If you drew a graph for how good Journey Into Mystery is from month to month, it’d look like a three year-old’s drawing of grass. Keiron Gillen doesn’t mind stuffing words on a page, which is probably the least offensive thing a Thor book has done to the English language, but that doesn’t make it any more bearable.

When the book is good, the upside is that, wow, there are some big, fun, fantastical ideas jumping off these panels. Anytime a Thor book is good people get caught up and compare it to Simonson, but I really believe JIM has that same knack for big fantasy. This is 19 pages of unfiltered imagination, and has been for a while.

When the book is bad, you’ve got your thumb and pointy finger just waiting to get past this one page. You get your money’s worth, but you’ll find yourself checking the cover to make sure Moby Dick didn’t find it’s way into your stack.

Issue #631 somehow sat itself in the middle of all this. That imagination’s flowing around every character, like an aura wrapped in a fluffy pink blanket. All these characters, however, have eloquent speeches prepared just in case we want to see how good they did in their Public Speaking class. If you’ve been reading Gillen’s run you’ve seen firsthand how this smothers the fun in the book, just a little. It’s always a quality read, but it’d be that much better if we could get a little room for these plot points to sink in and grow organically.

I’m a pitiful art analyzer, because I don’t pay as much attention to it as I should, but the art here is at the extremely low end decent magical-fantasy work. I’m not blown away but I can’t complain either. The colorists in particular know what they’re doing.

I don’t consider this spoilers, but I hope the Disir stay away for a while.