This ended up feeling like something between a finale and just another pretty great issue of JMS’s Thor. Certain plot threads wrap up–or almost wrap up–in relatively satisfying ways, but just as many new threads and character turns are started up. In other words, it doesn’t feel like Marvel blatantly yanked JMS off the book at the most inopportune moment, but it doesn’t feel like JMS altered his plans very much so that his final issue would seem like a big finale, even within the standard page-count he had to play with.

I guess you can count that as a positive in a way, that JMS really didn’t compromise himself or his story. On the other hand, you’re paying more money for something that is only “giant size” because of the filler in the back. Not that the filler is particularly bad, but….Now that I’ve got 1/3 of the next issue of Thor, aren’t I really that much LESS likely to pay $3 for the issue next week? Yes, I am. It wasn’t horrible, but it wasn’t anything special either, and in these days where we’re all looking for excuses to cut our pull lists, this is a good time for many readers to say goodbye to Thor.

It’s a shame because, as you’ve no doubt heard from many people already, Thor was one of Marvel’s best titles since the first JMS issue premiered in the summer of ’07. All told, there were 17 issues of Thor produced in two and a half years time (the cover date for this finale is Jan ’10).

17 issues in the span of 30 months.

Yes, we’re going to take this detour and examine the problem of delayed books from a somewhat different perspective: not from the perspective of an impatient reader following the book as it’s delayed, but from the perspective of a reader looking back, after a series as concluded, and thinking about how it could have been so much MORE if it just came out in a timely fashion. If you knew that JMS was going to be off of Thor by late ’09, if you knew that Thor would HAVE to start being integrated more into the rest of the Marvel Universe by then, then don’t you wish that the book could have come out monthly? That would mean that there’d have been almost twice as many issues by now, that JMS’s story could have gotten almost twice as far along as it did, and that JMS himself would have probably gotten almost twice as much money for doing this (since I believe that he’s paid by the issue, no?). Everybody would have won…except for the completists who insist that fill-in artists are never to be given work nowadays. (God, I’d’ve loved it if Djurdjevic was the fill-in artist all along…)

The point is, even though we have no way of knowing it beforehand, there really are very finite timeframes for how long things like this can go on. Sure, if it’s only a 12-issue series or arc, then often the complete run of something can be produced by the same creative team, eventually, and in retrospect it doesn’t matter if each issue took three months to work on. But the longer the saga, the more issues, the greater the risk that some heretofore unforeseen “event” of some sort is going to derail the process: one of the creators is going to get sick, or the publisher is going to need one of the creators on a different project, or the creator is going to want to go somewhere else already, or editorial is going to need the project to wrap up in too much of a hurry, or the project is going to have to be scrapped so that the title can join the rest of the shared universe. It’s always a risk. Time is always limited, and there are factors we don’t even know about that can sudddenly come into play to make a mess of things. Think of that the next time you say, “Yeah…I don’t care if it takes four months for the next issue of this series to come out”–because, in the end, what that might actually mean, all told, is that there will be three fewer issues of that series produced, period. Just saying.

Man, I wish there were 30 issues of JMS’s Thor instead of 17. I could have dealt with a few guest artists, no problem. (By the way, it’s a given that the art was what held up this book so often. I liked the storytelling in this series, but when there are THAT many silent splash pages, and THAT few lines of dialogue on the average page…then it’s not the writer who needed multiple months to do his part.)

Djurdjevic does a pretty good job in this issue, and its too bad he isn’t staying on. The action scenes are easy and exciting to follow, panel to panel. The numerous full-page spreads are impressive too (don’t worry, we’re not going to really get into how much more story I think could have been told in these 17 issues had they not been so very decompressed).

JMS’s script is good as always. Volstagg, in particular, has never been better. The thing I’ll miss most about this run is JMS’s Loki. Though his lines in this finale aren’t a particularly good example, JMS often blessed the arch-villain with many particularly evil speeches throughout this run. The team-up with Doom was compelling; too bad we’ll never see where JMS would have taken it, how it would have played out eactly, or what the interchange of villainous dialogue would have been.