This is a mostly harmless story about Galactus’ robot herald Gabriel coming to Earth and getting blown up by Thor, which makes a little kid cry because he liked Gabriel. But it gets a “D” from me because of the above, racially stilted panels. Ugh.
Here’s the Air Walker fight, during which he seems to lift Thor’s hammer. It’s not reallyi explained, which is bad. That shouldn’t have happened.
And here’s how he gets destroyed, which is pretty boss.
Next issue, Firelord–another former herald–avenges his fallen friend. After a decent fight, he takes the body to space and buries him.
There’s a lot wrong with these two issues, but the fights are good. It all balances out to an average “C” rating.
I saw nothing wrong with this very fine Gruenwald story. Mr. Ekko raises a few points faulting the story, which I can handily deconstruct. Mr. Ekko questions the ‘Gabriel’ robots’ ability to wield Mjolnir. I see no controversy at all, here. The ‘Gabriel’ robot is just that- a robot, a super-powerful robot built by Galactus to serve him in the capacity of a herald. That capacity is going to involve tasks of super-strength, which means curling mighty Mjolnir, listed in the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe as weighing 800 pounds, should be no problem for the Gabriel robot at all! As an unliving automaton, the mystical stricture preventing Gabriel from lifting Mjolnir due to the possible/debatable lack of character simply does not apply to an unliving machine, regardless of it’s level of sentience. By the same token, neither the Vision nor the Original Human Torch should have any trouble hefting Mjornir, either, as they are both technically soulless automatons, albeit damn super-strong ones. The other point which Mr. Ekko raises is the sticky, touchy subject of the racial identity of the three miscreants whom Thor encounters in the alleyway, who were all drawn as black. Personally, I applaud Marvel for having the guts to present these thugs as black, because the statistical fact of the matter IS, blacks ( or ‘Afro-Americans’, if you prefer ) are out there committing the highest percentage of crimes in America! The national prison population of this country is 85% black. This statistic is disproportionate, to be sure, but it is not INACCURATE. Considering the woke/politically-correct times in which we currently live, it would be undoubtedly impossible for such a statistically-correct scene to see publication in a mainstream American comic-book today, regardless of the publisher, but 1981 was a hell of a long time ago, and it was a lot easier to get away with presenting the truth of things back in those more politically-unbiased times. Again, I applaud the artist, or whoever made the determination that those characters be portrayed as black, as it was simply an accurate reflection of the statistics of crime as they existed at the time- and still continue to do so. And that’s the WORD, people!