Thor: God of Thunder - Volume 1: The God Butcher (Marvel Now) Hardcover – 11 Jun. 2013

Thor enters the Marvel NOW! era with this frankly brilliant, high-concept story from Jason Aaron - one which has the unusual distinction of actually adding to the Odinson's continuity, and introducing aspects of his long life which stand the test of time and are still appearing in the title today.Aaron's story flips back and forth between three eras of Thor: the young, 'unworthy', brash Thor familiar from the Apocalypse-themed issue of Uncanny Avengers, pillaging his way across the oceans with Vikings in 893 AD; the modern-day Thor; and a future King Thor, the last god in the heavens, trapped on the throne of a broken Asgard. The threat faced across all three time periods is a gruesome one: Gorr, the God Butcher, who has embarked upon a bloody and comprehensive rampage, slaying deity after deity, leaving those who pray to them bereft.Thor first battles - and is tortured by - Gorr in 893, while Avenger Thor travels the spaceways following the trail of blood. Aaron takes us from the close quarters of Gorr's cave of horrors in ancient Russia to an audacious odyssey across the stars; as he does so, he fizzes with ideas, names, and conceptions. From the War Faeries of Wendigorge to Falligar the Behemoth, Patron God of the Galactic Frontier, the body count mounts until Thor consults the Lord Librarian in Omnipotence City, Nexus of all the Gods - the most striking addition to Marvel's cosmic geography since the severed Celestial head space station, Knowhere.If Aaron's ambition is high, then Esad Ribic is more than equal to the task. His art perfectly matches a Thor book. He illustrates as if painting a mythic canvas; from the arrogant whelp Thor to his more moderate but still strident modern-day counterpart and, especially, the weighed-down, ancient All-Father of the future, who is barely strong enough to stand, but still wields Mjolnir in a desperate bid to reach Valhalla. Gorr himself is a brilliant creation - inky, sibilant, with murder oozing from him. When he and Thor first clash, it's aboard winged horses in the clouds; Ribic delivers, just as he does in a creepy, disturbing scene where Gorr travels back 14 billion years to murder one of the first gods in existence, a giant baby delighting in playing with misshapen excuses for humanoid life.As this book ends, the different time periods start to come together; but victory is by no means certain, and seems destined to be pyrrhic. This is a stupendous take on the God of Thunder which acknowledges his power set and the circles in which he moves when not bound to Earth, while keeping him emotionally relatable. Highly recommended.

Jason Aaron + Thor = Sure Thing, right? Well... no. Jason Aaron is definitely one of my favourite comics writers due to penning the superb Scalped and the ongoing Marvel series Wolverine and the X-Men, but his more recent stuff like Thanos Rising and this Thor series have felt really lacking in the quality he usually brings to his projects. Maybe he's stretched, or just uninspired, but I didn't enjoy this very poor effort.Aaron shows Thor at three different points in his long life - as a young man, living amongst Vikings in the 9th century; as he is in our time, an Avenger; and in the future, where he resembles his dad with one eye, has one arm, and looks old and worn out. Gorr the God Butcher has been, well, butchering gods for millennia but kept Thor alive until the last as he is the only one who stood up to him. Why is he slaughtering gods? He doesn't quite like them. Doesn't like their attitudes or the way they comport themselves, so they've gotta die. That's basically it for character motivation.So this entire book is Thor, at various points in his life, seeing the effects of Gorr's work, looking at the slaughtered gods and swearing to hunt him down. Gorr meanwhile continues killing gods. Gorr and Thor sometimes cross paths and fight - no one dies or seems to be majorly hurt, despite limbs being hacked off. More gods die. There's a giant lake of god blood. The story is to be continued. The end. Very unsatisfying!The story is very weak and repetitive and the characters barely interesting. Thor is an ok character but I feel he's still a bit one-dimensional - despite the various stages in his life, he remains brash and overconfident only with varying levels of both. Gorr on the other hand remains boringly powerful. There isn't an obstacle in his path that causes him a hindrance - he can overcome them all without any sign of effort. He can create armies of powerful beings out of nothing, he can morph his body into powerful weapons (his arm turns into an unbreakable black sword), he can regrow limbs, he can travel through time, he can do whatever, whenever, however. Is there anything more pointless than an invincible bad guy? What's more annoying is that he's bound to fall in the second book in some contrived way ("No, not my Achilles heel which you just discovered in Volume 2!"). His character design and invincibility reminded me a lot of Super Buu from Dragon Ball who's another alien god-like creature who can't be beaten - so even though he's not much of a character, it looks like Aaron's lifted him from an older Japanese comic rather than bothering to create someone original.I've always known Thor is a god but it wasn't until I read this book and the god characters show up in their scores that I really questioned gods in Marvel. Though I'm non-religious, a god to me should be more abstract and intangible than simply a human or alien with superpowers, and even then only some of them seem to have them! In this book, gods are basically replicas of humans or aliens and live on orbiting moons - it just seems too literal an interpretation. It also makes them seem less than gods and more like the rest of us whom we've wrongly assigned the label gods - in which case, they really aren't gods at all. Which is fine, maybe that was Aaron's intention - I get the impression he's non-religious too - but it makes the story that much less impressive. The God Butcher is really just an unkillable, angry alien who hates beings whom less powerful beings call gods - a Butcher instead. The story becomes far less dramatic and much more mundane.I'm also not a fan of Esad Ribic's art. It's not terrible but somehow the subject matter of Thor and epic-ish battles combined with his style make so many panels in this book look like cover art for 80s heavy metal albums.It's surprising to see Jason Aaron produce such an uninspired comic but that's what this is. The God Butcher is a barely involving storyline that jumps around in time to make you think things are happening when they're not. The story barely has a pulse, the characters are dull, and this book is utterly tedious to read. Thank god(s) for Wolverine and the X-Men!