‘Loki’ #4 Complicates the God of Lies in an Unexpected Way

Loki #4, Dan Watters and Germán Peralta’s conclusion to the latest Marvel Comics miniseries starring the God of Stories, dropped yesterday. It ends with what could be the most surprising revelation about Loki yet.

Warning: spoilers ahead for Loki #4!

In issue #4, Loki tracks down the last piece of Naglfar, the ship he made long ago out of the fingernails of the damned. The first two pieces took the forms of an axe and a bomb. This last piece, however, is a more subtle kind of weapon: a book that reveals the darkest truths about whoever reads it. The supervillain Bullseye gets ahold of the book on Earth, and takes out his opponents by reading what it says about them. The truths are so terrible that every listener dies screaming.

Loki, however, isn’t phased by the truths the book reveals about him. He defeats Bullseye (with a cameo from Spider-Man), takes the book back, and returns it to the ship. As he’s putting Naglfar back together, he muses about the truth Bullseye thought he couldn’t bear to hear. “I know what I am,” he tells Naglfar. “The unloved. The unwanted. I took you and made you powerful. Made you useful and violent. You were my masterpiece. But you weren’t a weapon.”

Then he drops a truth bomb of his own: he made Naglfar to see himself reflected, like a portrait. Naglfar was meant to be a work of art.

The old Loki was more introspective than we thought

The revelation that Naglfar was a work of art is a cool moment for our current Loki, the God of Stories. Sometimes he seems like nothing but a troublemaker on the surface, but we’ve seen the pathos in his character.

The moment becomes even more intriguing, though, when you remember that it’s not the current Loki who built Naglfar: it was the old Loki. The God of Lies. The sadistic, deranged god of evil. It turns out that even back then, the guy had a keen awareness of his own pain.

Of course, it’s also possible that the current Loki is projecting his own self-awareness back onto his old self. It’s possible that the old Loki wasn’t consciously aware of why he felt compelled to make Naglfar.

Either way, it’s a cool way to end the miniseries—and it hints that something is brewing for Loki in his next comics appearance, in Immortal Thor #2.

(featured image: Marvel Comics)