I’m not sure it’s happiness in our eyes. I mean, Ron Frenz is a good artist, but following Walt Simonson is almost impossible.
The new creative team starts to stake out territory on Thor by having him shave. Then they take him out of his armor and return him to spandex.
He spends most of issue #386 fighting Egyptian and Celtic gods, but at the end of the episode he decides to go back to Earth and instead of taking him there, the Rainbow Bridge drops him into airless space…
This takes him into a Celestials story, which is strangely coincidental since the Celestials aren’t used all that much at Marvel and yet there’s another major Celestials story going on at the same time as this one in the pages of Silver Surfer. And there’s no relationship between the stories.
In this tale, due to the Rainbow Bridge’s malfunction, Thor finds himself on a planet that the Celestials are trying to destroy, and he stops them.
Without explanation, he’s somehow got his armor with him (I didn’t see a suitcase when he got lost in space).
He’s only got the armor so that the Celestials can destroy it—so Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz can fully break from Simonson’s prior run.
Thor thinks he is saving a planet from the Celestials, but it turns out they are there to restore–not destroy–the planet. And to help Thor understand, the Celestials send him a message via Replicoid.
He tells Thor to stop f-ing with the Celestials or else.
Thor’s Replicoid will reappear in the future.
The story ends with a preview of the next big fight: Asgard vs. the Army of Seth, Egypt’s God of Death.