It is weird that Jason Aaron would have two books ship in the same week, and they’d both be villain-background pieces. What are the odds? We got Dog’s history in Wolverine & the X-Men, and this issue is all about Gorr the God Butcher.
Aaron taps into classic feelings of confusion about religion to make Gorr a lot more relatable than Dog. Gorr has a horrible life on his unnamed world. Pretty much everyone around him dies as they scrabble through their lives on an unforgiving planet. I liked the small touches like the “cave apples” and “salt worms” that give the world an alien but still familiar feel. (At first I thought the salt worm was a flower with a face!)
It is easy to identify with Gorr’s sense of betrayal, and it is hard to fault him when he takes revenge on the gods who fell right in front of him. Of course, it seems to me that the evil, dark-armored one may have passed on a weapon that made Gorr more evil than angry.
The story flashes ahead, not quite to the far future of the current storyline, but closer. We see Volstagg as a pale shadow of his former self. He’s starving after working in the mines to build something for Gorr. He points out something to Gorr that has been obvious to the reader for some time: by becoming an immortal god-killer, Gorr is now a god himself, isn’t he?
Butch Guice steps in on art this month, and it is amazing how much human emotion he’s able to get out of those alien faces. Gorr’s family looks so close to human that it is heartbreaking watching them suffer. I found the scene with the transforming sword a little bit hard to follow, but clearly the space god’s sword transforms into a more era-appropriate weapon for Gorr; a sharp stone. Now it seems to turn into whatever he needs.
I like to imagine those fallen “gods” might be a space knight and a dire wraith, but I’m probably over-thinking it!
Good
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