Thor by Jason Aaron vol. 1 (Actually vol. 14): God of Thunder Reborn
The Odinson may be back on the job as Thor, but he’s still without a Mjolnir. Good thing that he’s got his friends in the League of Realms to make him all the hammers he needs. He’s going to need them too after Loki shows up with an offer to send him right where he needs to be in the War of the Realms. Which would happen to be Niffelheim, the ice-cold land of the dead where his other brother Balder, Skurge, and Karnilla are leading the resistance against the assault led by Sindr, the Queen of the Ashes. That all of this culminates in a wedding where Thanos shows up to express his objections to the nuptials shouldn’t come off as too surprising for anyone who has been following the enjoyably over-the-top storytelling that Aaron has employed in this series so far.
What really surprised me about “God of Thunder Reborn” were two things. The first being the upending of my expectations regarding how the main story was going to turn out. Coming in so close to the “War of the Realms” event, I was prepared for another story about how Thor and his comrades were going to lose more ground to Malekith’s forces. Especially after Loki showed up. That it didn’t, for reasons which I didn’t see coming, really made my day. New artist Mike Del Mundo’s gonzo artwork was also pretty cool to behold as well.
The other surprise this volume had to offer was in the ongoing story of Old King Thor and the new struggles he’s facing after bringing the Earth back to life. It turns out that this has attracted the attention of some of the few remaining cosmic entities who aren’t too happy about how Thor has meddled with the natural order of things. This leads to some really spectacular fights, amazingly rendered by Christian Ward, where the writer shows us how crazy things can get when he’s not working within the constraints of the present-day Marvel Universe. It’s a satisfying cosmic slugfest that ends by showing us that the worst (or maybe the best…) is still yet to come.