Thor and Loki: Double Trouble Review

“Thor and Loki: Double Trouble” is a four-issue mini series I stumbled over by coincidence. I do get regular Amazon recommendations (as everyone who shops at Amazon does) and it was in my recommendations after I’d bought another comic book. I took a look at it, like the initial pages and the design, and decided to buy it. I loved it very much and have read it several times in a row, as it’s a fun romp which makes good use of its characters.

In general, I have a soft spot for stories which are more focused on the relationship between Thor and Loki instead of their big adventures or the darker sides they both have. Even by just looking into the first few pages I could access through the ‘look inside’ feature, I could tell that this mini series was one of those stories. It was about Thor and Loki being Thor and Loki and about them having an adventure that came about because of their characters and their relationship.
With its bright colours and clear lines, it was also obvious that the mini series wasn’t going to be dark — you don’t use that style in a story which is supposed to be dark and foreboding. Therefore, I was sure that it would be a fun read and bought it. “Double Trouble”, as I learned a little later, was a series in itself in 2021, there are more Marvel heroes in ‘double trouble.’

With Thor and Loki, though, the story is a ‘double trouble’ in more than one way. After Loki plays on Thor’s weakness of being unable to withstand a challenge and gets him to steal an artefact, they get into trouble over the results of using it. When trying to make their punishment of cleaning up after the facts easier, Loki accidentally sends them to another reality which has its own Thor and Loki — Jane Foster’s Thor and Lady Loki. This means we don’t just have the ‘double trouble’ of Thor and Loki, but also the ‘double trouble’ of two of each.
Naturally, there is a fight between the regular one and Lady Loki and an argument about who really is Thor between regular Thor and Jane Foster’s version. Yet, while Thor and his female version get their argument out of the way easily, their siblings need a lot longer to finish their fight over the artefact which brought regular Thor and Loki there in the first place.
Even though there’s the severe destruction of down-town Asgard, there’s no injuries or dead people in that scene, just a lot of rubble that needs cleaning up by the two people who caused the destruction in the first place. In the end, there’s still a lot of cleaning up to do, so Loki’s magic solved nothing. It’s a light-hearted story with a good end, if not necessarily a happy one for Thor and Loki.

Of course, if we’re talking about a comic book, it’s not only about the story. Comics are a visual medium and that’s a good thing, too. For the “Double Trouble” series, the graphics are crisp and bright and the line-work is clear and simple, often more akin to a Japanese manga than to a classic American comic book. Like this, it is easy to follow the action (and there’s quite some action in the comic) and it’s also easy to recognize the important parties within the story.
The writing of the story in general and the writing of the dialogues is also excellent. The behaviour of all involved is believable (although I was not aware Odin loved ice-cream that much until I read the comic). The dialogues are fun to read and play off quips to keep things light-hearted and fun.
The design of regular Thor and Loki is suggesting adolescent characters rather than adult ones (while Jane Foster Thor and Lady Loki are clearly more grown-up), which makes the story much lighter in tone. Thor and Loki look and act more like teenagers than like adults and their arguments are not harsh, but rather the usual arguments one would expect from two teenaged boys. Loki goads Thor, Thor lets himself be goaded. Thor impresses his fans, Loki cuts in and starts a fight. That’s very much an adolescent way of acting around each other.
The general framing of the action is also very well done. The panels are fun and show the story very well. Seeing Thor and Jane Foster Thor snack on some apples in the background while Loki and Lady Loki are fighting, for instance, is the kind of light-heartedness which you might want while two powerful shifters re-enact the fight of Merlin and Madame Mim from “The Sword in the Stone” — only without rules about ‘no dragons’ and in tones of green and turquoise instead of pink and blue.

“Thor and Loki: Double Trouble” doesn’t take itself or its main characters too serious and plays on the more light-hearted and funny aspects of their relationship. It helps, of course, that the comic can draw on versions of Loki who are less evil and more heroic or at least more of an anti-hero than a villain. Sure, Loki is a trouble-maker in the comic, but Thor is so, too, to a degree. After all, he has to be aware that breaking into the treasure room isn’t going to go over well. The quarrels between them are not dark or intense, they’re just sibling rivalry. As a matter of fact, they remind me of my Thor and Loki from the Loki Files — only that they have gotten over their rivalry and have become good friends and brothers who stick together by the time they reached adulthood.