Thor: God of Thunder, Volume 2

Godbomb
written by Jason Aaron
art by Esad Ribic (#7-11), pencils by Butch Guice and inks by Tom Palmer (#6)

This is how Gorr learned atheism.  And then heresy.  His is a world of suffering and misery, a world with little to eat, to drink or to shade them from the seemingly perpetual day, a world that took his family brutality, one at a time, and left him alone and grieving.  And all this suffering only made his people more devout, more faithful, and more intolerant of his despair in their absent gods.  Gorr did not believe, thinking themselves alone in the universe to suffer their lives as they are.  When two battling gods crash to his unnamed world, in his frustration and hatred Gorr kills them with a dark weapon that fell with them.  The God Butcher was born.

Aaron's universe is the world of gods.  They are not always beneficent or generous or even all that interested in those who worship them, but they are magnificent and awesome and dreadful.  They inspire worship because they inspire wonder and fear.  But it is also the world of mortals, those subject to the violent whims and mercy of these wild, awful beings, and Gorr is a casualty of their neglect and indifference who stumbles across a way to carve his own revenge and liberate their worlds from their mercurial sway.

But just as this is a story of what Thor is becoming, what he could be and is at different times of his own life, it is also a story of what Gorr is becoming.  Volstagg, normally renowned more for his enormous appetite than his astute intuition, sees the seeds of Gorr's mission as something more than just his great misfortune.  A powerful weapon of unknown origin that is itself transforming the god-killer into a god himself, and though Gorr vehemently denies his observation, his crucifixion of the Asgardian suggests he may yet feel the truth in it.  A truth that ultimately betrays him.

The substance of the story, nothing short of mortals' existential struggle and heroic self-discovery wrapped in adventure and lore, may give the series its gravitas, but the joy comes in the details.  Aaron's Thor: God of Thunder is liberally peppered with rich flights of storytelling fancy:  a school of starsharks feeding on the god-chum in orbit around Gorr's black world, young Thor's weapon of opportunity against the Avenger Thor and his steed against Gorr; a room in Asgard reserved for the All-Father alone and dedicated to fine, godly ale; and a bomb fueled by a god heart and time itself.  And he tells it with such a fine sense of folklore and epic that it drips like honey on the pages.

"On the world of Gorr, thunder is heard.  And then it began to rain.  It rained blood.  Godblood.  Then it rained hammers.  And Thors.  And despair."  (Godbomb: 85-86 [Thor: God of Thunder #9:19-20])

In a turn presaged by the ambiguous form of the titular compound—Godbomb, both a bomb to destroy gods and a bomb that is a god—Thor emerges from the weapon as the weapon.  On a planet made of the darkness—All-Black the Necrosword—he absorbs it into himself.  He may never remember it, and his future self (though the All-Father he fights alongside may not be the god he becomes) still feels his failure as a son, but he for this one moment at least is precisely the son his father Odin wants, the son indeed he prays to.  In his doubt, Thor still fights, for himself, yes, but more for others.  As a god, he is more human than any other.  Godbomb is a paean to the endurance of gods, of awe, and of the wonder of feeling both small and important in the light of the vastness and power of the universe.  In the end, the era of man, which Gorr so desperately desires and which sparks Thor the Avenger's selfless doubt, is the era of the gods.

Collects Thor: God of Thunder #6-11:  "What the Gods Have Wrought," "Godbomb Part One: Where Gods Go to Die," "Godbomb Part Two: God in Chains," "Godbomb Part Three: Thunder in the Blood," "Godbomb Part Four: To the Last God," "Godbomb Part Five: The Last Prayer"

ISBN:  978-0785168430