Thor #6-8 (2008)

Gosh I love this book.  This story opens with a town hall meeting where the townspeople who live near the area where Asgard now floats are trying to meet with the Asgardians to figure out how to live together.  A local civil servant asks Volstagg how the Asgardians dispose of their toilet waste, since they do not have plumbing connections in their floating city, and Volstagg says that they usually just toss it all over the wall…

…That’s laugh-out-loud funny.  What other writer thinks of things like this?  It shows how “real” this all is for JMS and is another example of how he’s one of the best ever to do it.  

This issue also introduces a new Asgardian named Kelda.

She’s a hottie who is flirting with a townie named Bill Cobb Jr. He’ll be important later.

While these quieter moments are happening, Thor is still trying to find his true love, Sif. 

Thor and Don Blake (who can now talk with each other on some kind of psychic plain) discuss it.  Thor doesn’t want to revive all the remaining wandering Gods because he doesn’t want to bring Odin back, and Odin is unlikely to embrace the new, Midguard-bound life of New Asgard.  But he doesn’t know how else to find Sif.  (We also saw last issue that Loki is tricking Thor into doing this–so that he will also revive his old Asgardian enemies.)

Thor decides to go ahead and revive all Gods, but the effort weakens him so he goes  into the equivalent of the Odinsleep inside the Odincasket and, when he does…Don Blake emerges!  Not only that, he offers a very cool Science Fiction explanation by referring to Schroedinger’s Theory.

Again: I love this comic.

Paralleling Thor’s journey, now that Don Blake is out and free, he goes looking for Jane Foster–thinking that maybe she is the host of Sif.  Jane is caring for an elderly woman named Rose Chambers.  Jane is upset with Blake for coming to ask about Sif instead of coming for Jane herself.  Don leaves.

In his “semicoma,” Thor wanders around in some kind of dream world and is visited by some Asgardians he hadn’t awakened yet, sees Odin defeat Surtur, and has a talk with his father. Odin tells Thor the story of his own birth, including how Odin created humankind on Midgard.  Odin also reveals that his role in this dimension is to spend every day fighting Surtur to prevent him from reemerging, and therefore Odin will not be brought back to life as a result of Thor’s efforts.

Thor returns from his time-in-casket and tells his fellow Asgardians that no one else can be brought back.  On the last page of this story, we see the old woman being cared for by Jane Foster.  She is looking into a mirror and her reflection is Sif.

Note that there is an artistic switch during this story from Olivier Coipel to Marko Djurdjevik.  Both are very good pencilers, but their styles are incredibly different.  Just noting it.  Nothing bad to say about it.  Although I loved Coipel’s clean style, particularly for the quieter and more humorous sections of the story, Djurdjevik’s grittier work suits the Odin/Surtur storyline quite well.