Originally Posted by
Kurt Busiek
Never in my run.
But Lee and Kirby portrayed Thor as vulnerable to bullets and blades, as did Len Wein, Walter Simonson and others. Far less so to broad impact damage, explosions and ray guns. Or at least, they had Thor speak and act as if he were vulnerable to bullets and blades, and I'm willing to take him at his word.
When I started writing AVENGERS, I read through every appearance of Thor, and took notes on his interactions with guns, and while they were inconsistent, the majority of the evidence suggested he was vulnerable to bullets and blades. Energy exposure, though, seemed to fall into the "lord of the living lightning" area, and didn't bother him very much.
When I answered someone's question about it online, some Thor fans freaked at the idea that Thor had been protecting himself from bullets with his hammer all those years for a reason, but I figured he knew what he was doing. Some of them seem to think that if Thor is vulnerable to bullets, then it would be easy to kill him, just like it's easy to kill Captain America, Spider-Man or all those other characters who've been shot at for years without dying, but I have rather more respect for Thor's combat skill than that.
Some people have tried to argue physics about an Asgardian god, but given that this is a mythos where Balder is invulnerable to everything but mistletoe because his mom asked everything but mistletoe not to harm him, the rules of science don't play consistently for Asgardians. [Balder, however, later got shot to shit by automatic weapons-fire, though, and it took surgery to save his life. Go figure.]
So I tend to think that Thor was vulnerable to bullets and blades because he was an inspiration to Viking warriors, and if weapons just bounced off him like a tank, that's not very inspiring. So he's actually woundable in a battle, even though it would take much, much more to kill him than it would an ordinary human. He's still got skin in the game, as it were.
But none of this ever made it into any comic I wrote. I treated Thor the way Stan and Jack and Len and Walter had, and never actually injured him, because he's really good at what he does.
I did play a part in the one time, as far as I know, that Thor's actually been injured by a bullet. That was when Christopher Priest called me up and said, "I want to shoot an Avenger in the head, who can I use?" I asked him if he wanted to kill someone, and he said no, he was going to do the "bullet just creased the skull" cliche. I told him that if he didn't want to do that, he could have someone shoot Thor -- the bullet could break the skin and knock him down, but it wouldn't do a thing to the bone underneath and it'd piss him off.
So Priest did that, and has been hiding out from Thor fans ever since, even though Thor was not significantly harmed by the bullet, just momentarily stunned and pissed off.
Since my time, though, Thor has been redefined as bulletproof, as shown clearly in the Straczysnki/Coipel run. So something happened in-between that made it so he doesn't need to use the hammer to protect himself any more. I don't think Thor needs that -- I think he's plenty capable of triumphing over foes of all sorts for centuries without having indestructible skin -- but some people have Superman-envy about Thor, and don't want Superman to be able to do anything that Thor can't approximate. I'd rather he be the best Thor, not a substitute for Superman, but there you go.
In any case, I did think that Thor wasn't bulletproof at the time I wrote him in AVENGERS and GODSTORM, and still think that was true at the time, but Marvel's made him more powerful since.
Pardon the snark, it's Friday afternoon and it's been over 20 years that some Thor fans have been angry that I disagreed with them online.
kdb