Our attempt to decide how Marvel should ideally collect all of Thor comics in omnibus format continues, with all the Silver Age and Bronze Age material already covered in the first part. Thankfully, things get much easier to work out from here: after Simonson, whose work on Thor received a dedicated omnibus
Thor
Omnibussin: Give Thor Some Love (and Thunder), Part 1
Thor’s had knockout run after knockout run in comics for the last several years, and with the release of the upcoming Thor: Love and Thunder film this will be the first character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe to get a fourth solo film. So, with interest in Thor at an all-time high, it’s the perfect time for Marvel’s publishing arm to give Thor some more love (and thunder) in the omnibus department, and our aim today is to ascertain just how they should go about it! [Read more…] about Omnibussin: Give Thor Some Love (and Thunder), Part 1
Jane Foster (Valkyrie) Reading Order!
Until the last decade, the tale of Jane Foster wasn’t a particularly noteworthy one. She was nothing more than the usual example of a 60s love interest, used as a secondary character to a male hero for a few years before being pushed aside and fading to the background of the Marvel universe.
But this all changed in 2014, when writer Jason Aaron pushed his run on Thor in a whole new direction by replacing the god of thunder with a new Thor, the Mighty Thor, the Goddess of Thunder : Jane Foster. Accompanied by Russel Dauterman’s gorgeous art, Aaron reinvented her as a superhero, protecting Asgard and the Nine Realms as Thor, while battling breast cancer as Jane, with the complication that using Mjolnir cancels the effects of chemotherapy on her body, thus putting her life on the line even more each time she picks up the hammer.
When the time came for Jane to stop being the goddess of thunder however, she didn’t stop being a hero, instead taking on the mantle of Valkyrie to defend the Realms and accompany the souls of dead heroes to Valhalla. And now that she is is about to come back to the MCU in a big way as the Mighty Thor in the upcoming Thor: Love and Thunder, it’s a great time to look back on the story of Jane Foster, both as the Mighty Thor and as Marvel’s new Valkyrie. [Read more…] about Jane Foster (Valkyrie) Reading Order!
Best 10 Thor Comics Of All Time!
Mighty Thor Vol 2 #700, cover by Russell Dauterman and Matthew Wilson, 2017The least earthbound of Earth’s Mightiest, the God of Thunder has for most of his Marvel comics history been very difficult to write. After all, how do you make an ageless god interesting? Give him a hammer and a big burly target? That’s proven at least an acceptable baseline for fans across the decades. But if I really wanted to convince a modern reader on the fence to love Thor, I’d have to look to those stories where the hammer blows and lightning strikes are balanced by something like character development. [Read more…] about Best 10 Thor Comics Of All Time!
Thunderstrike Reading Order!
What do you get when you cross the Thor mythos with grunge aesthetics? You get Thunderstrike, a new Thor variant made by the 90s, for the 90s. A beefier hero who traded his classic hammer in for an Asgardian mace. It’s a classic epic of a leather jacket fighting other, larger leather jackets.
First introduced as a side character in the pages of Thor, Eric Masterson quickly became the Thunder God’s new human alter ego (yes, the title was still doing the secret identity thing by the late 80s if you can believe it), before forging himself a new identity as Thunderstrike.
Created by Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz in 1988, Eric Masterson is a rare example of a Marvel hero who not only has a clear beginning and end to his story, but has also maintained a pretty consistent creative team throughout his comic book history (with DeFalco writing virtually all of his comics, and Frenz drawing most of them). In 2011, more than a decade after Thunderstrike’s death, the duo even came back to continue Eric Masterson’s legacy in the form of his teenage son Kevin, who inherits his father’s mace and becomes the new Thunderstrike (still active today, as of his last cameo apparition in the pages of Annihilation Scourge: Omega). [Read more…] about Thunderstrike Reading Order!