In Loki Modern Era Epic Collection: Journey Into Mystery, released just two weeks ago, Kid Loki found himself struggling with his identity. Reborn from the God of Mischief, Kid Loki was now a sort of god of stories, his evil mischief recalibrated into a mischief of self-awareness, a manipulation of his own narrative. He found himself constrained within that knowledge of narrative, playing a footnote in the larger Fear Itself narrative which centered upon his brother, his Asgardian people, and the fate of the world.
His identity was reduced to being a small – but instrumental – cog of a machine relative only to those more storied players around him.
Unshackled from Fear Itself, Kieron Gillen and company’s Loki saga could have justly been left to itself – with the character’s upcoming turn as a fraction of the Young Avengers on the horizon, certainly there could be some simple, solo Loki story that could take place in his nine remaining issues of Journey Into Mystery.
Instead, those remaining nine issues – collected in the second volume of Loki Modern Era Epic Collection: Everything Burns – dove into further crossover collaborations, thrusting Loki once again into pivotal supporting roles in the stories of others. It was only thematically appropriate, a lingering unsteadiness of self as the character approached dramatic self-fulfillment.
First, the character finds himself embroiled in a New Mutants crossover (which Gillen co-wrote with the writers of that series, Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning, with art by Carmine Di Giandomenico). The Mutants have a long, bonkers relationship with Asgard, which makes them the perfect unwilling collaborators in the Loki narrative.
As with most of Kid Loki’s story, the issues collected in Everything Burns illustrate the character’s manipulations careening out of hand; every desperate plan ends up with a karmic retribution landing in his lap. In the New Mutants story, the Disir (with whom he meddled in the previous volume) threaten reality itself. Later, a deal with new gods of modernity, the Manchester Gods, is revealed to have been part of a scheme by Ragnarok baddie Surtur.
Ultimately, Kid Loki comes to understand that his story – and his very uneven identity – has never been in his control: he has been a pawn manipulated beyond the grave by the preceding Loki, the evil God of Mischief. There had been a cosmic hand keeping Loki down in the footnotes of the narrative, never quite succeeding in his own machinations.
The final crossover of the volume is, of course, with Matt Fraction and Alan Davis’ The Mighty Thor; the character could never be free of that larger Asgardian fate. Intriguingly, Gillen continues to push and prod the borders of Marvel cosmology, thrusting Loki into the magical Otherworld, a nucleus of the multiverse (which Davis helped create and define with his work on Captain Britain and Excalibur).
Here, he introduces the new Manchester Gods, whose places of power – like those of Otherworld – are tied to British landmarks. Leave it to pop-obsessed Kieron Gillen to link Factory Records’ storied nightclub The Haçienda to actual gods.
The stories in Loki Modern Era Epic Collection: Everything Burns do not conclude Loki’s evolution from an evil villain into a beloved anti-hero, but it does wrap up thematic threads that the character closer to understanding himself. For a character defined by his relationship to the stories of others, finding concrete standing in identity marks a transcendent and defining moment for the Loki we know today.
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