relationships and philosophies on living

Rosenberg, at least with this book, got that, and made it a story about Jean's heart, not about overcoming a cosmic being. 

He went on to write the short run of Uncanny X-Men before House of X/Powers of X, and I think it was pretty terrible. So I don't know if it was the assignment here that raised his game, or if the assignment of killing time (and a ton of characters) before HOXPOX left him uninspired.

Even if it is only for one book, I like seeing this variation on Phoenix's costume

In the current HiX-Men continuity, death has been removed from the narrative of the X-Men. All characters now can be reanimated in a snap, so I wonder why this book was even editorially mandated to be made. Shortly after, Cyclops also would be mandated to return, using some other comic book logic. Why did they bother to do that when in HOXPOX, they brought back everyone any writer wanted to use? 

It's baffling, and makes me question just what the point of this book even was, when it's unlikely to ever be referenced in continuity ever again. But, if you ignore the convoluted continuity it was based in, and that within a year, all of the continuity in this would be ignored, the book itself is pretty good! It has some of the stuff that good X-Men comics are made of.

Reading Through 2021 95: Tales Designed to Thrizzle Volume One, by Michael Kupperman

Tales Designed to Thrizzle Volume One, by Michael Kupperman

2009

A little Michael Kupperman goes a long way.

I can't say I'm a life-long Kupperman fan. I watched the Robert Smigel's TV Playhouse when it was on, where Kupperman did animation. I first knew of his name though, when Tumblr was at its peak six or seven years ago. His work was perfect for a site like that: small doses of crazy, inventive humor. I was into it and got Volume Two of Thrizzle when it came out, and just recently decided I wanted some more and picked up the first volume.  

The sex hole v. sex blimp debate never ends

Kupperman makes short comedy pieces of the sort the Internet is sorely lacking. Humor strips these days tend to be four panel comics that are crudely drawn, with punchlines in the final panel, and not very inventive concepts of comedy. A quick pass through "comics" on Reddit this morning shows three dominant jokes: 1) a scary intimidating character does something cute in the final panel, 2) a cute character does something evil in the final panel, and 3) someone says something dumb and/or shocking while other characters stare in disbelief. That's 85% of the humor strips in my feed. Kupperman has themes he goes through, but I'd argue there is no formula, and jokes are laced throughout the strips, as opposed to a strip that builds to a single punchline. His art is retro, calling to mind work from the 30s to the 50s.

Meanwhile, the comics as literature debate has been settled

At times, it's barely a joke, simply a ridiculous concept that Kupperman has taken a great amount of effort to create. He also builds on his own strips, making callbacks to earlier strips and ideas. What might be a comic on one page becomes an fake advertisement on another. What is an advertisement on one page might face a rival advertisement on another. Like a lot of great comedians, he mines themes to get the humor out of them, and lets jokes evolve.

It's terrible when your Lyndon Johnson biography suffers because of having to perform foreplay

Kupperman was born in the 60's, and takes a lot of references from 70's culture, like buddy cop TV shows and the actors of the day, but he also works in a lot of Americana from old presidents to 1930's pulp stories. Most of the work in the book is familiar in some way, like it's been culled from the collective unconsciousness of America. He definitely is making more references than I can name check. This is dense work.

Remembering the Thirties

When he's on top of his game, it's absolutely delightful. It's novel in a way that humor comics rarely are. With the way the Internet has become, with endless scrolls asking for our attention, somehow it's rarely surprising. Kupperman manages to surprise over and over. Was I asking for for Einstein and Mark Twain as two beat cops solving crimes? No, and I wasn't asking their police chief to dress like Tarzan either.

If there's one issue I had with the book it's that it's that I couldn't just sit down and read it. This book collects four issues, and I had to read it about half an issue at a time. With books that collect a lot of short, unconnected pieces, there are some where I'm ready to burn through it, like Dakota McFadzean's excellent To Know You're Alive, but with this one, I found it hard to stay focused on it. I read it for fifteen minutes before or after reading something else.

From a piece on the pornographic coloring books of the 1970's

That's not really a criticism of the work, just recognizing that the form of one to four page strips without narratives don't lend themselves to concentrated readings.  I was delighted, then I was tired, then I was delighted again. It's good work.

Reading Through 2021 94: Sentient, by Jeff Lemire and Gabriel Walta

Sentient, by Jeff Lemire and Gabriel Walta

2020

I can now officially say I've given Jeff Lemire a fair chance, and I don't get the hype.

It's a good cover

He's a competent writer, but I don't see what others are seeing when they say he's their favorite writer, or he is put up for awards. My take on Sentient: an okay story told well with great art. That's three stars for the story, four stars for the storytelling, and five stars for the art.

Previously, I looked at his first six issues of Animal Man, which read like the prologue to a story as opposed to one ("Hey, if you just buy the next four trade paperbacks, plus the crossovers, it's gets good!"). And before that, I read his Justice League, which read like something a person was paid to do more than anything else I've written about this year. And before that, I'd read his X-Men run, which was a pillar of one of the bleakest periods in Marvel Mutant publishing history. I even have a hardcover of volume one of Sweet Tooth. It was fine; competent but unexciting.

There are action movie tropes in this

Lemire works hard to create a mood, and to some readers it must be a revelation, but I've just read a lot of other artists who've done it better without being bogged down with genre tropes. It's genre fare with heart. My frustration with his work is not that he's a bad writer. He isn't. It just isn't outstanding, which is what I've been repeatedly told his work is.

Walta's white lines bring out the details of the room and uniforms

That said, of the Lemire books I've read, this is he best of them, though still flawed. 

In advance, I have to mention that this is my first TKO comic, and the production quality is superb. Slightly oversized on a matte paper, I wish a penny-pinching company like Marvel would adopt this standard on its books.

And the art couldn't be better. Gabriel Walta, who made a name on the Vision 12-issue series a few years back, does the drawing duties. On the Vision, Jordie Bellaire did the colors, and here Walta does everything himself. Surprisingly, the color palette is very similar with browns and oranges, but here Walta draws more with the color. He's still relying on linework to create his images, but he creates texture and form using colors in a way that a separate colorist might not feel appropriate doing. 

There are a lot of mopey kids wandering, but kids who've lost their parents tend to mope

Lemire gives Walta lots of room to tell the story in pictures. Silent panels are plentiful throughout the book, and Walta lets the characters "act" out the story. The work is a great showcase for Walta's art, which is loose without being vague or sketchy. Like his work in the Vision, he keeps the storytelling down to earth, without many dutch angles or forced perspectives, and it gives the action scenes more believability.

The story is reminiscent of a number of sci-fi works, here is a play on 2001

The story is... not great. The book collects a single six-issue story, and the first half is quite good, while the second half is fine if you never think about it. The story takes place in the future, on a ship sending earth families to a colonized planet. The earth's environment is collapsing, and there is dissension on the colony on whether to let earth continue to govern it. All the adults on the ship are killed by a separatist, who is in turn killed by the ship's AI. The kids are left with the ship and its AI in a territory between the earth and the colony where communication is impossible. They continue moving toward the colony. As long as you don't think about it, it's fine. Why is a separatist on the earth ship when all the transports seem to go one way? I don't know. What were they going to do with the kids? I don't know. Why would they want a transport ship? I don't know. I can get past that sort of thing. Emotionally, it all works. The comic focuses on the two oldest kids who become the de facto "adults" on the ship, but having just lost their own parents, they are in no shape to be the rock for younger kids.

The story focuses on daily life on the ship, and the emotional states of the kids. This is good compelling stuff. 

The separatists kill all the people on their ship but leave the one guy nutty enough to try to kill kids

A lot of stories don't make sense if you pick them apart, and I was happy to see where this went by the halfway point. It then went to a very boring place. There is a refueling station the ship stops by, and the kids hear an SOS. The SOS is from a guy whose crewmates were killed, and his ship was taken by separatists. When he encounters the kids, he tries to kill them because he's gone crazy. They get away and their ship is boarded by separatists who had left the man on the station as bait! So they could take a second ship and do something with it. The kids fight, the bad guys die, and they go to the colony, the end. None of the separatists goals are addressed. The motive for separating is reasonable enough (freedom!), but it's never established why they would feel comfortable just killing earth citizens. Were they living under tyranny and oppression? On the colony, the concept of separatism is not addressed and life there seems just fine from the few images we see. The kids just live there happily ever after. 

The separatists were mere bad guys. This is a home invasion story set in space. 

So half the book is taken up with plot that doesn't have any relation to the the overall book. The bad guys are only there to give the two leads a reason to come together. It's very similar to the technique Zach Snyder employed in Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice, when he introduced Doomsday in the third act to bring the quarreling heroes together. 

The AI has a fun 2000's iMac design

I would tolerate a story like this in made-for-Netflix movie, but I wouldn't call it great and tell people to watch it. The past five years has seen an explosion of competent but unexceptional science fiction, and this fits right in there.

There are good points to the writing here. When Walta draws silent sequences, that's Lemire having him draw that. I appreciate him letting the artist tell the story using only images. That's good comics. And I think Lemire is writing good characters on an emotional level. The two main kids do not have a good relationship, and are forced to come together. An image of the one character's hand touching the other is a subtle yet powerful way to communicate a change in their relationship.

Probably my favorite thing in the book

That is good writing. It doesn't make this a great book, but it was a fine Sunday read.

Reading Through 2021 93: The House, by Paco Roca

The House, by Paco Roca

2015, English edition 2019

Paco Roca is a sensitive man, and I'm here for it.

The cover is a pretty good summation of the vibe of the book. If you like this, you'll like the book

This is my third Roca book, following Twists of Fate and Winter of the Cartoonist. He has at least another two books I haven't read, but it's only a matter of time because I am going to become a completist. He's making a kind of comic which few others are: mature, refined stories without any manufactured melodrama. 

Roca uses strips within strips on many pages, capturing multiple small moments

Twists of Fate and Winter of the Cartoonist were both true stories, more or less. Fate was based on one man's account of WWII, while Winter was based on the lives of a number of 1950's Spanish cartoonists. The House isn't explicitly autobiographical, but the degree of detail and the similarity of a central character to Roca in age and job gives the feeling of true experiences.

The use of color is impeccable. The story shifts between the past and the present through an adjustment of the tint. Here it's more pronounced, but he uses many subtle changes as well

The book starts with the death of the elderly father of a family. His three grown children are left to take care of his rural weekend home and prepare it for sale. It begins with the younger brother (who seems to be the Roca analogue), and later introduces the oldest brother and a sister. 

While the other books of his that I've read were done in brush and ink, this seems to be done with something like a Rapidograph. I'm partial to brushwork, but Roca gets a lot of life out of his line, and his coloring manages to capture an organic, brushlike stroke. He manages to create a very clear, structured image, but still maintain a lively feel to the lines.

Color here is used to highlight how different memories are just thrown away 

The book uses a wide, panorama format, on whose pages Roca crams multiple rhythms. A page might have three or four horizontal sequences, or two horizontal sequences and one vertical. The panel layout remains intuitive to read no matter the format.

As a writer, Roca navigates a number of threads as we're introduced to these characters. The first is the relationship of each grown child to their father. The father having passed away, all are confronted with the things unsaid, the promises they never quite kept, and just accepting that a period of their lives has closed.

The three siblings themselves have a relationship dynamic that is slowly revealed through their interactions.  All three are married and show different dynamics within their own new families as well.

Another page with multiple rhythms. An elderly neighbor sheds insight on their father's experiences in his later years

All of these relationships are nuanced without veering into cliché. Perhaps the relationship of the two brothers is the simplest, as the older brother has a bitterness to him over feeling pressure to be the responsible one in the family and having to handle the most of the father's estate. Still, their dynamic manages to have complexity as they deal with their relationship to one another as well as both to their father. Both had very different perspectives on how their family life was.

A particularly nice use of time shifting as a brother remembers the view he once saw when he was a child

I was only a few dozen pages in before I started deeply considering my own life and my family. The situations Roca is portraying are all too real. He pulls out a lot of emotion from the reader by showing realistic dynamics rather than amped up ones, and that is no easy feat. The patriarch of the family is absent in the story, but his presence still weighs on everyone. All of them spent long amounts of time at this second house, but less and less as they got older. Eventually it became their father's house more than the family's house. Simply being in the house makes them recall parts of their lives long past. Not necessarily better days, but different days long gone, impossible to reclaim.

As a reader, it's hard not to reflect similarly on your own life.

Here, the present and past overlap, as a grandson remembers only a few years back

As they look after the house, they see how their own relationships have moved away from each other, and to an extent have to reckon with their own families which might someday suffer a similar fate. 

The book has very cinematic vibes, with the consistent use of space and people in it, allowing the reading of the work to be intuitive  

The book is in no way a sad or depressing, it's got some humor mixed in too. It's simply a reflective, contemplative work, recalling those times in your life when you stop for a while and survey the state of your life. The act of reading this caused me to consider my own. 

Roca writes as well as he draws, creating a space for the characters' emotional lives and for readers' emotional lives too.

Reading Through 2021 92: Thor: The Black Galaxy, by Tom deFalco and Ron Frenz

Thor: The Black Galaxy (Epic Collection vol. 18), by Tom deFalco and Ron Frenz

1990, collected in 2019

When these comics were new, I absolutely hated them. I had many things to learn.

It's 1990. McFarlane is doing Spider-Man, Liefeld is doing New Mutants, and Lee is doing Uncanny X-Men. Walter Simonson hasn't been on Thor for a few years. This was a cold book to my teenage eyes. 

The brashness to label the first issue of a storyline a "saga"... So so good!

And I get why I didn't like it then. This was old school. Writer deFalco had been working under Jim Shooter, and was made editor-in-chief around this time. His policy as the head of Marvel Comics was to just keep doing what Shooter did. There is nothing in this book that would have been out of place in a 1980 Marvel book.

I'm here for it, Count Tagar. The inking here is incredible work by Joe Sinnott, but the colors on it pop as well

For me at that time, that meant the book lacked any freshness, especially compared to the soon-to-be Image artists that were the stars at Marvel. Thirty years later, I'm reading these simply as comics rather than as a barometer of the times, and they they read a lot better than, say, all of McFarlane's Spider-Man run. 

That's how you do a double-page spread

This work is a refined, classic Kirby homage with a quality of craftsmanship that would be hard to find today.  Frenz was an artist I loved on Amazing Spider-Man (he was the artist around the mid 200s, the time of the black suit Spider-Man), but he evolved into a much more retro artist on Thor. The first half of his run had Joe Sinnott inking with bold lines and dynamic feathering, giving it even more of a Kirby-esque vibe. And probably older Marvel fans were loving it, but at my comic shop, it was not part of the conversation.

Asgard crosses over to the Negative Zone

To really put this in perspective, two years later, Alan Moore would be making 1963 for Image, doing a similar homage to classic Marvel and be hailed for it. Around the same time, Mike Allred would also start mining Kirby, pairing it with ginchy kitsch and getting praised left, right, and center. At the very same time, deFalco, Frenz and Sinnott were making the real deal and getting no credit for it. The argument might be that Moore was choosing to make Kirby-esque comics, while the makers of Thor were simply making what they made, but that's a disrespectful argument. It's the same snobbery that gave Roy Lichtenstein credit for ripping off 50's comic art but not the artist who actually drew it, or gives a trendy restaurant credit for seeing the beauty in street food when it puts it on a nice plate and sells it at four times the price.

There's a bit of Kirby in this

No, this Thor run is the real thing, not a distillation of it. DeFalco and Frenz weren't slumming, they were being the thing itself.

This collection is the third of four Epic Collections that have most of their run. I have collection 16, War of the Pantheons, which I only bought because it was 50% off, and shocked me how much life and energy I found in it. I missed volume 17, In Mortal Flesh, and it's now unaffordable in the current Epic Collection collector's market. This volume is, relative to Epic Collections, pretty good. Some volumes have a lot of filler, and these don't. It starts with an annual which was not done by deFalco and Frenz, and it's not great. The annuals of the early 90s at Marvel were generally just places to give gigs to aged-out veteran artists or try out younger artists. Here, 70's Herb Trimpe does a competent but uninteresting chapter of a lackluster crossover.

I'm not going to dog on Trimpe's art. Instead, check out what Hercules does on his day off!

A number of the Thor issues in this were split in two with a back up Tales of Asgard story, written by deFalco  and drawn by someone I've never heard of, Gary Hartle. I think I get what he was trying to do, get a chance to write characters like Balder or the Warriors Three, and give Frenz and Sinnott some time to make deadlines, but these also just lack the energy of the main Thor stories.

The impact in panels 1 and 4 is amazing, but the perspective and composition in the third panel really puts you in the action

The main title goes through roughly two arcs in the course of the 18 issues contained in the collection, with some smaller arcs in between. The first arc is the Black Galaxy Saga, which really wears the Kirby on it's sleeve. Thor investigates an organic galaxy being researched by the High Evolutionary, and witnesses things no man has seen before.

Again, the colors! You couldn't do this better using Photoshop

It involves one of Kirby's greatest creations, the Celestials, and Frenz is more than capable of bringing an epic quality to the work.

Double-page spreads should blow your mind

After the saga has ended, Thor returns to earth and fights the Wrecking Crew, one of Kirby's much less interesting creations. There is a crossover with Excalibur where they fight at a New York pier, and for me, this was a lull in the book. Thor fighting at street-level in New York isn't half as interesting as him having adventures in space or in Asgard. I'm here for the crazy stuff I can't get anywhere else. I was losing interest, when suddenly Excalibur's mission to recapture the Juggernaut takes them to an alien planet where Juggernaut has been proclaimed the almighty leader. And just like that, I'm back on board!

The back of the book reprints some of Sinnott's original inks

All in all, I loved this book and am looking forward to more, with a few massive caveats. I love what deFalco and Frenz were doing here. It was authentic, high-quality old school Marvel Comics. They weren't trail blazing, but they were doing a great job on what they were doing. As the volume is ending, the atmosphere of the book starts to shift, and it's a little troubling.

That is a 2/3's of the page panel. Look at that ink!

The first is that Al Milgrim starts stepping in on inking duties. Joe Sinnott was a classic heavyweight inker. Milgrim was a Marvel editor whose art and inking I associate with books on a deadline. I'm sure he enjoyed the job, but he was always competent, never much more than that. I have volume 19, and having flipped through it, it seems like Milgrim became the regular inker. It's not a deal breaker, but Sinnott was a pretty key member of this creative team for me.

A double-page spread with Milgrim inks lacks a lot of the power of previous ones 

Another downturn for me was the appearance of a superpower enforcement police team. They don't have powers, they just specialize in cases involving powers, and they aren't inspired in any way. As a kid, I was never into G.I. Joe or any men in uniform type characters, so maybe they worked for others better than for me.

That's not gonna work on an Asgardian god, you fool!

Lastly, whether it was pressure from the bean-counters at Marvel, or simply deFalco and Frenz wanting to create something that'll connect with the kids, the book starts trying to be "cool" toward the end. Make no mistake, deFalco and Frenz were not cool guys. And their uncoolness is part of what makes this run so great. And I understand their impetus to make something that jives with the kids like Cable did. But it's not great stuff.

This probably lost as many readers as it gained. Maybe it gained a little more, since it was 1991

In the Black Galaxy Saga, deFalco tried writing a cool, young character, and the silence was deafening, the character swiftly disappeared to the planet Poochy went to. A god created mere days ago using youth lingo. It has strong "Hello, fellow kids!" energy.

Frenz gets credit for Juvan's hairstyle

That said, I think this is one of the best runs from the era. I had this image of Tom deFalco as a hack for most of my comic-reading years. Actually, I have that image of a lot of the artists and writers at DC and Marvel from the 70s and 80s. Mainly the guys who worked there until they got pushed out by younger styles. I judged them a lot on what they couldn't do, which was stay fresh and dynamic forever. Now that I'm in my 40s, I'm reading their work a lot differently, and not judging them for not appealing to 13 year olds forever. Looking at the work now, I see the craftsmanship and passion in it, but I also see the fun. It's when it's trying to be cool that it starts being very uncool, and losing some of that fun. 

"It's the nineties, pal! Those days are OVER!"

This book isn't flawless by any means, but it has a lot of great work in it. It's nearly 500 pages of Thor, and I'd estimate about 300 of those are awesome, and the rest ranging from mediocre to solid. But it's a must-read for anyone looking for a Kirby fix. Of course, go get the Kirby reprints first, that's the source, but if you are into Moore's 1963, or anything Tom Scioli does, this belongs on the shelf with those.

Thor gets political