Thor #494: Review

Jan 1996

Warren Ellis, Mike Deodato Jr.

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Story Name:

Worldengine Part Four: Finished Off

Review & Comments

Rating:

Thor #494 Review by Peter Silvestro (May 29, 2024)

Review: The four-issue arc is wrapped up. To summarize: Issues #491-493: Thor gets sick, fights monsters, and beds the Enchantress. Also #492-493: Detective Curzon reads up on Norse myths while irritating everyone he meets. Issue #494: We get an entire sci-fi/fantasy story that grows up then breaks down with all of the mind-boggling magic this arc has to offer. Plus, Detective Curzon, who was in the story only to supply exposition, having fulfilled his purpose, is evaporated for no clear reason. Issue #495: A new writer takes over and points out what was wrong with Warren Ellis’s story before heading off in his own direction. Okay and offbeat four-issue arc was offbeat and okay but didn’t deserve all the attention it received. Come back next time.

Comments: The letters page includes one by Allison Weinstein, noted collector of Thor comic art.

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Synopsis / Summary / Plot

Thor #494 Synopsis by Peter Silvestro

Thor and Amora take off to discover who has been trying to kill him while Detective Inspector Curzon demands the police lab give him a Thor detector, a device that can trace the radioactive emissions of Mjolnir because he thinks Thor has been killed and wants to locate his body….

Thor and Amora arrive at the underground passage where he was found unconscious after issue #1. Descending they discover a massive machine hooked up to Yggdrasil. They are met by an elderly man introducing himself as Price and with a note of pride in his voice, he offers them a tour of his Worldengine. Price gives a precis of his strange research interests and his fondness for cannibalism as a means of acquiring knowledge. He gets to his point: he had a strong desire to see the new race of humanity that the World-Ash would create after Ragnarök. But he would not survive Ragnarök so he had to devise a means of convincing the World-Ash that Ragnarök had passed. So he built this machine, operated by powerful workers who are cloned from the cells of Thor and Amora. The Asgardians consider destroying the Worldengine and going home but Price tells them that such an act would not stop what would happen. Indeed, the Enchantress’ spell to protect Thor only convinced the Tree that Thor was dead. So now, as they watch, bubbles drop like dew from the tree’s branches. The new humans, blue-skinned, golden eyed, with elongated skulls, living solely on the air they breathe, rise from the ground. But then they start dying; Amora explains that they were intended to absorb their food from the skin particles of the extinct humanity that should have been in the post Ragnarök atmosphere. Then the worldengine becomes very active, trying to correct its mistake by ending the world for real. Price is killed by his workers while Thor, without his divine power, seizes the engine’s wheel and struggles to turn it backward—and succeeds. Out at the tunnel’s entrance, Curzon arrives to ask Amora if anything unusual is going on. She disintegrates him….

Epilogue: Thor returns to the Ash Hotel and stands on the roof in the lightning for a flashy end to the story….

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