Thor: God of Thunder #6 Review

So who exactly is this Gorr character that’s been giving Thor a couple thousand years of problems?

Thor: God of Thunder #6

Some 3000 years ago, on a planet with no name, a race of beings lived in an inhospitable world under a sun that rarely sits.  These people are always hungry, but more often die from what’s called “sun fever” than from starvation.  This is the home Gorr grew up on.  This was a tough life.  Those he loved spent their entire lives praying to gods that seemed to never answer their prayers – though they never attempted to hope for that eventual answer.  Every single loved one of Gorr’s died hoping the gods would one day deliver them from their sorrowful lives.  When Gorr finally stands up against this way of life after yet another loved one perished, he’s cast out.  It was then that he finally did meet one of his world’s gods, the first that would feel his revenge.  Several hundred years later, it would be a familiar Asgardian who would finally force Gorr to see that he may not be any different than those he is slaughtering.

After the last issue, I mentioned that it seemed as though Gorr himself was acting more like a god than a being seeking his revenge on them.  After reading this issue, I got one of those rare moments of feeling, what I guess would be, pride knowing that I was actually kinda right!  What he’s been able to use to stay alive for so unnaturally long came from one of his people’s “dark” gods.  Now we’ve seen him be a little less godly in the more recent time frame, but it doesn’t change the fact that he is one of the very things that he hates so much.  It’s almost as if his own vengeance and anger has become unfounded.  He’s so bent on killing gods that I’m not sure he even remembers exactly why he’s doing it.  Even when we see him with Volstagg (a skinny, young Volstagg I might add), he doesn’t speak of why he’s on this killing spree.  He never spoke of it before.  All he does is see his own mission as true righteousness – another trait of a god.

That’s what makes this issue so damn intelligently written by Jason Aaron.  Gorr’s own origin is perfectly legit and logical.  Everyone who had to suffer a loss of a loved one had to, for at least a split second, ask a deity “Why?”  So many hear about the plans of God or how God works or how God, as is the case with particularly young people dying, had the need to recruit an angel.  These are all comforting words when things are dark and in doubt, but to really step back and think about that in a logical way, it’s hard to really legitimately accept when you lose someone especially close.  So, for a person like Gorr to lose everything he ever loved because of faith or belief, and to be expected to accept it as “God’s will”, feels like an affront.  If so much death has happened to people who honestly placed all their faith in a higher power, doesn’t it seem unfair that they are the ones who died?  Gorr has suffered so much loss, his own anger took over and there we have a new villain.  But what makes him a little more original that most whose main driving force is anger and revenge is that he’s no better than the very thing he’s hunting.  He himself has taken on the attitude of a god.  It’s a duplicity that makes Gorr a phenomenal character.

As soon as I saw Butch Guice on the cover as the artist for this issue I was giddy.  Guice goes back to the 80s when I was a kid reading comics.  I’ve met the man when Crossgen was around and always had their artists out at conventions to do free sketches.  The guy’s awesome.  His name on a cover alone makes me at least pick up the comic to flip through.  I wanted to say so much about how his visuals told a story every bit as well as Aaron did (which it does).  I wanted to say that regardless of how good Aaron’s script was, Guice’s art was going to trump it because of my affection for his work.  I simply cannot say those things.  It’s not that the art isn’t awesome because it truly is.  It’s that Aaron’s script is that interesting it trumps Guice.

Either way, as good as this script is alone, a four year old could have done the art and it would have been an awesome book.  It’s just icing on the cake that we got art this good to go along with that amazing script.

Tags: Butch Guice Jason Aaron Marvel NOW! Slider Thor