What If...? Thor #1 // Review
Battleworld. The other side of the Marvel Universe. Peter Parker found himself in a tattered costume that wouldn’t be able to stand-up for much longer. And with no end in sight for the Secret Wars, he needed a new costume. But...what if he didn’t? What if there was another champion needed a garment repaired on Battleworld? Writer Torunn Grønbekk explores this in What If...? Thor #1. It’s an alternate universe story brought to page and panel by penciler Sergio Dávila, inker Aure Jimenez and colorist Bryan Valenza. It all comes together quite well in a satisfying one-shot story.
He announced his intentions to the machine...what appeared to be a possible fabric replicator. Dr. Banner was pretty good at identifying it given the fact that really didn’t look at all like anything that would produce fabric. Nevertheless, Thor needed his cape replaced. He did get the cape. It wasn’t like...the traditional red or anything like that. It was black as night...and it came to cover his entire armor in similar darkness. What’s more...it gave him added resistance...but there was something darker in it that would only reveal itself in time. Something altogether more sinister than anything he would have been expecting.
Grønbekk take the Thor symbiote premise and moves it through the Marvel Asgardian fantasy setting with a fleet and concise storytelling momentum. The drama. The darkness. The sense of fantasy sorcery about it all...it all fits quite efficiently between two covers. The problem, however, is the fact that the symbiote feels much more genetically sword and sorcery fantasy when it's taken out of its 1980s superhero setting. Without the specific concerns of Peter Parker, the black costume feels much more like a traditional Elric-style story of a cursed artifact infecting a hero. It’s less impressive.
Their team frames the story quite well. They do a very good job of delivering the traditional Marvel fantasy visuals. The Thor Symbiote has a sleek look about it that feels respectably cool. There is a respect for the art style of original Secret Wars artist Mike Zeck in the early going. It feels like a bit of a weird update on the 1980s style, but when things move to Asgardian visuals, the art team loses some atmosphere. The costuming feels like a mishmash of different eras of Marvel Asgard. It would have been much more impressive to see Loki and Sif rendered in a style that would have been much more in line with Walt Simonson’s mid-1980s style.
It's a fun, little exercise. It's fun to see how Grønbekk tackles an ideal like this. She manages a very concise story that plays well with the overall tapestry of the Marvel Universe. There are a lot of different elements that could have dragged the narrative quite a bit had the author chosen to move it in a different direction. As it was, she chose to maintain a very pure approach to it that just happens to feel like it was a lot more to Michael Moorcock than it does to a more Marvel-based style of storytelling.
