Writer: Jason Aaron
Artist: Kev Walker
Color Artist: Dean White
Cover Artist: Ed McGuinness & Matthew Wilson
Publisher: Marvel Comics
Reviewer: StoryBabbler
The Avengers have been Earth’s Mightiest heroes for years. But long ago, in prehistoric times, Earth had Avengers of its own. But this time has a direct connection to the present Avengers team through Odin, his son Thor, and Thor’s third mother, the Phoenix, or rather its first human female host. Witness the origins of Thor’s birth in Avengers: 1,000,000 B.C. #1!
Review:
The Avengers B.C. team has been Jason Aaron’s pet project for years now since he started his Avengers run, but they’ve never really took off with people. To try and draw more eyes to the team, he retconned Thor’s parentage being Odin and the first Phoenix host on Earth. But now we finally get the book that will provide the answers behind Thor’s birth. And it’s a weird one, and not in a good way. Fair warning: this review will be long and there will be Spoilers from here on out.
Don’t let the synopsis fool you, it’s not really about the fall of the Avengers B.C. team exactly, it’s about the soap opera drama between Odin and the Phoenix host leading to Thor’s birth. This is a sad and boring comic book, there’s no getting around it. But let’s start with the only good thing in it. Kev Walker’s art is great when it’s in action and working with the bright colors by Dean White. The comic is at its best when there’s action and the characters get to be dynamic figures. Now, onto the bad.
Here’s the thing about this comic. From the get-go, Jason Aaron has the narration bill this comic as a “great love story”, but he fails to actually tell a love story of any kind in the comic. He does a lot of saying and not a lot of showing. He says that Laufey (Loki’s frost giant father) fell in love with some random alien queen from the Negative Zone (don’t ask, it never explains). He says that Odin and the Phoenix are in love, or at least used to be, but he never shows what could possibly have drawn them to each other. You get the idea.
Also, the comic is all about Odin and Phoenix’s drama as they’re the real main characters, while the other B.C. Avengers just serve as meager side characters. It doesn’t help that Jason Aaron continues to make Odin as unlikable as he can every chance he gets to write him. And he made it that Odin is responsible for this Avengers team breaking up. Why? Because Aaron has Odin stage a wedding for him and the Phoenix host, which she didn’t know about or take all that well, and apparently that’s what “shatters” the team. A bad wedding. And Aaron takes every opportunity to prop his new Phoenix host up on a moral pedestal, who is tired of Odin’s advances and can’t stand the man. The two of them are not compelling characters and they make this book a miserable read.
And then there’s the big reveal: Thor’s birth. Let’s just say the answers behind his birth are less than satisfactory and weird. To make a long story short, Thor’s conception was planned by the Phoenix host and the Earth Goddess Gaea in secret from Odin. The Phoenix host proposes Gaea have a child with Odin so that she can birth a god to protect the world before the Phoenix Force leaves Earth.
At first she rejects the idea, but then when the Phoenix host reveals that even she fell in love with Odin, and still loves him, Gaea decides to give Odin a chance. Afterward, the comic flash forwards many years later to Thor’s birth, where the Avengers B.C. team has morbidly reunited and Laufey attacks and ends up pricking Thor’s skin which ends up killing him. But it’s the Phoenix host who brings him back to life, thereby making her his second mother.
Throughout this comic, Jason Aaron tries to make this story to be a “Love Story” but it’s not. The one essential ingredient this book lacks is showing Love at all between these characters. The love shown here is the love for the planet Earth by the Phoenix host and Gaea. There’s no romantic love here whatsoever, only spite and bitterness.
Final Thoughts:
Avengers: 1,000,0000 B.C. #1 is where Jason Aaron’s provides the “answers” about Thor’s true parentage. Unfortunately, the comic fails to make the reveal (and the retcon) of Thor’s origins worth the wait and hassle. Not to mention, the rest of the Avengers B.C. team fall to the wayside as backups to the bitter melodrama between Odin and the Phoenix host.