Thor: The Lost Gods #1

Note - This is the collection of the ongoing series of Thor - Journey Into Mystery # 503 to 513, published after the events of Onslaught - The first thing that kindled my atention towards this TPB was the fact that Mike Deodato Jr. was involved, but unfortunally his participation was very small and this book wasn´t solid enough to deserve a better rating, despite having some interesting premises and concepts, like the whole renewal of several of Asgard´s Gods such as Lady Sif, Loki, Vollstag etc. The story about Odin faking Ragnarok in order to trick Seth, the Serpent God of Death (is there any relation to Fear Itself?) is the continuation of the acclaimed arc story of Warren Ellis and Mike Deodato Jr called Worldengine (issues # 491/494), but Tom Defalco old dated narractive structure, with the abuse of repetition dialogues, that kind of useless information in which the character say what he´s doing or is about to do (that boring feat of stating the obvious like "I say thee nay, foul villain, and now fear the wrath of my furious blow to your head that I´m about to unleash now", that kind of thing you know?), the poor characterization of the villain (who often uses language and speech totally out of character, like common slang or street talk), the annoying dialogues that took place in all scenes where Red Norvell is involved, all of these are just some examples to show how off this series was and I wonder how boring this was for the readers that followed it monthly - on the other hand, Defalco does some interesting aproaches and funny dialogues, especially the ones involving Erica Velez (Lady Sif), Landers (Balder) and Amora/Enchantress - summarizing this story, it´s about how the whole Asgardian Gods are trapped into human forms, living in Midgard, without knowing they´re gods and the quest of Odin (the drunken bum named Wad) to gather the lost gods and help them remember who they were - the nucleous (most important characters) are Sif, Loki, The Warriors Three, Heimdall, Balder, Hermod, Red Norvell, Amora and Ulik - the art really disapointed me, because it´s not Mike Deodato who´s in charge of the art, instead it´s Deodato´s Studio, so he only did like 30 to 40% of the real work, letting other artists (mostly of them from Brazil) and Sal Buscema in charge of the art - the colors were good - this is a display of how comics were made back in the late 80s and early/mid 90s, with boring dialogues, plenty of repetition and the abuse of the same ideas - I haven´t enjoyed a lot this volume and I don´t recommend it!
2.5 out 5