Journey into Mystery #639 – Review

By: Kieron Gillen (writer), Rich Elson (artist), IFS (colorist), and Clayton Cowles (letterer)

The Story: Loki and Leah arrive to aid a beleaguered Otherworld at war with….urban sprawl?

The Review:  I’ll admit that while it certainly ended better than it started, I wasn’t particularly thrilled by the Exiled crossover.  It’s a good thing then that this issue of Journey into Mystery feels like a righting of the ship as Gillen gets back to doing what he does best.  I’ve often felt, with his character-centered stories and sense of humour and general Englishness that Kieron Gillen bore some resemblance to Paul Cornell.  As such, having Gillen do a Captain Britain story in a fantasy setting just makes sense.  It’s a natural fit.  Moreover, it lets Gillen get back to telling a straight up fantasy story, as opposed to the somewhat awkward urban fantasy with mutants that was exiled.

Where this book succeeds most is when Gillen allows the mundane and he magical to intersect, allowing elements of the fantastical world of Loki and Otherworld to crossover into our world.  You get hilarious scenes like Loki and Leah taking a cab across England and Hern the Hunter waiting to pick them up at the airport, sign and all.  It leads to a kind of absurdity that suits Gillen’s comic voice very well.