2 out of 5

Man, finally I can rest assured that Aaron’s Marvel work won’t be for me, and save a few bucks each week.  As ever, gang, trust your gut; after getting into Southern Bastards and coming ’round on Scalped, I’d glanced at Aaron’s AAA work whenever he would start on a new title, shrugged, and put it down.  But smart marketers and their dollar intro issues had me impressed with glimpses of Doctor Strange and a later Thor arc.  Further reading had me on the fence, though.  Thankfully, Godbomb is self-contained, and doesn’t leave me with doubts that I need to read more for context.  Nope, context achieved: Jason has some cool ideas and gets paired with great artists to bring them to life (I’m partially convinced Thor’s positive reception is more due to artist Esad Ribic versus the stories), but his Marvel voice is pretty typical: Lightly jokey; paced pause-for-effect declarative statements about what so-and-so is thinking; punctuate with “cool” sounding catch phrases.  And Godbomb suffers the same main annoyance I found in a recent Doc Strange arc, which suggests it’s similarly just part of how JA writes this stuff – restating the plot several times over, multiple times per issues, sometimes even the beginning and end of the same conversation.  It really underlines how empty the story ultimately is, and how little the characters’ actions make sense or feel narratively justified.

In Godbomb, bad guy godkiller from previous issues has his back story flash-backed to, then plucks gods from across all of time to slave away eternally on his own planet, working on his “god bomb,” which, when finished, will put an end to his lifelong dreams of destroying all deities.  So Thors from across time team up to put him down, with hammers.  Hey, sure, there are better plots and there are worse plots, but this absolutely has the makings of a fun, pulpy yarn.  And here and there that peeks through.  The multi-Thor dialogue is fun, and though it could’ve been explored a lot more, the planet-of-slaved-gods is a good idea.  Plus: Shark punch, automatic points.  But it’s way too over- and under-stuffed elsewhere to serve the pulpy promise, starting with our bad guy justifications.  Gods killed his family, so now he will kill all gods.  FOREVERS.  This black-and-white revenge motivator has been used and abused forever, and its rarely believable.  It also feeds the (to me) lazy comic book trope of self-justification, i.e. these guys only exist to fight one another and aren’t, otherwise, real characters.  You can earn this setup, but not by just introducing an over-powered baddie and then taking twenty pages to drop some generic justifiers on us. And so maybe we’re supposed to assume that dude’s mad-on os fueled by some black weapon he inherits, which gives him much of his power and is another whole-sale Aaron creation for this arc.  …Which, unfortunately, also means it has no appropriate build-up (there’s a lovely bit where someone alludes to a mysterious history for the weapon, which we never seem to get), and feels like just another drop in the self-justifying bucket.  Later, things get “deep” when someone points out that godkiller is acting like a god himself… And it’s so deep it’s pointed out to us a couple more times.

On the art side, Ribic’s pinups and glory shots are gorgeously epic, but his style works way against the stories bigger ideas, when Aaron jumps us into space or needs to depict, say, a planet-sized bomb or a planet full of slaves. Ribic’s uber-realistic style would seem to sacrifice a lot of background and his paneling isn’t able to handle comparative scope, so these massive story elements feel incredibly underwhelming.  But, like, Gorr looks cool I guess.

Lastly, although this doesn’t affect the rating: Marvel can eff off with their hardcover addiction.  24.99 for five issues with one bonus sketch and two variant covers plus a complete lack of awareness of binding – there’s no gap towards the spine, so dialogue on the inner edge can get lost – is completely over-priced.  So it’s slightly over-sized, whoop-de-doo.

Jason Aaron has some fun ideas and, overall, a good light-handed for AAA books.  But his tendency to re-present his themes over and over and to stitch the light-handedness together with over-serious narration exposes the lack of inner workings in this Thor collection, undermined further by Esad Ribic’s pinup-ready but not sequential-comic ready artwork.