New Comics!: The "Exiled" Edition (HERE BE SPOILERS!)

Exiled #1:  OK, as expected, Gillen and DnA (GnDnA?) spend most of this issue setting up the story that they're going to tell over the next four issues.  We learn about the Disir, shieldmaidens of the former King of the Gods, Bor.  He apparently expelled them from Asgard after catching them eating warriors who he had defeated, cursing them to always be hungry but never able to eat.  (I'm not entirely sure why they went all cannibal, but I'm just going to go with it.)  They eventually fell under the sway of Loki, who transferred his power over them to Mephisto in some sort of deal.  GnDnA actually pull off telling that complicated back story pretty well -- particularly since it happens all in the first two pages -- but all that narrative, no matter how successfully it sets the stage, doesn't exactly make for the most exciting of starts.  As the issue progresses, we eventually learn why we care about the Disir:  one of the warriors who the Disir allegedly ate managed to survive somehow and is now living across the street from the New Mutants, watching their every move.  (It seems that they attracted his notice when he observed one of Hela's minions secreting away the Hel-hound that Warlock has been keeping as a pet, though it doesn't explain why he was living across the street from them (and watching them) in the first place.  It appears he might have just been watching them because he's an observant kind of guy, possibly because the Disir have been searching for him.)  When Dani discovers him spying on them, she confronts him and, realizing that she's a Valkyrie, he activates a set of armor that he'd been hiding in his apartment.  In so doing, he brings himself to the attention of the Disir, who break their bonds and flee Hell.  It's pretty clear that we've got a lot of twists and turns ahead of us, but I thought GnDnA did a good job of setting up such an involved story.  Hopefully the next few issues will move a little more quickly than this one did as we get into the fights proper.

Journey into Mystery #637:  First, the intro page was awesome.  Since comics and Dungeons and Dragons overlap significantly in my Venn diagram of nerdiness, I loved the use of Dungeons and Dragons terms to describe the events of the first issue.  But, most importantly?  "Adventures in Babysitting" is probably my favorite movie of all time, if I'm being honest.  I mean, sure, I'm supposed to say that it's something like "Germinal," but, it's not.  It's "Adventures in Babysitting."  As such, this comic is FULL OF WIN not only for giving us the Thor-as-a-mechanic scene but acknowledging that said scene comes FROM "Adventures of Babysitting."  FULL OF WIN!  (Sorry, I just had to repeat that, to accurately portray my excitement.)  The minute Thor appeared on the New Mutants' doorstep as a mechanic, I was like, "OMG, 'Adventures in Babysitting.'"  But, I lost my %&^* when he actually referred to it!  Well effing done, GnDnA!  Well effing done!  Of course, the reason why Thor appears as a mechanic is because Sigurd apparently cast a spell when he went to his armor at the end of last issue and wiped clean the memories of all Asgardians near him.  Apparently, when he recognized Dani as a Valkyrie, he panicked that he had been discovered by the Asgardians and deactivated the shield that hid him from the Disir.  He did so in order to attract them to him so that he could use a spell that Loki gave him to erase their memories.  (Loki apparently gave him this spell when he was Adult Bad Loki and not Kid Mischievous Loki.)  The good news is that the Disir have, in fact, forgotten who they are; they form an eating-disorder support group.  The bad is that all the other Asgardians who had assembled to fight the Aesir when they noticed them convening on Sigurd have also forgotten who they are, which is why Thor suddenly finds himself fixing the New Mutants' car.  Besides the Thor bit, GnDnA play up this premise for yucks (Volstagg runs a bakery, Fandral owns a bar, Hela is a recycler screaming, "Bring out your dead!").  For me, it works.  It probably only works for this issue, but GnDnA make it pretty clear that they're not going to ruin it by dragging out the joke too far, since the New Mutants already remind Kid Loki who he is by the end of the issue.  Based on the ending, where one of the Disir realizes that she can eat whatever she wants (namely, a cat), I'm guessing that Loki and the New Mutants are going to find a way to revive the other Asgardians' memories fairly quickly lest the Disir eat most of San Francisco.

New Mutants #42:  OK, so I'm a little confused by what happens at the end of this issue.  For most of the issue, the New Mutants go about gathering the materials necessary for Kid Loki to cast a counter-spell to undo the spell that Sigurd cast, allowing the Asgardians to remember who they are.  (I'm not entirely sure what was supposed to happen with the Disir, since I'm pretty sure that Sigurd and the New Mutants wouldn't want them to remember who they were, since they would beeline for Sigurd.  But, as you'll see, that becomes a moot point.)  Kid Loki is under the gun because reality is reasserting itself against the spell that Sigurd cast; if he doesn't cast the counter-spell in time, reality will cause Sigurd's spell to snap, killing the Asgardians.  The Asgardians, including the Disir, begin to remember vaguely who they are.  (I think the Disir remember more quickly as a result of finally being able to eat.)  As predicted, the Disir come gunning for Sigurd, and the New Mutants and the recovering Asgardians have to protect him (and the rest of San Francisco).  I get all that.  (I mean, you know, more or less.)  But I didn't get the part about Kid Loki not being Kid Loki.  Are we really supposed to believe that he was just a kid living down the street from the New Mutants, who happened to have Hela as a foster mom?  Without the Hela connection, I might have bought it, but I'm pretty sure that the Hela connection makes it a non-starter.  So, did the spell that Kid Loki cast misfire and make himself forget all over again?  I'm hoping next issue gives us some clarity on that.  I'm also assuming that the Asgardians remembering who they are is really bad, since it means reality must be seriously fighting the spell and ready to burst.  But, no one seems all that concerned about it here, though, admittedly, the New Mutants have a lot on their plate at this point.

Journey into Mystery #638:  OK, so, the twist here is clever.  The shieldmaidens didn't eat the warriors that Bor defeated; they slept with them.  He cursed them with "desiring flesh" after they had, you know, desired flesh, thought in a different way than we were originally led to believe.  Seriously, I so didn't see that coming.  It was unclear from the start of this arc how exactly Sigurd had escaped the shieldmaidens (when it seemed that he had escaped from being eaten) and why the shieldmaiden still hunted him, but here we learn that it's because the curse that Bor put on them stipulated that they had to either kill or marry Sigurd to become their former selves.  (Yeah, I thought it was kind of odd as curses go, too, but at least we got the cannibalism explained.)    But, I still have a bunch of questions that I don't feel like we've seen answered yet.  First, how did the shieldmaidens escape Mephisto in the first place?  Hell isn't generally the type of place you can just leave if you want.  Given that Mephisto obtained the shieldmaidens through a deal with Loki, I'm guessing that it's some sort of detail of their deal.  In re-reading "Exiled" #1, it appears that Loki is on the hook to round up the Disir and return them to Mephisto, lest his role in giving them to Mephisto in the first place is revealed to the other Asgardians.  I'm assuming this issue isn't done (particularly given Amara's, um, connection to Mephisto).  But, in addition to the details of the Loki/Mephisto deal that (presumably) would allow the shieldmaidens to escape once they sensed Sigurd, I'm also a little unclear on what Loki got from the deal with Sigurd.  Sure, he gave him the spell to use if the shieldmaidens ever found him, but what did Loki get in return?  Loki doesn't really just make one-sided deals where he doesn't benefit.  (Also, how did Loki come in possession of the shieldmaidens in the first place?)  I wonder if DnAnG are going to manage to answer all those questions next issue.  Also, it seems that we're no longer worried about the snapping of the spell.  By the Disir marrying Sigurd, does that undo the spell, saving the rest of the Asgardians?  That seems implied here, but I feel like it probably merited DnAnG mentioning it specifically.  Since they didn't, we did seem to suddenly branch into a totally separate plot (Sigurd and his relationship with the Disir) without really addressing the one that had been driving most of the arc (undoing his spell before it broke and killed the Asgardians).  I will say that it still read as a fun issue, but I think I'll be a little disappointed if we don't address some of these outstanding issues in the last issue.

New Mutants #43:  DnAnG actually manage to deliver a fun issue here, even if they don't really address a lot of the loose ends.  I thought it was interesting that they introduced dramatic tension by having Dani rebel against the paternalistic nature of the wedding vows.  I was wondering going into this issue what they were going to do to make this issue interesting, since it wasn't like I was going to be on the edge of my seat reading 20+ pages of Sigurd complaining about getting married.  (That said, I loved that they paired up Sigurd and Sunspot.  When Sigurd first appeared, I actually confused him for 'Berto, so it seemed fitting that they were all buddy-buddy here.  I'd totally buy a buddy comedy mini-series featuring the two of them.)  I thought having Dani rebel was remarkably clever, and it set up the much more satisfying conclusion of Hela and Loki essentially forcing Bor to free the Disir than watching them marry Sigurd.

Although I go into more detail below about the loose ends that GnDnA don't resolve, they do manage to wrap up some of them in this one.  We don't actually ever learn the nature of their deal or how the Disir managed to escape Hell in the first place, but we do get confirmation that Loki was, in fact, on the hook to round up the Disir for Mephisto; his failure to do so is clearly going to cause him problems in the future, I assume in "Journey into Mystery."  (I will say, in terms of "New Mutants," I thought it was weird that we seem to end the Amara/Mephisto relationship so quickly.  As Mephisto himself implies here, I assumed that he (and DnA) had much greater plans for Amara in the future, so it would be weird to just see this sub-plot disappear.  Maybe they felt that they couldn't really go where they wanted with it?  I can't say that it was a sub-plot that felt like it belonged in this title, but it was probably worth at least another issue or two.)

Final Thoughts:  OK, I'm going to go with the dreaded numbered list to address some of the sub-plots and existing threads that, so far as I can tell, never got fully resolved or were dropped completely:

1) As mentioned in the review of "New Mutants" #43, we never do get an answer on how Loki got the Disir in the first place or, as mentioned in "Journey into Mystery" #638, how they managed to escape Hell so easily.

2) As mentioned in the review of "New Mutants" #42, we never really get an answer why Sigurd just happened to live across the street from the New Mutants or, as mentioned in "Journey into Mystery" #638, what Loki got from his deal with him (where he delivered him the spell that wiped away the Asgardians' memories).

3) Perhaps most disappointingly, we never really discover what happened with the spell.  It was the major driving force of "New Mutants" #42 and seemed to be the real focus of the arc, but it essentially gets dropped as a pressing issue in "Journey into Mystery" #638.  In "New Mutants" #43, after the Disir become Valkyries, we learn that the spell was broken, even though, as far as I understood it, the spell really had nothing to do, specifically, with the Disir.  For example, it's not like the spell broke the minute that the Disir remember who they were; that happened in "New Mutants" #42, but, as we saw in "New Mutants" #43, the other Asgardians still didn't know who they were when they were at the church.  So, it's pretty clear that the implication is that the breaking of the spell had to do with the resolution of the Disir/Sigurd situation, even though the spell didn't seem to have anything to do with the breaking of the curse itself.

I actually enjoyed this arc.  The writing was sharp, the banter was witty, and the turns were twisty.  But, I don't think you can leave this many loose ends on the table and feel like you're leaving your audience satisfied.  I could see if they left just enough loose ends to get people to pick up the series that they weren't reading; although I'm not intrigued enough by Mephisto's vow of revenge against Loki to pick up "Journey into Mystery," it's pretty clear that it's what Marvel was hoping would happen.  Instead, these loose ends are central to the plot of this arc itself, but they never get addressed.  We're supposed to just accept Loki one day found the Disir and gave them to Mephisto.  We're supposed to just believe that they suffered his torment for millennia for fun, since, apparently, they could've left Hell at any time.  We're supposed to just believe that rent on Mission Street is so cheap that every superhero and Asgardian inevitably will move there.  Finally, we're just supposed to believe that reality-altering spells crafted by Asgardian demi-gods just stop the minute that they're no longer helping advance the plot.  Unfortunately, I can believe one of those things, but not all of them.  If I were giving this arc a rating, I'd desperately want to give it a three, but would probably have to give it a two.  [Sad trombone.]