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Looking forward to read Thor by Donny Cates.
I still have lots of Thor stories to read,but i will be reading the new Thor stories for sure.
Venom by Donny Cates have been a great comic book,so i am intrigued to read the new Thor comic book.
Thor #228 Oct 1974
"Ego: Beginning and End!"
Ego has withdrawn his minions, and begins to project images into Thor's mind.
Thor relives Ego's origin, as Egros. When he comes to, he discovers that while they had Ego distracted,
Galactus has attached thrusters to Ego's south pole, launching him into exile.
Galactus then agrees to free Firelord if a suitable replacement is found, and such a one is the Destroyer.
Script by Gerry Conway, pencils by Rich Buckler with Arvell Jones and Keith Pollard, inks by Joe Sinnott.
Last edited by JKtheMac; 10-11-2019 at 03:44 AM.
“And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.” ― Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Listen to your own argument. Superman often suffers badly from being unrelatable. One of the most famous but largely unsuccessful comics of the modern era. A character I have never liked one bit, even as a child in the seventies he was dated. A character from before even my parents’ age (they were young). For me and many others an artefact of an age that has turned into nostalgia, parody and self-reflection. Nobody wants a character even less relatable than that!
Last edited by JKtheMac; 10-11-2019 at 03:45 AM.
“And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.” ― Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Well, Thor is from a time before the greatgrandparents of the people that invented Superman were born, and then another hundred generations. Why is this the place you are looking for a less "dated" character? Superman grew up on a farm, moved to the big city, got a 9-5 job at an office, has a relationship with a coworker, every part of Thor's life is fantastical. Writers have experimented with powering down Superman, or disconnecting Magneto from WWII. It's not where their niche lies. I feel the same way with the viking god characters. If all their experiences are 100% acquittable to that of the modern man/woman, I'm disappointed. Thor isn't like the people of Earth. Now he doesn't have the same problem that Superman does, in that he isn't the only Asgardian. In the city he calls home he's not a thousand times faster, stronger and tougher then anyone else. He operates in the Nine Realms where there many powerful beings rather a city of humans, so it's easier to show him struggling. But if the intended takeaway he's as mortal as you or me, then I feel that writer perhaps should not be on the God of Thunder.
I would argue that Thor the character in the comics is not the same as the supposed god of a few random surviving ideas from an era long forgotten, precisely because he can’t be. Nobody alive today has a clear or undisputed idea of how that religion functioned, outside of a christianised perspective from the thirteenth century. If indeed it was a religion in the way we now think of them.
It is wrong IMO to suggest that Kirby latched onto the idea of turning Thor into a superhero as a means of somehow reviving a character from a forgotten era. Marvel’s Thor is very much a phenomenon of his time. A character reflecting upon earlier superhero archetypes that were very relatable to kids, specifically Fawcett’s Captain Marvel. A hip and modern take on the idea of heroes, and part of Kirby’s fascination of the fertile ground between mythologically and humanity.
“And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.” ― Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Nobody has a undisputed idea of how that religion functioned, no, but nearly every writer and reader of Thor had an idea of Thor, be it accurate or inaccurate, formed from more then Marvel comics before ever picking up a comic. I feel you'd want to write Thor invoking from a being from very different time and place, rather then a place that's the same as us in a disappointing amount of ways. If he's as modern and human as any other Avenger, I think he loses something. Almost nobody that watches Marvel movies or comics today grew up during WWII when Captain America was created, but the creative team behind Captain America will empathise he is from a different time all the same, they understand it's an important part of sets him apart. But he'll still get the occasional reference that Thor misses, for whom the modern world is more alien place still. That's how it should be to me.
Both Thor and Captain America were reshaped and modernised by the Marvel era of comics, so I really don’t see that argument. The defrosted Captain America was about reflecting upon a new era through the lens of an era gone by. Cap has an entirely new function in the Avengers stories. One that has remained modern by continuing to use him in that way. A man from two eras and therefore forever a means of reflecting upon modern times with the values of the past.
Thor on the other hand was often used counter to his early genesis. Moved into a fantastical realm that no longer allowed him to be the guy who sits between two worlds. By undermining his humanity we risk loosing his relevance. He is always at his best as slightly separate from Asgard and from Earth. Sitting between mythology and modern storytelling. A means of telling modern and relevant stories that resonate with mythology and abstraction.
This necessitates a strong and intimate connection with Earth and its people. It requires him to be more human than the gods and more divine than humanity. Both have to exist side by side, with his human aspect being modern and relevant to our current world. Like any character, he cannot be allowed to ossify based on some outdated notion of who he is.
“And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.” ― Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
I agree with most of that, but I don't see why Thor needs to be so very modern. He's visited Earth at every point in it's history, never picked up anything that endures at any other time? If modern values dominate who he is, I don't think he's reflecting the many thousands of years old character we know him to be. Old King Thor is worse still. His encounters with Nick Fury, Gorr and Jane Foster in the early 21th century still define who he is thousands of years later. If he's that modern and relatable now then he should adapt to something new after just as quickly, nothing turns out to be further from the truth.
Nothing gets under my skin more than the argument that Superman is unrelatable. It comes from such a shallow understanding of the character. I'm a black man, I shouldn't be able to relate to Superman at all, but I do. Superman is the ultimate first responder, even without his powers, that's what he would be. A fire fighter, an EMT, a Police Officer, that's who Superman is. Yes he has all the powers, but he can't be everywhere at once, as many people as he saves, there are those whom he can't and that weighs on him. He's an example of absolute power not corrupting absolutely. In a world that is becoming more cynical, harsh, and cruel by the second, it is difficult to believe that a man like him, does the right thing just to do it. He isn't motivated by the death of a loved one, fame, riches, or crippling insecurity. He just does it. Grant Morrison once said that "Batman fights death, while Superman fights the impossible." I think he does that because he's the only one who can.
“Relatability” is a bit of a meme. This idea that readers will reject any character that isn’t a 1 to 1 copy of their own modern lives and beliefs doesn’t really hold up at all. Look at Immortal Hulk under Ewing. Hulk has never been less “relatable” than he is now as a walking incarnation of the Judaic Satanic Archetype as he struggles with a malevolent Anti-God who wants to use him for his own ends and is also secretly plotting to destroy the world on his terms. Hickman’s X-Men has reincarnation, clone bodies that allow mutants to cheat death, god-tier machine civilizations at the center of black holes, and a biologically sentient island serving as the home base for the X-Men. And both of those franchises are doing better than they have in years.
If Thor got a crappy 9-5 job at his local McDonald’s to help pay for his college funds that would be very relatable for the average reader but it would also be pretty damn boring. Thor needs to be exciting. Plots that span the realms and aim at Thor’s love of adventure and desire to help others are what makes Thor an attractive character. Thor needs to be cool more than he needs to be relatable.
Cates taking over Thor is fine. I really loathe Knull at this point so it’s going to be a slog to get through the inevitable Thor vs Knull showdown but hopefully the rest of the story will be good.
Maybe it's just me, but I tend to relate fine to characters that others say are "unrelateable..."
I don’t even agree that he is thousands of years old. I much prefer to see him in the way he was presented under Aaron as being a little over one thousand years old give or take a couple of hundred years. The whole Ragnarok cycle stuff can he hand waved away as nothing more than a passing fancy of a few writers who wanted to write a more mythological Thor. It has mostly been retconned out of existence from my own personal perspective since Secret Wars.
But that’s a bit of a tangent. I am not saying he needs to be “very modern” I am saying his stories need to be modern. Mythology in the context of modern storytelling has the power to enlighten us and see the world around us in new and interesting ways. Ways that can’t be expressed simply and often can’t be expressed outside of storytelling. To do that the characters need to speak to us now.
Take what I have already claimed to be one of my favourite issues of Thor of all time. Thor #10, ‘A Boy and his All-Father’. The power of that issue for me is its direct addressing of dysfunctional fatherhood in a very modern and relevant way. A way that spoke to me and my own life, and probably many others who have had more difficult parental relationships than I ever did. On one level it was timeless story of a father and son rivalry, and on another it couldn’t have been told in any previous decade. Only now are these kinds of issues being addressed in ways that acknowledge how our culture places expectations on fathers.
Last edited by JKtheMac; 10-11-2019 at 10:34 AM.
“And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.” ― Kurt Vonnegut Jr.