If you're George O'Connor, you pick what's arguably the next most famous pantheon, and start a new four-book series. (The Olympians series was originally four books, then expanded quickly to twelve after early success, so some people might hope the same will happen to Asgardians - I hate to dash anyone's hopes, but I don't think there's that much underlying myth to work from. So four is what we should expect.)
The Olympians series ran from 2010 through 2022, and was a surprisingly robust, nuanced retelling of Greek myth in comics - a format and style that was not off-putting to middle-grade readers but only made a few allowances (like avoiding direct references to Zeus's tendency to turn himself into an animal and rape any woman who caught his eye) to their younger years. Those books were Zeus, Athena, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, Aphrodite, Ares, Apollo, Artemis, Hermes, Hephaistos, and Dionysos.
The Norse pantheon is far more doom-laden than the Greek, with the whole Ragnarok thing baked into the story from the beginning, and the existing stories are more focused on blood and sex in ways that might make teachers and parents uneasy (may I mention what happened when Loki turns himself into a mare?) And, as I alluded to above, the corpus of Norse myth is tiny: two books, the Poetic and Prose Eddas, both of which were literary productions from a time when people had mostly stopped believing in these myths as being religiously true. The Greek equivalent would be if we had Hesiod, but nothing else - or maybe a four-century-later retelling of Hesiod, with random quotes from stories that aren't told in full.
But O'Connor is up to the challenge, and Odin - the first of this expected four-book Asgardians series - arrived almost a year ago, to tell the origin myths of the Nordic Nine Worlds and a bunch of myths about Odin. His art is moodier here, I think - not that there wasn't plenty of battle and mayhem in Olympians - and the coloring by Norm Grock subtly differentiates it from the mostly sunnier, Mediterranean feel of the Olympians books.
The framing story involves the Valkyries and Valhalla - the viewpoint is a person chosen on a battlefield and brought to the mead hall, where three mysterious figures tell him how the world came to be, what the nine worlds are, and some of the things Odin, chief of the gods of Valhalla, has done.
So we get the giant Ymir in the void, and the two races that appeared on him - the gods of the Aesir and the Jotnar, sometimes called giants. The Aesir go from Buri to Bor to Odin, Vili, and Ve, who kill Ymir and build their world from his corpse. The Aesir and Jotnar battle a bit, but Odin becomes blood-brothers with the Jotnar Loki. The Vanir appear, and the two pantheons of gods fight before making peace. And Odin seeks more knowledge, particularly of the future, hanging on the tree and learning the runes and losing his eye.
O'Connor drops back to the frame story multiple times, which helps smooth some of those inevitable transitions - Norse myth is a bunch of sometimes disconnected moments (What happened to Buri, Bor, Villi, and Ve? Where did the Vanir come from?), and O'Connor's detailed, interesting backmatter dives into the details of what we know and what we simply don't. The main story reads cleanly and flows well; it doesn't need the backmatter but having it is helpful for the nosy readers like me who want more details.
I find O'Connor's work more organic than what I've seen of the Gaiman/Russell Norse Mythology comics adaptation, which is more Marvel-inspired and tells each story as a separate tale on its own. O'Connor, I think, is trying to tell the whole story of Norse myth, as well as we know it, straight through from beginning to end, with the backmatter notes to explain the things that he has to leap over or guess at along the way. Both are valid approaches, but I appreciate O'Connor's ambition and enthusiasm more.
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