Immortal Thor vol. 1: All Weather Turns to Storm

Cover Price:  $29.99

Amazon Discount:  $20.49

After the Buy 2 Get 1 Free Discount:  $14.33

Regular readers will know that this is something I’ve been wanting to read for a while.  After all, it’s Al Ewing taking on the God of Thunder, and he’s even invoking the “Immortal” moniker that finally turned him into a household name in comics with his run on “Immortal Hulk.”  That’s tempting fate, but the writer has gone on record as wanting to do so in order to challenge himself to do the best job he possibly could on this series.  I was all for that until Marvel decided to charge an exorbitant price for the collected edition of the first five issues of these series.

I generally don’t bring up the prices of the comics I read in my reviews because good ones are usually worth reading regardless of it, while the bad ones shouldn’t be read at all.  However, as the direct market audience grows smaller and smaller, as the efforts to win back people who used to read comics through it consistently provide diminishing returns, the prices keep going up as publishers try to find out what they can get away with versus what their readers are willing to pay.  This is usually done subtly – a dollar here and there over a couple of years – but then you get something like this and that’s why it took me almost a year after this comic was originally published to finally get around to reading it.

Even then, my efforts likely weren’t worth it.  Marvel isn’t going to know about my efforts to buy this comic at the cheapest price I could.  They’ll likely just care that Amazon ordered the comic from them to be sold at that manufacturer suggested retail price in the first place.  Also, I could’ve just read this on Marvel Unlimited and dodged the issue altogether.  But… it’s Al Ewing writing “Thor.”  Surely this would be worth having a physical copy on my bookshelf if the price was right?

The short version is that no, “All Weather Turns to Storm” was not good enough to warrant that $30 cover price.  It’s a solid tale that I’d have had an easier time enjoying had it retailed for the price that I eventually bought it at.  The appeal it does have involves seeing Ewing digging deep here to find a threat worthy of a God and he does that in the form of Toranos – the Utgard Thor.

What is Utgard and why does it have its own Thor?  That’s a question you’ll want to save for later volumes of this series.  Just know that he’s a god-sized threat who Thor can only drive away by invoking the All-Power and then succumbing to the All-Sleep that its use entails.  Fortunately Loki is on hand to offer his brother help in this matter in the only maddening trickster way that he can.

The name of the game in this volume is Thor fighting a bigger, badder, and nastier version of himself.  At least that’s what Ewing is trying to project here – it’s probably for the best that he doesn’t go into the villain’s origins in an “X-Men/Alpha Flight” crossover from the 80’s.  He succeeds in no small part to the work of artist Martin Coccolo.  Most of what the artist does in this volume has the look of standard superhero action that’s executed well enough.  However, Coccolo deploys a more detailed style to depict Toranos and does an excellent job framing the god in every panel to make him look like the imposing threat that he is.  Every time he shows up, you can tell that Toranos means business thanks to the artist.

That he’s eventually dealt with shouldn’t surprise you, and Ewing accomplishes this by having Thor display an appreciable amount of cleverness along the way.  Loki may still be the smartest character in the room, but his smarts are guarded and in service to the story.  Thor gets to do the hard-thinking work for the audience’s entertainment and it generally works here.

Still, it does feel like there’s something missing from this volume.  Even though the threat of Toranos and the other Utgard gods is established, they don’t have the presence of a next-level threat outside of their look.  Plus, there’s a lot of setup being done here to establish them and future storylines here that feels like you’re going to have to trust the writer that it’ll all pay off later.  At the end of the day, though, this first volume still feels like another story where Thor fights a god-level threat and wins whose execution is good, but not much better than that.

It also has to deal with that price driving up my expectations as well.  For $30, I’d need it to deliver greatness – or a collection consisting of the first 8-10 issues.  Neither were delivered here, so I really can’t recommend buying this comic at that price.  What’s here is good, just not $30 worth of good.