Odin is the Most Savage Work of Bennett and Tynion’s Careers
Nazi lives don’t matter. I needed to get that out first and foremost in this review. I have avoided reading anything about Odin, going in completely blind to the story and world I was wading into. Nothing I could have read would have prepared me for that. Odin is the most brutal book of Marguerite Bennett and James Tynion IV’s careers in the best possible way. It’s an unflinching portrayal of young people who have fallen down the alt-right pipeline from one of numerous paths to becoming a monster.
Odin follows Adela, a thrill-seeking journalist who goes undercover to report on a band of Neo Nazis. She will do anything for the perfect story, including heading into the frozen forests of Norway, with Neo Nazi punks who seek Odin to achieve their promised white supremacist destiny. But what awaits them in the woods is far older and stranger than any of them can comprehend, and no gods are coming to answer their prayers. Odin was co-created by Marguerite Bennett, James Tynion IV, artist Letizia Cadonici (House of Slaughter), colored by Eisner Award-winner Jordie Bellaire (The Nice House on the Lake), lettered by Tom Napolitano (Red Book), designed by Dylan Todd (The Department of Truth), and edited by Steve Foxe (Razorblades).
It’s hard for me to see anyone wearing a Thor’s hammer necklace and not assume they are some flavor of nazi. So many white supremacists wear this totem as some sort of symbol to other losers that they, too, believe in the “ultimate white race”. But this cracked belief in Odin and the Norse gods is just a veil over their lack of empathy. Even the book started from this place of understanding, with Tynion saying:
“It all started as a text conversation about a group of white supremacists we’d seen a story about online, talking about their faith in Odin, and then we started talking about what the real norse Odin would do with these idiots if he had the chance. It felt pretty immediately clear that there was a mean and brutal horror story in it and we wanted to tell it together.”
And do just that, they did. This is a mean story. A story not meant to glorify or give some weird shade of grey to a truly evil group, but to brutally tear them from the fabric of the created reality limb by nazi limb. Every portion of this book is brutal, from the descriptions of what these characters are into to how they treat each other, and every other aspect. The art keeps that fever high with a stark depiction of the worlds these people travel in, the punk aesthetics that the neo nazis have co-opted, and so much more.
Everything hits the fan once this group’s vision quest begins, especially with the world’s artistic display. Bellaire and Cadonici create a fever dream of a sequence that emphasizes the red in Bellaire’s chosen color palette so well that it’s integral to the book’s theme. That, juxtaposed with the snowy climate, is a striking visual from the art team, making everything so visually interesting.
The crew, along with the journalist, is on a death march into things far beyond their understanding. What a nazi punk believes is their messiah will soon turn into a game of cat and mouse with a tormenting mythology whose very essence revolves around trickery. It’s a vicious, visceral book that pushes boundaries in ways I have not seen this team do before. Odin is going to be a seminal horror comic when it hits shelves in May. I leave you with this:
