Reasons to love Thor: Ragnarok

Thor: RagnarokOK, before we get into discussing why you should see Thor: Ragnarok, we’re going to ignore for a moment that the title of this post misspells “ragnarök” as “ragnarok.” I’m sure if it were a section of Taika Watiti’s Thor movie, there would be a “devil’s anus” joke to riff on here. And I’m a bit disappointed that a movie willing to use Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” not once, but twice, didn’t get an umlaut in its title.

But such petty concerns are beside the point. I loved this movie. It was exactly as fun as I hoped it would be.

And, in its many departures from Norse mythology, it actually uses them to make a point. Unlike the first two Thor movies (which I enjoyed in their own right), Taika Watiti’s Thor: Ragnarok finds a way to make the Marvel superhero Thor both epic and funny. (In Thor, he was funny, but not epic. In Thor: The Dark World, he was epic, but not exactly funny.)

Thunder God Thursday: Walter Simonson’s Ragnarök

simonson-ragnarok-teaseShould 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.

Why you should read Walt Simonson’s entire run on Thor

MightyThorOmnibuscropIn 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.

Norse code

ONE of the reasons Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were able to cast ancient Norse gods as modern comic-book superheroes was that they were comparatively unknown, Richard Wagner and the names of our weekdays notwithstanding. Here, then, are a few terms so you can tell your Asgard from a Hel in the ground.