Beta Ray Bill and his allies must fight the ultimate battle against Surtur, the fire god responsible for the destruction of Bill’s home planet. It’s going to take an immense amount of power to defeat this foe. But with his goals in sight, is Bill ready to pay the cost required to return to his former self? Find out in Beta Ray Bill #5, the final chapter written, drawn, and lettered by Daniel Warren Johnson, colored by Mike Spicer, and co-lettered by Joe Sabino.
A year ago I started working out with a personal trainer. Since then I’ve gained 35 pounds of muscle. Sometimes I look in the mirror and I don’t recognize myself. Not just the mass but the age. I don’t recognize the bald, middle-aged man staring back at me in his size-large floral print shirt. And yet it’s a form I fought for. In the end, maybe change — even change we seek out — makes us sad because it reminds us of our mortality.
That appears to be the overarching lesson of Daniel Warren Johnson’s five-issue study of Beta Ray Bill, the Korbinite horse warrior famed for his nobility. It’s a story about what we do when we lose the thing that made us special, the lengths we’ll go to get it back, and the emptiness we feel when and if we get it — because it’s never quite the same.
This issue gives us the content we crave: The Daniel Warren Johnson Giant Monster Fight in Which Our Hero Overcomes His Shortcomings with the Help of His Allies to Slay the Beasts Within and Without™. This is that good, hook-it-to-my-veins ish. Johnson plays with Surtur’s size but keeps him big for those all-important splash pages that are at once Johnson-brand metal and harken to Walt Simonson’s splashes in Thor’s epic fight against the Midgard Serpent.
Challenged by Bill to fight like a mortal, it becomes a choreographed dance of punches and blocks, kicks and parries, shirtlessness and glorious, oversized, hand-lettered sound effects, the shockwaves from which are enough to power the means to Surtur’s defeat, which is a brilliant bit of deus ex machina from an actual machina (Skuttlebutt).
This comic has two horizontal splash pages, something I haven’t seen in a Big Two book since that New X-Men Annual that introduced Xorn. Were this another artist doing it, I’d be too reminded of Rob Liefeld to enjoy it. But this is Johnson, and he makes it work.
They’re not so different, Bill and Surtur. While Surtur is still a giant fire demon, he’s been found unworthy of Twilight and is basically hiding out in his mancave in Muspelheim’s basement waiting for someone to tussle with so he can prove himself worthy again. Like Bill, Odin, and Skurge, he finds himself past his prime but still looking to prove his mettle to himself so he can feel whole. He’s still the guy who wiped out the Korbinites, though, so no sympathy for this devil.
Bill’s two “wingmen” on this journey — Skurge the Executioner and Pip the Troll — get big damn hero moments. Skurge’s plays on his role as the gun-obsessed comic relief throughout the book. Pip’s … feels unearned.
Aside from a two-panel, “Hey, I’m sad, too. Can I come?” speech in issue #2, we really haven’t spent much time with Pip or explored his motivations. Heck, I forgot he could teleport till it was written into the “Previously On” page at the beginning of the book. So when he pulls his distraction technique and incurs Surtur’s wrath, it leaves me a little cold, though everything happening around that moment more than makes up for it.
Also, remember how Bill was threatened in issue #2 by those Shogun Warrior-looking space sentinels at the portal to Muspelheim who warned him they would face him again if he made it out? Missed opportunity, that.
The issue’s penultimate scene finds Bill, once more in his Korbinite form, staring at Twilight and snuggled up against his robutt lady while the 1991 Peter Pan movie Hook plays in the background, specifically the scene where the Lost Boys grope at adult Peter’s face to determine whether it’s him.
There’s room for interpretation here. Is this specific scene from the movie meant to let us know that Bill’s changed so much as to be unrecognizable to those around him unless they’re allowed to invade his personal space, like Skuttlebutt? Or is Bill Rufio, playing at leading the Lost Boys (Skurge, Pip) while Peter (Thor) is away? If Thor were Peter, wouldn’t the Lost Boys be the Warriors Three? Like most metaphors, it falls apart quickly if you think about it too much. Maybe Johnson just likes Hook. I’m told Hook is a thing some people like.
More importantly though, when did Bill develop a Thor-like affinity for Midgard culture?
So where does the next creator take Bill? He’s got Twilight locked away. He’s back in his Korbinite form and he’s in some kind of nebulous relationship with the gynoid embodiment of his spaceship AI. Does he return to the main Thor title so Donny Cates can tear apart everything Johnson did here, or worse, make fun of it while he does Cool Stuff? Do we leave Bill on the shelf for a while, to have off-panel adventures till he’s needed again? Does Al Ewing absorb Bill and ‘Butt into his sensitively written cosmic corner of the Marvel Universe? The latter two options might be the best.
But the real question is, will Bill be happy?
Will I?
Dan Grote is the editor-in-chief of ComicsXF, having won the site by ritual combat. By day, he’s a newspaper editor, and by night, he’s … also an editor. He co-hosts WMQ&A: The ComicsXF Interview Podcast with Matt Lazorwitz. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, two kids and two miniature dachshunds, and his third, fictional son, Peter Winston Wisdom.
