By Steve Morris

Why did Loki do it? No one knows.

He faced a mad creature with the power of star piled upon star – a creature he brought down upon Asgard, a creature which brought down Asgard. He faced it; and was reduced to a scream on the wind, shrill enough to draw tears from those who prayed for his death.

At the start of Journey Into Mystery, seven magpies fly out on a journey, the destination unrevealed to the readers. Along the way six of the magpies are lost, abandoned, or killed, leaving the final magpie to complete its journey. It apparently doesn’t manage that, however, as it instead turns back and goes home instead “after certain other trips that do not require further elaboration in our present narrative” – as the narrative boxes tell us. The remaining magpie tracks down a young Loki, whose older self was killed during the Siege crossover, seemingly for good. This new ‘Kid Loki’ was created by Thor, and was determined to set off on his own path, rather than return to being the older, evil Loki whose legendary tales made the people of Asgard shiver.

Sometimes the only journey you’re on is a journey back to where you were.

In that first issue, Kid Loki meets the magpie and follows it to a secret destination where he can meet his previous self. The previous self explains that he could have survived the events of Siege if he’d wanted to – but he wanted to die, and needed to die. He has become too predictable, and his path has become too defined. He chose to die so that his story could come to an end, and a new one could be written instead. Although Kid Loki hears everything that his previous self says, he misses the meaning when he’s told that “you must become a new Loki” and rewrite the narrative on what a Loki can be.

The old self is sent into the body of the magpie, and sits on Kid Loki’s shoulder across the rest of the series. Kid Loki thought that his purpose was to be something new and different, so he could take Loki forward into a new direction and find a new home for his legacy: well, he was half-right at least. As is quickly made clear at the start of issue #645, which concludes this Journey into Mystery, Kid Loki’s purpose was solely to redeem Loki in the eyes of the world, so the original and definitive Loki could return unnoticed.

Let’s set up for a moment. Halfway through the series, we found out that the throne of hell was empty, and nobody sat in it. Several powerful forms of evil all wished to claim the throne, and Kid Loki needed to find a way to ensure that Hell remained without a single leader. If one person claimed all that power for themselves and channelled Hell into a single-minded pursuit, there was very little which they wouldn’t be able to accomplish, you see. Loki’s solution was to channel part of his own essence into a crown: whoever wore that crown would be able to claim the throne. Yet by creating that powerful item, he also ensured that no-one would ever be able to claim it. The assembled powers of Hell would be stuck in a never-ending war to claim that crown, and that distraction would keep them occupied eternally.

So nobody could claim the throne.

But someone did.

The “certain other trips” pursued by the last-surviving magpie are finally elaborated upon in this epilogue for the series: it predicted everything that would happen in the series to date, including the crown, and… narced. Mephisto heard about the crown before it was even created, thanks to the magpie, and was able to claim it in the aftermath of Everything Burns. Thanks to Loki, there is a single leader of Hell, and all of existence should shudder and cry.

Kid Loki returns to the secret hiding place of his past self, realising the trap that he’s been caught inside. In order to stop Mephisto, the crown has to be destroyed – but the only way to destroy it would be for Kid Loki to no longer exist. The crown was created of Kid Loki’s hopes and dreams: if they were to die, then the crown would be immediately erased from existence, and the threat to the cosmos would be averted.

Oh, and that leaves Kid Loki’s body as an empty shell – well, handily, Loki would be able to step right into it and bring it back to life.

The mysterious journey of the comic wasn’t for Kid Loki to create a good name for himself and forge a future: it was for Loki to launder his reputation so he could step back into his younger body with a fresh new start, the world (more or less) trusting him, and with no idea that Kid Loki was erased from existence itself. And so it comes to pass, because this is the rare Marvel series which gave itself a chance to actually, genuinely kill off its lead character. Kid Loki devours the magpie, erases himself, and dissolves the crown of power. As the comic concludes, Loki is left in the body of Kid Loki, victorious and ready to lead himself into a new future of his own devising, the world unaware what they’re in for.

Throughout Journey Into Mystery, writer Kieron Gillen and the rest of the creative teams across all thirty-one parts of the story played with the threads of reality. Kid Loki’s journey from life to death was foretold from the start: not just because the first issue outright states everything that will happen to the character, but because he’s an alternate version of an established character from Marvel’s Golden Age. Legacy characters never last: Kyle Rayner isn’t the main Green Lantern, Rachel Grey doesn’t control the Phoenix Force, and Dick Grayson gave up the Batman suit as soon as Bruce Wayne walked back in. Marvel would always want the original Loki to return at one point, and the smartest set-up of this comic was how it allowed everyone to get what they wanted in that regard.

Just as Kid Loki spends the series just-about saving the world at the end of each new story, so readers celebrated his victories and loved him for it. They dressed up as Kid Loki for conventions, they wrote various levels of fanfic about him, and they told their friends “you’ve got to read this Journey Into Mystery comic” so they could try and make sure that the comic remained in publication. In doing so, they were laundering Loki’s reputation just as much as the character himself was – perhaps aided somewhat by Tom Hiddleston of course, who writes a fan-letter for the end of the series. Text and response matched one another, which made the inevitable betrayal and tragic conclusion of the series so much more satisfying/upsetting for readers.

Marvel don’t get to write tragedies too often. It’s well-known by readers that the final issue of a series has to put all the toys back in the box so the new writer can step in with whatever plans or ideas that have in mind. Journey Into Mystery simply ensured that one of those new toys was a character it’d successful made into one of Marvel’s most popular of the time, so the shelving of Kid Loki could be seen as a tragedy, and so status quo could be the work of a bastard rather than the work of a triumphant hero.

Loki would go on to do whatever he would do in Young Avengers, next, and Kid Loki was gone forever… although eventually he did come back to life, of course. He did so in a limited series which isn’t hugely well-remembered, called Asgardians of the Galaxy. It’s hard to say whether the magpie saw that part coming.

I think the most important part of this run of comics was always that it put everything down in writing, black and white, for the reader – and then challenged them to see elements of grey hidden inside that bold font. It was a series which was trying to train readers to look for lies, analyse the text they were given, and see how they might choose to interpret the narrative. Maybe for some people that’s a bit of an English literature seminar, but there’s room in comics for the creative team to sometimes say ‘hey let’s just evaluate this a little bit, shall we?’

It was a foregone conclusion which so many readers never saw coming, and it made the release of this final tragic finale so much more satisfying. Readers actually cared about a comic reverting back to the status quo, rather than happily accepting what we put in front of them. It was clear and unclear at the same time. And hey, Old Loki doesn’t get time to triumph at the end of the issue either: having seen everything his younger self went through, who is to say he doesn’t have capacity to change himself? Other than, well, himself.

If there’s anything I think stands as the legacy of Journey Into Mystery, it’s that a lot of comics readers suddenly realised that there were more options available to them than they predicted. Kid Loki’s tragedy was always going to come, but if readers learned to be a little less trusting of narrative – and its narrators, especially if they’re called Kieron Gillen – then it left comics as a whole with a smarter and more engaged audience moving forward.

Why did Loki do it? Well, to find that out, you have to sit and stare at the sentences printed down on the page a little longer, and think about them. It’s only appropriate that the comic encourages readers to think for themselves and query what they’re told: it began with the death of the author, after all.

 

Journey Into Mystery #645 “Everything Burns: Aftermath”
Writer: Kieron Gillen
Artist: Stephanie Hans
Letterer: Clayton Cowles

 

Steve Morris runs this site! Having previously written for sites including The Beat, ComicsAlliance, CBR and The MNT, he can be found on Twitter here. He’s a bunny.

 

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