Bring On The Bad Guys: Loki #1 - Marvel Comics

BRING ON THE BAD GUYS: LOKI No. 1, September 2025

The fourth of “seven villainous one-shots”, Anthony Oliveira’s narrative for “Bring On The Bad Guys: Loki” probably proved a bit too sedentary with fans of the God of Mischief. In fact, seeing as the central plot thread revolves around the creation of “The King In Yellow” anthology novel (by Robert W. Chambers) in 1895 A.D., the Lord of Lies doesn’t really have a great deal to actually do until the story’s very end when he mercilessly stabs “a poor, lost descendant of Khonshu’s crumbled order” to death inside a packed French theatre house.

Up until this moment of cold-blooded murder, the Asgardian is largely consigned to the side-lines, with much of this twenty-page long yarn sadly becoming bogged down with the dialogue-driven relationship between Swedish baritone Jonathan Nilsson and the play’s nightmare-troubled writer. So stationary a script really doesn’t seem to do the duplicitous Laufeyson much justice at all, and even tries to convince its audience that the deity’s sole motivation for not killing the lad straight away, and thus ridding himself of his debt to Mephisto, is simply because he wants to hear the youth’s finished yarn; “Oh, forgive my ill manners. I am the Vicomte De Farbauti, and I think I can spare more than that, boy.”

Arguably far more successful than this comic’s penmanship, are the layouts of Jethro Morales – at least at first. The visual artist does a solid job of depicting the menacing fate awaiting Loki should Thor Odinson invade the Dread Lord’s realm and take him back to Asgard. But debatably by the time the illustrator is busy pencilling the hapless Nilsson’s demise at the hands of Sister Sorrow, some of his line-art appears a little rigid and rough around the edges. Indeed, some of the panels appear so cartoony, that some bibliophiles might even look twice to see whether a second person was brought in by Senior Editor Tom Brevoort to help with the interiors.

Much more pulse-pounding and action-packed is this publication’s secondary tale entitled “The Last Lord Of Darkness”. Written by Marc Guggenheim and drawn by Michael Sta Maria, this five-pager rather succinctly shows a deeply sorrowful Sorana being momentarily tempted to betray Mephisto with the help of K’un-Lun Master Guo. Together, the creative team do a great job in showing the ferociously-fast close combat skills of the two fighters, and ultimately just how far under Hell’s malign influence the Latverian-born sorceress has fallen.

The regular cover art of "BRING ON THE BAD GUYS: LOKI" #1 by Lee Bermejo