Thor: God of Thunder 11, Fantastic Four 11

Thor: God of Thunder 11
Aaron (w) and Ribic (a) and Svorcina (c)

How do you beat a bomb that kills every single god through every second of time and that's going off RIGHT NOW? You kind of don't? That's the immediate takeaway here and it's certainly what Gorr would have you believe but fortunately for every god ever, present Thor doesn't buy it because he's wielding two Mjolonirs. What can possibly stop him? Turns out not much. He fights through the pain of dying in every second of his life to take on the godbomb, sparing the other gods by taking the weapon unto himself. As a result, a Thor cloaked in the black weapon, revealed to be called All-Black the Necrosword (in a rather phone-it-in naming attempt), emerges to defeat Gorr once and for all. Gorr's levels of crazy go unabashedly up as we hear he created his wife and child out of all of this mess and it was his own created child, a part of him, who betrayed his plans to Thor. Then the whole thing is written away as the narration explains that these gods would, in short time, forget the events that had happened here (hence why present and future Thor don't know how this ends from their own past).

Let's get this out of the way first: the art here is stunning. Esad Ribic has immense talent and Ive Svorcina does too. The two combined created a story of epic scale to fit the wide-ranging events that take place in this arc. The story ends a little flatly, beyond the two Mjolnirs and Thor cloaked in All-Black. Up to that, I was totally onboard. It's the several pages of narration that follow that weakened it for me. I don't really know how you avoid clearing a few things up (like the memories of gods) but, while it provided a fine denouement, it felt a lot like Aaron responding to questions that I'm not sure anyone was asking. I, for one, accepted it when the Thors way earlier said that, having been alive for millennia, they don't remember everything in their past; it was a kind of weak explanation then but it's serviceable so I'm not sure why you draw attention to it again, attention which makes me just go "hey yeah, wait, he really forgot the time that every god in history almost died in every second through time and then a version of him used two Mjolnirs to take that pain himself? He died! And was, of course, immediately resurrected! The narration even says he died for the fourth time which is kind of a cheeky nod to the comic public who is aware of rampant resurrections in comics but instead it now feels a little like 'hey, he's only died four times, not four thousand, how could he forget ONE IN FOUR?'" It's true. I said all of that upon finishing this. Even when it got meta and my questions asked questions. Good arc, good ending right up until that second half of the ending. Still took a little long for my liking. Next time, Jason Aaron takes Thor back to Earth!

Fantastic Four 11
Fraction and Sebela (w) and Bagley and Rubinstein (a) and Mounts (c)

Val is still mad at Reed but she has to put that aside because Reed needs her help. However mad she is, and however right she is to be mad, she's brilliant and a fresh set of eyes for Reed's problem. She demands they go to the futuristic development planet, Celeritas, which has, with its vast intellect and abundant resources, decided to turn inwards and improve itself rather than helping other planets. Val knows if there's an answer, she can come to it there. However, things quickly go awry on the planet when time terrorists calling themselves the Preservation Front strike and open up a portal to send the building Reed, Val, and Johnny are in to the end of the planet's timeline. The Preservation Front hate the futuristic society of Celeritas and want only to restore traditions, which they attempt to do by displacing parts of this world in time. It sets both teams of F4 members (Val, Reed, and Johnny in the future and Sue, Ben, and Franklin in the present) to work trying to figure out a solution. That's not all for surprises: Johnny arrives in the future to find future John Storm there, like the one in FF right now. What. Is. Happening.

For people who aren't fans of too much pipe-laying and soft science, PARTICULARLY soft time-travel science, this book is kind of a major miss. I'm not really one of those people (at least where soft time-travel science is involved, too much pipe-laying is never a good thing) but even I felt its weight here. It's a little tricky to get through and there's frankly too much introduced here for a standard 20-page book. We're meeting a new planet and trying to understand that, we're seeing jumps in time, we're meeting new enemies, we're meeting new possible friends/enemies (in future John Storm), we have a crisis within the F4 (in their powers deteriorating) and now a crisis with future Celeritas (where the planet is quickly being eaten away by time, essentially, and Val wants to create more time. It's all very strange). There's a lot happening here, is what I'm saying, and there aren't enough panels in a book to get it all efficiently across. I think the book is certainly weaker for that but it's still not a particularly weak book. One of the impressive feats of both Fraction and his predecessor Hickman has been making  Val and Franklin essential members of the team and showing us why they're necessary while not letting them get too precocious or childlike WHILE FURTHER allowing them to remain children. This issue helps bring that forward too, so I'm not about to be upset with it. You can be. That's your call.