4 out of 5

This was a lot of fun.  Ragnarök attempts to imagine the world after the titular Norse mythological cataclysm, the ‘twilight of the gods.’  We come into the main thrust of the tale – Thor, reawoken, trying to learn what’s happened post world-destruction-and-evil-conquering-all while fending off the minions sent to shut him down by Muspelheim’s current head honcho, Surtr (and I’m sure I’m getting those names mixed up, so forgive me) – through something of a back door: issue one has a dark elf hired by a mysterious taskmaster to go somewhere and destroy something.  Simonson treats this elf, Brynja, and her husband and daughter, like full characters, not bit players, and the build up to her mission’s end point is the whole first issue; it feels possible, as a reader, that Ragnarök (if you haven’t read anything about it, or, er, maybe ignore the subscription cover which has a dude with a hammer on it) Brynja might be our star, and how her mission plays out our focus.  Even through the second issue, which details what Brynja discovers – the chained “stone god” – being stirred and starting upon his own task to figure out what the heck happened, Simonson avoids calling this dude Thor.  Heck, for the whole first arc, he’s a jawless skeleton, and asks to still be called The Stone God.

More concisely: Walt takes a character we all know and finds a way of reintroducing him that feels both epic and fresh.  This isn’t the empty Thy-spouting Thor of Marvel; it is an amnesiac de-throned God, stuck in a revenge tale.  All of his fellow gods are gone.  And I could be making this up, but this feels like the kind of story a creator, tied to a Marvel or DC property, might want to tell about that character, but be unable to properly do so.  Thor could certainly feature in a post-Ragnarök imagined story for Marvel, but that’s all it would ever be: imagined.  An elseworld-ish kind of riff, or something that inevitably rewinds to put the big man back to status quo.  Such is the revolving creativity door for the Big Two.  But thankfully, the mythology itself is certainly copyright-free, so at IDW – bringing along the letterer who’s style is also synonymous with Simonson’s Thor, John Workman – Walt can give this story the kind of space and presence it needs.

The pacing hiccups sometimes, as Walt skips back and forth to different locations on the same page to keep the different parts of his story going (the dark elf family, Muspelheim, Thor), but on the whole, this is a riveting tale with big, bold art and a solid color scheme from Laura Martin that really sells the the blue and orange tones that plays up the good / evil, earth / hell juxtapositions.  And it’s also a heck of a lot of fun.