Writer & Editor
Should you be interested in Walter Simonson’s Ragnarök? If you’re already familiar with the writer-artist’s work, particularly his acclaimed run on Marvel’s Thor, you can probably skip to the line below.
TL;DR – Shut up and take my money. Yes, it’s that good.
In the 1980s, superhero comics were in the process of reinventing themselves for a more sophisticated audience, and one of the creators who took advantage of that was writer/artist Walt Simonson when he took the reins at Marvel Comics’ Thor.
Chris Clarememont and John Byrne had made their mark on The Uncanny X-Men; Frank Miller and Klaus Janson had overhauled Daredevil into something epic. (Byrne and Miller, of course, later revolutionized Superman and Batman, respectively.) But Simonson, who had worked on The Mighty Thor in the late 1970s, already had mythic material to start with, and when he returned to the title he built it into a world-shattering story.
OK, fine, we all know Odinn (Óðinn) isn’t the god of thunder; that would be his son, Thor. But I have loved this meme pic since I first saw it on Facebook. Not much to add, other than: this is clearly an Allfather you can trust.
I first had the opportunity to talk to Jon Mikl Thor back in 2005, while he was in the midst of a gruelling tour and had recently suffered an onstage accident in which he was nearly electrocuted. Despite that, he was very upbeat about his music career and made for a great interview. The only kicker was, I was interviewing him for Lögberg-Heimskringla, an Icelandic ethnic newspaper, and in the course of the interview learned he was not of Icelandic background at all.
Full disclosure: I’ve not only read Chadwick Ginther’s Norse-mythology-infused novel set in Manitoba, Thunder Road, I got to do so in my capacity as freelance copy editor. So I felt, having had a part in its production, I shouldn’t interview Chadwick about his book.
But, I figured, there was nothing wrong with hosting him as part of a blog tour. (Info on the book launch can be found at the end of this post; he’ll also be appearing at Thin Air: the Winnipeg International Writers’ Festival this autumn.)
Artist Oliver Coipel revamped Thor’s look for Marvel Comic’s reboot of the series, written by J. Michael Straczynski, in 2007.
Author’s note: a few things have changed since this was written. First, there was the resurrection of Thor by Marvel Comics in the acclaimed run on the new title by J. Michael Straczynski, alluded to in the comments from Tom Brevoort below. Also, there were new incarnations of Norse myths in independent comics, such as Grant Gould’s The Wolves of Odin.
And one other thing, what was that? Oh yeah, Marvel’s Thor is going to be a female character now, which has some people excited (nothing wrong with a more diverse Marvel lineup) and some people upset (because they forget Marvel’s Thor has also been a frog and a horse-faced alien, among other incarnations).
Add to that, two blockbuster movies starring Chris Hemsworth as the titular thunder god, who also featured in The Avengers movie and in its sequel, The Age of Ultron, due out in 2015. If you want to see how the god of thunder went from medieval god to modern superman, read on…
Though their names leap out at us from the days of the week, Norse gods were relatively obscure until recently. Opera figures of Siegfried and Brunnhild were one tentative step into this pagan world, but it took another form of entertainment to plunge a new generation into the old myths: comic books.
