It isn’t quite clear when the decision to make Loki a heroic and sympathetic character was made – one assumes it was tied to Tom Hiddleston’s early compelling turn as the character – but once the decision was made, the character shed a great deal of his God of Mischief mythology. It seemed a bit tricky to find something wholesome about a being bent on tricking people to malicious ends. The solution, then, was to reconsider what mischief could mean. If a character centers almost solely around lies, then what is a way of softening lying?
The answer was to reframe the character as a sort of god of storytelling – what is fiction if not a series of willful lies?
As a result, modern Loki stories have become infused with the joy of storytelling, the power of myth. Loki stories have begun to examine their own narrative in a nearly-meta way, making Loki aware of the storytelling framework of his own life. Understanding his own character arc allows for a manipulation of storytelling conventions that, in turn, alter the outcome of his adventures.
The shift from mischief to stories was made with just such a manipulation – the old, classic and cackling version of the character rewrote his own downfall and subsequent death in order to be reborn, quite literally, as something new.
That narrative, which took place throughout 2010’s massive Avengers-centric crossover Siege, isn’t collected in Loki Modern Era Epic Collection: Journey Into Mystery beyond the scene-setting Siege: Loki one-shot. Instead, the book chronicles the happenings after Loki’s rebirth as eventual Young Avengers member and all-around rapscallion Kid Loki.
What better writer to examine story gods than Kieron Gillen, whose work has often touched upon the prototypical and primeval? Following his turn writing Loki, Gillen set off on an epic that reimagined the nature of godhood in The Wicked + The Divine. That book, like his Loki, ruminated on something bigger than godhood, bigger than story: it (and Loki) struggles with identity.
In the Journey Into Mystery stories, Kid Loki repeatedly struggles against the chains of his previous self; none of his Asgardian peers are willing to accept that he has actually changed, and he is often (and regrettably) forced to trade on the reputation left behind by his old self. At no point is Kid Loki ever free of the lingering specter of himself, to the point that a splintered piece of that old God of Mischief has been transposed into magpie, Ikol. The bird’s counsel always tends toward the very dark nature Kid Loki chafes against.
A godly child but a child nonetheless, Loki often lacks the experience and understanding to pull off his massive manipulations, stumbling through adventures in such a way that never quite speaks for his own abilities so much as the anticipated result of the story. He is fated to succeed because doing so resolves a narrative arc; Loki is constrained from self-discovery even by the nature of his own godly powers.
Throughout the volume Gillen plays with storytelling flourishes, applying a ‘once upon a time’ flavor to caption boxes, along with knowing winks to the audience that come close to breaking the fourth wall. The reader is made to face their own expectations of narrative tropes – we know how the story will end, the caption boxes imply, because we have read stories before.
All of this metaphysical play is accentuated by masterful work by a myriad of artists, frequent and favored Gillen collaborators Jamie McKelvie and Stephanie Hans among them. Doug Braithwaite, impeccably aided by color artists Ulises Arreola and Andy Troy saturates the book with the scratchy marriage of the storybook and the epic, making Journey Into Mystery an utterly singular visual experience.
This first volume of the Loki Epic Collection oozes myth, playing not only with Asgard but also the wider Marvel cosmology. It makes a contract with the reader that these are Very Big Stories, and even at its most incidental or meandering a B- or C-plot might be, it fulfills its side of that contract. Loki’s struggles to reinvent himself become massive, just as our own struggles to understand ourselves often feel.
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