ULTIMATE COMICS THOR #4

Review by: TheNextChampion

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Avg Rating: 4.1
 
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Story by Jonathan Hickman
Art by Carlos Pacheco, Dexter Vines, Jeff Huet & Jason Paz
Colors by Edgar Delgado, J. Aburtov, Jorge Gonzalez
Letters by Clayton Cowles
Cover by Carlos Pacheco, Dexter Vines & Edgar Delgado

Size: pages
Price: 3.99

If there is anything that Jonathan Hickman is great at it is twisting the norm. Since going to Marvel, he has been handling well established characters and has given his own take on them. Now we’ve seen writers put their own spin on the characters before. But I think Hickman does it in such a way where it feels like we’re seeing these characters for the first time. It plays particularly well, so far, with Ultimate Thor; an origin for the ‘Ultimate’ version of the Norse God. It has been a pretty fun mini since it started four months ago. But sometimes the wheels do have to spin off at some point. It’s just a shame that it completely falls apart with a FINAL issue.

You know there is nothing really bad here about this issue. But this has a very strange way to end an origin of Thor. That is, by pretty much giving us a barely expanded take on the character mere days before the first Ultimates series came out. Also this entire mini had a weird pace to it, but it was working by balancing out the WWII aspects of the plot to the Norse mythology. Here the entire issue focuses on the ‘present’ day Thor which is really something Hickman was putting to the side from the three issues previous. It’s also strange that essentially the majority of the plot ended in the last issue and we get very little to work with here. You get the obligatory moments with Nick Fury and random news clips of Hulk rampaging through New York City; but it adds nothing really new from what we read in Ultimates. Again, nothing is badly written here in terms of the actual script. But the pacing of this issue and the entire mini overall really hampers this finale of a mini.

The art also suffers a bit from this issue with about three inkers and colorists to finish Carlos Pacheco’s pencils. Characters are widely inconsistant from page to page, with Thor going from an original looking character to Chris Hemsworth at points. Other times characters have really bizarre looking mouths to them; with Balder being a pretty good example in the beginning of the issue. Pacheco’s pacing, another theme with Hickman’s, is also a bit bizarre by not really going outside a standard, panel structure. Other then a few times where he breaks out into one page spreads; it’s all panels and everything is a bit too tight for the action described in the writing. We should see the complex areas of the scientific base for Captain Britain; but we get very little looks into it.

I’m bringing a lot of negativity to this review, but in reality it’s not a bad issue. Hickman’s writing is certainly readable and even with too tight of panels, Pacheco’s pencils are pretty solid. But nothing about this issue really brought any strong emotions from reading it. I know a ‘2’ seems too negative but remember it means ‘average’ and that’s what this issue was. Add to the fact that there are some inconsistant inks in this issue and also having a ‘weak’ ending it definitely isn’t going to be remembered for having the best 1-2 combo for a mini. It’s a shame, because Hickman started off strong with this mini but it just ended flat for me.

Story: 2 - Average
Art: 2 - Average

Comments

  1. I’ve got to agree this final issue seemed a massive let down in terms of quality from the first three amazing issues.

    Artwise is was wildly inconsistent, and storywise, I felt it was mostly a pointless epilogue, that just retold the beginning of The Ultimates from Thor’s point of view.

    As a massive fan of Hickman since Nightly News, was really disappointed with the conclusion to the otherwise excellent mini.

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