Loki by George O'Connor

The surviving corpus of Norse mythology is very thin - the two Eddas, Prose and Poetic, from an era after most of the Norse peoples stopped believing these gods were real and started thinking of them more as stories or metaphors. So retellings often have notes to say "this background character is named, and it looks like he was a major god of something-or-other, but this is the only surviving reference to him" or "from the way it's told, this seems to be one of a long cycle of similar stories, but it's the only one we have." 

But the stories we do have are compelling, full of interesting characters, complex mythology, and great stories - or maybe, in some cases, fragments or pieces of stories. So modern storytellers keep trying to put those two Eddas into modern language, to frame what we do know in ways that attract and thrill present-day audiences.

George O'Connor is in the middle of a four-book series, which I think will retell most, if not roughly all, of the existing Norse stories in comics form, under the overall title Asgardians. Like his previous twelve-book series about the Greek gods, Olympians, so far the books have been titled after, and focused on, specific gods: first Odin and then Thor.

The third book is this one, Loki. The fourth, teased at the end here, will of course be Ragnarok. (If you do a four-book series retelling Norse mythology, you're pretty much required to make the fourth one Ragnarok. Same with a two- or three- book series; you might be able to avoid that title if you do just one.)

Since I've written about all fourteen of O'Connor's previous mythological books, I don't know if I have a lot to add here. This is just as good - compelling, well-told, strongly organized, drawn in an style influenced by classic adventure comics and colored in moody tones by SJ Miller.

In Loki, we do see again O'Connor's skill at weaving what were separate myths - how this happened, how Loki tricked that guy, and so on - into a fuller, linked story. It's still clearly a bunch of tales, but O'Connor organizes them, and narrates them, and foreshadows later events, to make this, like his other books, not just a collection of pieces, but a single integrated tale.

And, not to give it away, but he notes in his extensive backmatter that the story here is Loki's "heel turn" - how he went from an annoying but usually helpful (in the end, mostly, while having fun along the way) trickster god who was loosely allied with the Aesir to the guy who sparked that previously mentioned - and, in so much Norse mythology, foreshadowed repeatedly - apocalypse that will destroy most of the Nine Worlds and its peoples.

The stories here see him shifting in that direction - we start with the creation of Asgard's walls, by a mysterious stranger, and how Loki got the Aesir out of their agreement with that stranger when it looked like the stranger actually could live up to his outrageous promise and claim his even more outrageous prize. Then we see the story of Idunn's golden apples, which shows Loki's random, cruel, chaos-for-chaos's-sake style. In between, though, there are scenes of Baldr, and of his mother Frigg - who, O'Connor repeatedly notes "knows the fates of all, but makes no prophesies" - extracting promises from nearly all of the animals and plants and objects in the world not to harm him.

If we know anything of Norse mythology, we know the one item she will not get a promise from. And we know what will happen. That's the last story page of this book.

There are other Loki tales in the middle as well, particularly those about his children. We see a slimy worm, thoughtlessly thrown into a river that leads to the sea by Thor. We see a small wolf that grows very large, and how he is chained. We see a little girl, dead on one side and alive on the other side, and learn where she goes and what name she takes.

Before those, we see an eight-legged horse, and O'Connor does not tell us that horse's parentage - one of the few obvious nods in this book to its young-readers audience - but he hints as obviously and clearly as he can, so only the very most cossetted and innocent and dim young readers will fail to realize just how Loki saved Asgard from having to pay for its walls.

Most of O'Connor's mythological books stand alone; this one less so. It's partially "here's some stories about Loki, the great trickster," but also partially "here's how Loki helped to bring about The End of All Things, which we will see in the next and final book." But if you're reading a four-book retelling of Norse myth, you're expecting Ragnarok - it's not going to be a surprise.

And Ragnarok will be coming. The George O'Connor book, I mean, not the actual end of all the nine worlds. With luck, it will hit next fall. I'm looking forward to it, and wondering what myth sequence (The Kalevala? The Irish "cycles"? The Mahabharata? Something Egyptian?) he might be thinking about next.