WAR OF THE REALMS
Seen it all be Thor
released OUT NOW! Publisher Marvel Comics
Writer Jason aaron Artist russell dauterman
Thanks to his legendary source material, few Marvel heroes are quite as well-suited to world-shattering confrontations as Thor, and over the years the son of Odin has starred in a whole selection of lurid and apocalyptic showdowns. Now Marvel have made him the centrepiece of their latest splashy crossover, but while the results are as loud and extravagant as you’d expect, War Of The Realms is also a showcase for the worst excesses of event comics storytelling.
Part of the problem is that this is actually the climax to a years-long saga that’s been running in the main Thor title since 2014, and which for new readers will feel like stumbling by accident into the last 20 minutes of a Hollywood blockbuster.
Admittedly, the set-up for this six-issue miniseries is fairly simple: Malekith the Dark Elf has been amassing forces of evil and conquering the separate realms of reality, with only Midgard – our own world – left to be defeated. Now he’s launched an all-out attack on Earth, and as the combined heroes of the Marvel Universe unite to fight back a seemingly endless tide of mythical terrors, there’s a traditional mix of quips, fights and explosions, but thanks to the haphazard storytelling there’s little sense of impact to what transpires.
Instead, Jason Aaron’s script for these first three issues plays like a weirdly abrupt compilation of big action-packed moments without the connective tissue that would make the reader care about what’s happening.
There’s no shortage of large-scale set-pieces here, but almost all of these end up as empty noise and bluster, with an excess of characters yelling dramatically at each other. It doesn’t help that Aaron’s take on Malekith is barely more interesting than the character’s weak MCU appearance in Thor: The Dark World, while none of his partners in supervillainy make much of an impression.
Artist Russell Dauterman delivers slick but serviceable art that’s only truly memorable for some imaginative use of sound effects, and even the major (and no doubt reversible) character deaths fail to hit home.
The story does eventually start acquiring some proper shape in issue three, as a quest to rescue Thor from imprisonment begins, but it will take a lot for the latter half of this saga to compensate for such a tone-deaf opening.
There may well be some genuinely fun material happening elsewhere in the multitude of related spin-offs and crossover issues, but the core War Of The Realms miniseries is so far feeling like a flat cover version of a story we’ve seen too many times already.
Russell Dauterman previously worked as a costume design illustrator on movies like Captain America: The First Avenger.
Even the major character deaths fail to hit home