Review: Thor & Loki – Blood Brothers

The title of this is a little misleading, as this story is far more about Loki than it is about Thor, but as I find my interest in the title characters on the rise due to the movie’s release – I thought I would give this book a try.

The story starts out with Loki in the position of having defeated Thor, and finding himself ruling Asgard. As Loki contemplates a future without his adopted brother, he flashes back to stories from their youth, showing the seeds of how their relationship came to be so strained and why they wind up opposing each other.

If that sounds like it’s not a lot of detail about this story, that’s because there honestly isn’t a lot more to tell. I’m going to dig a little deeper and talk about the good and the bad of this book (and there is both), but there’s going to be very little in the way of spoilers, because there’s hardly any to really give away anyway.

First, the artwork by Esad Ribic is amazing. It looks like a combination of the photo-realistic style of Alex Ross combined with an artists painting – it’s very appealing and will have you turning the pages just to see how gorgeous the next piece will be. This story also serves as a nice introduction to the world of Asgard and the Norse-gods who inhabit the world of Marvel’s Thor. You’ll see the woman Thor loves, Sif, as well as the woman who loves Thor but knows she cannot have him (the Enchantress). Thor’s father Odin as well as others of the court make various appearances throughout.

Unfortunately, I found the story itself to be kind of a tired old thing that I’ve read too many times before. Loki acts the way he does because Thor made him that way, because he felt he wasn’t as good as Thor and could never earn their father’s love. Combine that past with the story of Loki realizing that he doesn’t want to kill Thor in the present, because a villain is nothing without his hero to oppose, and again it just seems like a tired old cliché.

There’s a few additional items in this collection, a couple of Stan Lee written issues of Thor/Journey into Mystery featuring Loki, as well as a very interesting story from the current run of Thor showing the Loki of the present travelling into the past in order to set his younger self on the path that will lead him full circle. Storywise, this was probably the most interesting in the entire book, because it shows Loki before he was adopted by Odin and felt less clichéd.

Similar to The Mighty Thor vol 1, this book can work as an introduction to some of the additional characters you can expect to see in the Thor movie, but it’s not the most compelling of Thor stories. Fortunately, I continued to be interested in Thor and sought out some additional tales, but those are reviews for another time.