(season 1)
[Walt Simonson, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Larry Lieber, Don Heck, Len Wein, Roy Thomas, Mark Gruenwald, Mike Gustovich,] Kate Herron, and Michael Waldron, 2021
I wasn’t looking forward to this. A few years ago I thought I’d try reading every Marvel superhero comic of the 1960s—an absurd undertaking for any decade I had actually lived through, but in the 1960s Marvel published well under a thousand superhero comic books in toto. Only sixteen heroes or groups got their own title or were featured in half of a split book; Stan Lee wrote the first several appearances of every single one. And Jack Kirby drew the first few appearances of most of them! But by the end of the decade, the Lee/Kirby team was down to two monthly titles: they had stuck with Fantastic Four and Thor. I could not say the same. I found Thor, Loki’s home book, a chore to read and gave up midway through 1967. I usually find mythology in general pretty tedious, that of ancient Greece excepted. And as I mentioned last time, I’m not a fan of the blithe face turn. The Marvel Cinematic Universe version of Loki has murdered over a hundred people; now he gets a series of his own, which will no doubt treat him as a lovable rogue? Feh.
Thus, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that, despite the title, this is barely a Loki series. This is a TVA series! One of the main characters is Mr. Mobius! That is one heck of a deep cut: Mobius has fewer than a dozen total appearances in the comics, none since 2006. But let’s back up a bit for some context. As noted, the Lee/Kirby team worked on Fantastic Four and Thor into the 1970s, but only just—Kirby left both books a few months into 1970. Both books then sort of treaded water for a decade-plus. But in the 1980s, both sprang back to prominence under a single writer-artist: for Fantastic Four, this was John Byrne, and for Thor, it was Walt Simonson. And while Byrne was hailed for returning the F.F.’s book to its old Lee/Kirby vibe, freshened up a bit for a new generation, Simonson was more experimental. He gave Thor’s hammer to a space alien, did an epic Surtur storyline that he started building up seventeen months in advance, turned Thor into a frog for three issues, did an issue consisting of nothing but splash pages, and that’s just what I remember off the top of my head. Oh, and he sneaked in the first mention of the TVA, the Time Variance Authority, into Thor #372 (cover date 1986.10), along with an early mention of the fifteen-year time bubble that would go on to play such a large role in Simonson’s later work. But it was also around this time that Marvel’s 1980s renaissance started to peter out, as editorial interference chased many of their top creators away. John Byrne, for instance, found himself a persona non grata at Marvel after agreeing to revamp Superman for DC Comics, and while he wasn’t fired outright, he found that an increasing amount of his work was either being rejected or redone by the higher-ups, so he left Fantastic Four mid-storyline. Roger Stern took over—but the following year, it would be Stern’s turn to step back from his signature book. He’d been writing Avengers for years, but now the editors were insisting on a storyline in which the new team leader, the second Captain Marvel—Monica Rambeau—turned out to be a disaster in the role. Stern thought that “for the first time the Avengers are led by an African-American woman, but she turns out to be incompetent” was a fucked-up, right-wing idea for a plot point, and refused to write it. He decamped to DC, leaving both his books in need of new writers. On Fantastic Four, he was replaced by Steve Englehart, who was also writing West Coast Avengers. The year after that—we’re up to 1988 now—Englehart discovered that the top brass was rewriting his West Coast Avengers stories, and that spelled the end of his run on that book. To show what a conveyer belt Marvel’s creative teams were at the time, he was replaced on that title by… John Byrne.
On Avengers, Stern was replaced by Walt Simonson. His remit was to bring Stern’s version of the team to a definitive end and then premiere a new lineup of his own design in Avengers #300. Over in Fantastic Four, Englehart had kicked off his run with a big shakeup, having Reed and Sue Richards, a.k.a. Mr. Fantastic and the Invisible Woman, retire from superheroics. (Englehart had replaced them with Crystal of the Inhumans and the new Ms. Marvel, Sharon Ventura.) Simonson asked the higher-ups whether he could shock his Avengers readers by adding the two F.F. retirees to his new roster. The editors gave him permission. They then immediately rescinded it. By “immediately” I mean that Simonson rolled out the new Avengers team in #300, and the editors mandated that in issue #301, he had to show Reed and Sue failing to fit in, and the last issue in which the two could appear was #303. Simonson decided that he’d rather just quit; #300 was his last issue. But why was he suddenly not allowed to use those characters? Because the editors had demanded that Englehart bring them back to the F.F., ruining over a year’s worth of the storylines Englehart had planned. Englehart responded with a series of issues, written under a pseudonym in protest, that gave readers a sneak peek at how those storylines might have unfolded, along with some heavy satire about power-mad meddlers who just want to see the same old stories told over and over and over. Then he left. Replacing him was… Walt Simonson. So Simonson got to write Reed and Sue after all! And while Simonson’s celebrated Thor run didn’t do much for me because, y’know, it was about Thor, I loved his Fantastic Four run, brief though it was—thirteen issues as writer/artist, and another six as writer only. Nearly all his issues as writer/artist involved the F.F. bopping around in the timestream, and after a couple of issues that teased the TVA getting alarmed by this, the TVA was finally fully unveiled in Fantastic Four #353.
The Time Variance Authority, we learn, is an infinite bureaucracy dedicated to tracking and correcting deviations from the canonical Marvel Universe timeline, with desks extending forever along the X, Y, and Z axes, staffed by faceless drones. The managers do have faces—specifically, they all have the face of executive editor Mark Gruenwald, known for his encyclopedic knowledge of Marvel continuity. The letters page for #353 notes that Gruenwald got a heads-up about this and “was a pip about the whole thing”. Assuming that that’s a good thing—isn’t the normal idiom “a peach”?—he perhaps wasn’t as much of a pip about it as all that, since he pretty much immediately undid Simonson’s whole story. He retconned Nebula into Ravonna and wiped out the Council of—
—aaaaand this isn’t going to make any sense without even more context. Gah. All right, I’m going to try to keep this as short as I can.
In Fantastic Four #19, cover date 1963.10, the F.F. fight Pharaoh Rama-Tut. He hails from the year 3000, a time of utopian peace, but hates it: “There were no adventures in the year 3000… no enemies to battle, no dragons to slay!” Discovering a time machine, he installs it into a sphinx and travels back to ancient Egypt, which he easily conquers with technology from six millennia in the future. When the F.F. arrive, in search of a cure for blindness (long story), Rama-Tut subdues them with an “ultra-diode ray” and decides to take Sue for his queen. But eventually the F.F. defeat him, and Rama-Tut flees into the timestream.
In Avengers #8, cover date 1964.09, the Avengers receive a distress call from the Pentagon, asking them to deal with a flying saucer. Inside is an armored foe who calls himself Kang the Conqueror; he swiftly defeats the Avengers with technology from millennia in the future, and if this sounds like Stan and Jack are repeating themselves, it’s not because they’d forgotten they’d done the same schtick with Rama-Tut. Three pages after he steps out of his flying saucer, Kang reveals that he is Rama-Tut—that after being defeated by the F.F., he had set his escape pod to take him back to the year 3000, only for “electro-static disturbances in the relative time stream” to divert him to the year 4000, a time of endless, post-apocalyptic war. The world has deteriorated to the point that the technology of 3000 is nearly as miraculous now as it was in ancient Egypt, and Rama-Tut, now styling himself Kang, conquers the planet. However, when this time-traveling tyrant tries to take over the world of 1964, he is defeated by the Teen Brigade.
In Avengers #10, the Avengers find themselves up against what the cover bills as “the truly different villainy of the evil Immortus!” It is the same villainy. Immortus is later revealed to be the same guy as Rama-Tut and Kang. He’s just an older version, one who had become more of an administrator than a conqueror. In this incarnation, he is introduced as “the one who rules the mystic realm of Limbo, where things never change!” I could discuss the events of this issue, but they’re actually undone via a time loop at the end of the story, so why bother. Immortus reappears for a single panel in Avengers #16, declaring, “The Avengers!! I shall never rest until they have been destroyed forever!” He then disappears until 1974. Seems like a bit of a rest to me.
In Avengers #23, we rejoin Kang in the year 4000, as he has selected a new queen for himself: Ravonna, a princess of one of the barbarian kingdoms he had conquered and permitted to survive as a puppet state. She refuses him, and Kang decides that her land’s nominal independence can no longer be tolerated. In #24, the Avengers fight on Ravonna’s side against Kang’s forces, but they lose. Kang’s lieutenants prepare to execute the entire royal family of the defeated kingdom, their standard practice—but Kang still wants to marry Ravonna: “In all the universe, it is only she who has filled my heart with—love!” He orders that Ravonna be spared. His lieutenants declare that they joined Kang’s service because he was “the most ruthless of all”, and this “sign of weakness” cannot be tolerated. They rebel, and the Avengers find themselves on Kang’s side in the war to save Ravonna; this time they win, and Ravonna is wowed. “Kang! You were willing to risk your army—your power—your very life to save me from execution!” she exclaims. Ravonna is so moved by Kang’s gallantry that when Kang’s top commander takes a treacherous shot at him, she throws herself in front of the blast to save him.
Stan’s last Kang story is Thor #140, cover date 1967.05. Having defeated an entire Avengers squad before, Kang is not worried by the prospect of taking on just Thor: “Do your worst, thunder god!” he says. “There is a cosmic force field around me now that nothing can hope to penetrate!” What Kang didn’t account for is that Stan Lee was notorious for giving every hero the power to do anything. “My mallet need not penetrate thy field of force!” Thor replies. “Not so long as it can whirl around thee with a speed far greater than light!” This is the sort of thing that led Thor’s entry in the online Marvel Database to feature a big box that says “Thor’s powers, abilities, and strength level can vary due to a broad degree of artistic license employed by various comic book writers and artists.” “Various comic book writers” is a polite way of saying “mostly Stan”. For instance, in Journey Into Mystery #89, Thor needs to distract the bad guy, and “an idea suddenly comes to Thor! Using his super-developed vocal cords, he throws his voice across the room…” So, yeah, if he can do that, I guess it’s no stretch to say that he can trap Kang in “a universal infinity vortex” and send him off to Limbo.
Sticking with Thor, in Thor #243–245 (cover dates 1976.01–03), he and his allies take on the Time-Twisters, a trio of creatures who travel from the end of time backwards to its beginning, destroying all in their wake. To defeat them, Thor and company travel to the end of time, where they meet a wizened yellow humanoid who is incubating the Time-Twisters in eggs. The humanoid introduces himself as He Who Remains, explaining that his goal is to create a set of creatures who will carry the knowledge of this universe through its death to its rebirth. When Thor’s companion Jane Foster explains that, unable to reach the beginning of a new universe, the creatures instead blaze a deadly trail to the beginning of this one, He Who Remains pulls a lever helpfully marked “TERMINATE LIFE-SUPPORT SYSTEMS”, ending the threat.
In Thor #282, cover date 1979.04, Thor visits Immortus’s castle in Limbo, where Immortus reports that, following Avengers #10, he had been visited by a trio of creatures from the end of time who claimed to be custodians of the timestream. After tutoring him in the ways of timestream management, they put him in charge of the years 3000 BCE to 4000 CE, i.e., the seven millennia during which he had been active as Rama-Tut and Kang. Okay, so what sort of management does a timestream need?
In Avengers #267–269 (cover dates 1986.05–07), Roger Stern gives us the answer. We learn that after Thor had banished him to Limbo in Thor #140 (as detailed above), Kang had happened across the castle of Immortus, where he found Immortus reduced to a skeleton. With free access to Immortus’s machines, Kang discovers a way to teleport Ravonna away an instant before her death, saving her life—but the viewscreen reveals that without Ravonna to block the shot of the renegade commander, there lies a dead Kang. But Kang does not disappear from Limbo, revealing that the timestream branches at key moments, leading to one universe in which Kang lives and one in which he dies. And it is clear to him that some of those branches need to be pruned. For instance, in one version of 1986, Kang’s attempt to conquer the twentieth century by hitting Avengers Mansion with an H‑bomb leads to a full-scale nuclear war that leaves the planet a radioactive husk. Whoops. In another version, before he can even set off that first bomb Kang manages to blow himself up! Stern reveals that a small council of successful Kangs from different timelines have been busy wiping out the failures. Naturally, they also want to off each other. Eventually one sole Kang emerges triumphant, at which point Immortus shows up and reveals that the skeleton wasn’t actually his and that Ravonna is on his side—which she does not consider disloyalty because Immortus is just a more mature Kang. The showdown between Immortus and Kang at the end of #269 is brief. Immortus wins.
Cut to 1988. Stern is off Avengers; Simonson is on. We learn that one Kang had survived the events of 1986 by slipping into a temporal pocket. No sooner does he return, though, than he finds himself battling more divergent Kangs—but these diverge from the Kang we know much more than did the Kangs of ’86. One is a child; another is a woman. The female Kang teleports this surviving Kang into a stadium full of Kangs: bearded Kangs, Neanderthal Kangs, monkey Kangs, dinosaur Kangs—this is no single timeline’s council, but the Council of Cross-Time Kangs! Meanwhile, the newest Avenger, a Hydrox version of Dr. Strange called Dr. Druid, finds himself caught up in reveries in which he, a middle-aged egghead, has won the favors of a beauteous young blonde, clad in gossamer, who serves not only as his eager bedmate but as his all-knowing counselor. Under her guidance, he is able to elevate his powers within these trances from the handful of modest psychic abilities he possesses in real life to those of a true Superman, winning him the adulation of the masses under his protection. In #293, we learn that Dr. Druid’s bewitching spirit guide is the female Kang—who, we will soon learn, has also been working her seductive wiles on the other Kangs, receiving technologies from many timelines as gifts. And she’s actually not a Kang at all—she’s just infiltrating the Council. So who is she? She’s Nebula! Roger Stern had introduced Nebula back in Avengers #257 as a boring space pirate whose big gimmick was that she was the granddaughter of the equally boring Thanos. Simonson’s Nebula isn’t completely different from Stern’s: she’s hunting for “the deadliest weapon in the omniverse”, which is very much on brand for Nebula as initially established. But Simonson’s is an infinitely more interesting take on the character. And the culminating issue of the “Nebula subverts the Avengers” plot, #297, knocked my stripey little socks off back in the day. Simonson had established that there was a near-future area of the timeline, encompassing the years 2005 to 2020, that could no longer be accessed by time travelers, and Nebula is certain that the weapon she seeks lies within this bubble. So #297 has the Avengers mentally enslaved to Nebula—they even induct her onto the team. They’re trying to find a way to penetrate the time bubble in one of their quinjets, racing against alternate versions of themselves (“Our presence here must be generating alternate probability nodes of being in the local time flux!”); meanwhile, multiple Kangs are trying to board the ship, and the Avengers (apart from the besotted Dr. Druid) are trying to shake off Nebula’s control with varying degrees of success. It’s a wild ride!
Simonson had an even wilder ride planned for his post‑#300 batch of Avengers, since this first batch doesn’t make it into the bubble—instead, Nebula and Dr. Druid are shaken from the ship and lost in the timestream. But as discussed, Simonson didn’t end up writing any of those post‑#300 issues. Mark Gruenwald, then Avengers editor, stepped into the breach to write the immediate follow-up issues, in which an alien called Super Nova of Xandar demands that “the Avenger called Nebula” be turned over to him for crimes against his planet. Gruenwald then left both the writing and editing posts, and the new editor turned the book over to John Byrne. Byrne was already writing West Coast Avengers, which was promptly renamed Avengers West Coast so that the two Byrne books would be displayed next to each other in comics shops. A few months later, Simonson started his run on Fantastic Four. In issue #337, cover date 1990.02, he kicked off his epic follow-up to the time bubble story, and had Nebula trying her psychic seduction trick on Reed Richards (unsuccessfully) and Johnny Storm (successfully). That very same month, Byrne launched a storyline in Avengers in which the villain was… Nebula! Portrayed as the same boring space pirate Stern had written. And Thor was in both books! The next month, in Avengers #315, Thor says, “I know not how thou didst extricate thyself from the time vortex into which thou fell with Dr. Druid”, and Nebula says that she has no idea what he’s talking about. That same month, over in Fantastic Four, she and Thor are bopping around on the same time sled. Now, that is not necessarily irreconcilable: it’s a time travel story, after all. But it does suggest that the F.F. and Avengers offices were not on the same page. And it does indicate that Byrne intended to undo Simonson’s story. How exactly? Perhaps we’ll never know! Byrne once again left mid-storyline, quitting after Avengers #316.
The reason is relevant to this article. Over in Avengers West Coast, Byrne had been doing a storyline in which Immortus was busily pruning divergent timelines: one in which Mary Queen of Scots executes Elizabeth Tudor, one in which Abraham Lincoln is not assassinated, and, uh, that’s all he got to before quitting. Because he quit Avengers West Coast, too. By Byrne’s account, he had thought that he kept butting heads with Marvel editorial in the early and mid-’80s—cutting short his runs on Captain America, Incredible Hulk, Fantastic Four, and maybe more I’m forgetting—solely due to his differences with editor-in-chief Jim Shooter in particular. But in 1987 Jim Shooter was fired. Byrne, who had left in ’86, was back by ’89. And almost immediately he found himself in the same sorts of disputes with new editor-in-chief Tom DeFalco. DeFalco subjected him to the same bullshit that drove away Simonson and Englehart: “Hey, Tom, can I do this?” “Sure!” “Okay, I did it!” “What? You can’t do that!” Now, Byrne’s plans for his Immortus storyline were not especially promising. He has said that the idea was that Immortus would realize that the Scarlet Witch altered the timestream every time she used her powers, and that Immortus would harness and use that power to change history so that when he fought the Avengers in Avengers #8 as Kang, he won. This would lead to a dystopian world, the superheroes we know would be unpowered civilians, there would be a secret resistance movement… the usual set of timeworn tropes. The twist was going to be that the Black Knight would save the day because Thor, in the main Marvel Universe, had placed him in a time vortex after the events of Avengers #297, which would be a really cool use of continuity except for the fact that Thor hadn’t actually done that. (This is entirely typical of Byrne: one of the crucial plot points of his run, deployed in Avengers West Coast #52, hinged on a chronology of past events that he got completely wrong.)
Instead, Byrne was gone, and the editors somehow had to find a way to wrap up his storyline: the Scarlet Witch had turned evil, Immortus was up to something, and oh yeah, Magneto had trapped the Avengers in a house-sized ball of metal and dropped it from orbit. After buying some time with some fill-ins, the editors brought in Roy Thomas, Stan’s former right-hand man and Marvel’s original continuity expert, to try to salvage the mess. What eventually got published was a deus ex machina, as Avengers West Coast #62 concludes with the arrival of a trio of cosmic entities, footnoted as the same ones from Thor #282—but while in that issue we only saw the back of their heads, now they stood revealed not as the Time-Twisters, but as the self-proclaimed Time-Keepers: one with a humanoid face, one with a sort of crustacean face, and one whose face is a sort of bug-lion-thing. They take Immortus into custody and that’s that. Except that story was almost immediately undone by… Roy Thomas. In What If…? v2 #39, of all places, Thomas opts for a do-over. Those Time-Keepers whom it was so important to distinguish from the evil Time-Twisters? Yeah, they were the Time-Twisters in disguise, and here are the real Time-Keepers (who look just like them). I gather that the idea was that the Time-Keepers had maybe come off as villainous in that first go-around, so Thomas doubled back to make it clear they weren’t supposed to be. Apart from that, Thomas’s main order of business is to weave the TVA more deeply into the Marvel mythos. Not only does his story revolve around the organization, but He Who Remains is recast as an actual human rather than a yellow humanoid, and is revealed to be the final director of the TVA, which apparently survives to the end of time.
But there was still the question of how to reconcile the two Nebulas. Mark Gruenwald handed down his ruling in the atrociously drawn Avengers Annual #21 (1992): the true Nebula was the one who had appeared in Stern and Byrne’s stories, while the Nebula from Simonson’s story was a version of Ravonna who would now call herself “Terminatrix”. Why had she impersonated Nebula? The answer is the same one the screenwriter gives in Ryan George’s Youtube pitch meetings: “Hey, shut up.” The following year, Gruenwald wrote a Terminatrix limited series that I guess was supposed to tie up some loose ends—e.g., he kills off the Council of Cross-Time Kangs—but it just ended up creating more chaos: a bunch of alternate Ravonnas, a son of one or all of theirs called Marcus Immortus, a sort of temporal smoke monster called Alioth, etc. Not long thereafter, Gruenwald dropped dead of a heart attack. Stepping into his role as Marvel continuity maven was Kurt Busiek, who was given twelve issues to do continuity cleanup, with assistance from Roger Stern, in a series called Avengers Forever (cover dates 1998.12–2000.02). This really did tie up loose ends, closing the book on Terminatrix and the Time-Keepers, resetting Kang and Immortus to the classic versions of those characters, and clarifying their tangled history, while throwing no small amount of shade at those awful comics from ’92 and ’93. “I hit my lowest ebb,” Kang reflects in Avengers Forever #9, “engaging an alternate Ravonna, who sought my death, in a needlessly complex battle, in which I toyed with the Avengers and the Fantastic Four, tossing them clues to half-formed plans of mine, as if the empty shell of conflict could serve in place of the real thing.”
All right, I think that was pretty succinct! So, on to Loki.
In Avengers: Endgame, the Avengers had traveled into the past to thwart Thanos’s plan to kill half the life in the universe, and during their jaunt to 2012, they’d accidentally given Loki the means to teleport away. But in the original timeline, he hadn’t teleported away, setting off a chain of events that had led to his appearances in three post-2012 MCU films. Temporal paradox! So the Time Variance Authority shows up to take this variant Loki into custody. And like I said at the top, bang, there’s Mr. Mobius, portrayed in live action. The creators knew he was based on Mark Gruenwald; they give him a car whose license plate is GRN-W1D. And they made him look like Mark Gruenwald might have looked in 2021. It was kind of uncanny watching a show featuring a guy whose ashes were sitting on the other side of my room. In the comics, everyone in TVA management is a Gruenwald clone; in the TV show, there’s only the one. So Mobius’s boss is someone different. She’s Ravonna! And she reports to… the Time-Keepers! Their appearance is very close to how they look in the comics, and we’re told that in the MCU, they actually founded the TVA. This turns out to be a lie: at the end of the series, after making it past Alioth, Loki finds out who is really behind the TVA, and it’s a guy who is introduced as He Who Remains, but whose dress, demeanor, and role make it clear that he’s the MCU’s Immortus. When he depicts his alternate selves, they’re Kangs. And the reason I wrote the four thousand words in the middle of this article was so that those last half dozen sentences would make sense to people who hadn’t already read those comics.
As for the part that actually involves Loki, well, there are a couple of bits worth noting. One is that at one point, Loki finds himself in a sort of afterlife surrounded by a bunch of alternate versions of himself: one dressed in his Jack Kirby costume, a kid version, an alligator version, etc., etc. So, sort of like the Council of Cross-Time Kangs, but even more like Alan Moore’s “Supremacy”, which I wrote about here and which I wrote a version of in my interactive story Endless, Nameless. So that’s something. The other bit I should probably mention is that one of those alternate versions of Loki is the main Loki’s love interest. We learn that the TVA’s mission is to keep the timeline from branching, and that there’s a big bad out there who’s deliberately causing temporal disturbances. Then we learn that the TVA’s interest in the Loki we know is that this big bad is a variant of him, and Mobius thinks that it could be useful to use a Loki to catch a Loki. Initially the variant Loki wears a hooded cloak, but when the hood finally comes down, we find not Tom Hiddleston but a blonde woman. Oh!, I thought. Okay! After three Thor movies with villains such as Loki, the Destroyer, Malekith, Hela, and Surtur, we’re finally getting around to Thor’s #2 villain after Loki: the Enchantress! And then… they do that thing the MCU people do, the same thing they do at the end of this series with Immortus. They hint at who the character is, but don’t say it. Like they’re embarrassed. So they have the main Loki say that this blonde woman is using her powers to “enchant” other characters about fifty thousand times, but he never sticks a “ress” at the end of that word. At one point there’s actually dialogue about what Loki can call this character other than “Loki”, and it turns out that she has in fact been using another name. I was waiting for her to say “Amora”, i.e., the real name of the Enchantress—and then she says “Sylvie”. What? It made me start to wonder whether I was jumping to conclusions about whether this was supposed to be the Enchantress—was there a character in the Thor mythos named Sylvie? I’m very far from a Thor expert. But then I saw the pattern of circles on her sleeve, and those were the exact same circles the Enchantress has featured on her costume since Jack Kirby first drew it in 1964. The creators were absolutely signaling to comics readers that Loki/Sylvie/whatever was meant to be the MCU Enchantress. But they wouldn’t say it. Saves me the effort of doing a rundown of hundreds of Enchantress comics, I guess.
And I have to say that, despite these hints, this didn’t really feel like the Enchantress. Jim Shooter might have torpedoed Marvel’s 1980s success with his insistence that he knew the one and only right way to write a comic book, but the fact is that he was really good at it. For all the hate his series Secret Wars has received over the past forty years, he gave himself a cast of three dozen characters and every single one stood out as a distinct personality. One was the Enchantress, and in every panel, she is absolutely, unmistakably the Enchantress. This MCU character, not so much. But the MCU character doesn’t feel like a version of Loki, either. One of the things I found most striking about this series is that, while the premise of a guy who meets a female counterpart to himself and falls in love with her could hardly be more high-concept, the show barely comments on it—aside from a couple of jokes about Loki’s narcissism, Loki and “Sylvie” are treated like any other male and female leads in an action romcom. Seinfeld did more with this premise than season one of Loki does. I guess I’ll see whether season two clarifies anything. And I’m looking forward to season two a lot more than I expected to. The characterization and attempts at drama here are hit-and-miss, but the show is pretty amusing—the introduction of the bureaucratic elements of the TVA are genuinely funny and a big improvement over the comics—and I’m looking forward to seeing how the TVA vs. Kang/Immortus storyline goes. The actual Loki parts, whatevs.
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