Thor Epic Collection, vol. 24: The Lost Gods

Date Completed: 9 June, 2025

Grade: C+

This was a weird one. This volume collects Journey into Mystery #503-13, & -1; Valkyrie #1; and Hercules and the Heart of Chaos #1-3. I generally like Tom DeFalco's work, and I enjoyed the concept of this volume, but it felt a little stretched out. The basic premise of the Journey into Mystery issues is that following the Worldengine storyline from the previous volume, and the death of Thor from the Onslaught event, the Asgardians had become mortals and placed on Earth without any knowledge of their godhood. Red Norvell (Odin's back-up Thor) attempts to find and reassemble the gods. So given where Marvel was at the time, post-Onslaught, this is an interesting and intriguing idea. I think the problem for me was that the Asgardians were in their mortal guises for so much of the run, again with no knowledge of their true background, that their being together and fighting against the main villain just felt forced. It was also weird that the Enchantress seemed to have missed getting transformed, and while this might have been explained (she was on Asgard when Onslaught happened? Maybe?), I seemed to have missed it. At least the storyline wrapped up with the return of the Gods, and there was not an attempt to continue this super team of the Lost Gods; this certainly improved my opinion of the overall storyline. The art for the Journey into Mystery issues was inconsistent as it was credited to "Deodato Studios" which I guess means Mike Deodato farmed out the work to other artists. However, whoever did the -1 issue did a fantastic job capturing Jack Kirby's style.

For the rest of the volume, the Valkyrie one-shot was fine but not anything memorable (perhaps it was meant as a send-off following Mark Gruenwald's death?). The Hercules mini-series at the end was for me the highlight of the book. It was an interesting story, with some good villainy and twists to it with a satisfying resolution. Art by Ron Frenz is always nice. I seem to recall hearing an interview (probably from the Epic Marvel Podcast) with either DeFalco or Frenz (or maybe both?) that this miniseries was done to prove Frenz could draw in the "modern" style of the 90s. I think this meant playing with the layouts a bit more, which he does, but Frenz is just such a good story teller with his art that its a shame there was that 'need' at the time.

Completing this volume brings me to the most recent published volume of Thor before the modern age (Volume 25 is slated to come out in a month as I write this). I have two volumes I have yet to read: vol. 5 (which is prohibitively expensive until it gets a reprint), and vol. 10 which was released after I had already read past that volume. While my reading schedule allows for catching up for missed volumes, I wanted a little more variety than to read two Thor volumes back-to-back, so I made the decision to just wedge volume 10 into the end of the run. So, on to the next volume chronologically, and then back for my last Thor volume for a while!

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