100 Days, 100 Comics #72: ‘Thor’ #606

“You little men in your little suits. That is all you ever do. It makes no difference whether you craft them from iron or steel or uru…There is no metal in your hearts.”
–Thor

Kieron Gillen’s Thor writing can really make your heart thump, and that little exchange he had with Dr. Doom in Thor #606 set the tone for the issue, which proved how far one good hammer swing can go to make 24 pages worthwhile. The confrontation with Doom in his Destroyer armor from Thor #605 did seem anticlimactic by the time all was said and done, but as a prelude to Siege, this arc justified itself.

Loki, Balder and Doom were definitely the stars of the issue. As was even more the case in #605, Thor was a supporting cast member to the story playing out, but given all the characters with threads in motion leading up to Siege, that’s more or less how this issue was intended to function.

Billy Tan remains an ideal match to the Asgardian fight scenes here. He handles big-torso’d figures with remarkably fluid ease, and they feel massive to the eyes, which is off course how Asgardians should be be perceived. The sequence with Balder uncovering Doom’s lab experiments likewise benefited from Tan’s sense of scale and versatile imagination applied human forms.

I’d tell a Thor fan who planned on reading Siege to pick #606 up for sure. For a Thor fan who wasn’t interested in Siege, I’d probably tell them to wait out the storm and resume this series when it’s over, and I look forward to seeing where the thunder god ends up when the dust of this year’s crossover event settles.

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