Marvel Graphic Novel #32: The Mighty Thor – I, Whom The Gods Would Destroy (1987)
Plotted by Jim Shooter
Written by Jim Owsley
Penciled by Paul Ryan
Inked by Vince Colleta
Coloured by Bob Sharen
Spoilers (from thirty-five years ago)
I have two old bags from what was once the greatest comics store in my city, The Silver Snail (they were drawn by Ken Steacy) stuffed with the old wide-format graphic novels that Marvel used to publish. When I wanted to read The Death of Captain Marvel earlier in the week, I pulled these bags, that I haven’t looked through in years, out. I reviewed what else is in there (there’s some very good stuff), but what caught my eye was this Thor graphic novel that I have absolutely no memory of ever buying or reading.
What caught my eye was Jim Owsley’s name on the cover. Owsley, who is now known as Christopher Priest, is one of my all-time favourite comics writers, and unlike many of his generation, who have kind of fallen off, he’s only gotten better (his current Black Adam is fantastic, as is his Vampirella family of books). Owsley was more of an editor than a writer at this time, but what he did write was usually excellent (I wrote about his Spider-Man vs. Wolverine recently).
It’s interesting that the inside cover of this book mentions that it takes place before Might Thor #337, which was when Walter Simonson took over the book and turned it into one of the most exciting and daring books that Marvel published. Simonson shook up the status quo, bringing us characters like Beta Ray Bill, and re-examining long-standing characters like the Enchantress and Executioner. That this story takes place before that suggests, to me at least, that we have the frequently dull Thor here, but who knows, because I do not remember this book.
It’s interesting that there is no kind of descriptive blurb on the back cover – it looks like this was just tossed into the world with nothing more than a pretty standard cover image to recommend it to readers. I also find it curious that the plot for this book came from Jim Shooter, who was well known for making editorial decisions and issuing edicts that had to be followed.
I’m not sure what to expect from this, so let’s find out together.
Let’s track who turned up in the title:
- Thor
- Sif
- Heimdall
- Odin
Let’s take a look at what happened in these books, with some commentary as we go:
- Thor narrates most of the book as Don Blake. He’s deeply upset after not being able to save one of his patients in the operating room, and has gone to a bar to drown his sorrows. A woman starts to hit on him, but he’s not responding to her at first, and then introduces himself. The whole bar pauses when Lady Sif, dressed as an Asgardian and wearing a long sword, comes into the bar. She tries to get Don to take his walking stick, but he rejects her, speaking in the faux-Shakespearian English that passes for Marvel’s idea of Asgardian. Sif wants him to return to Asgard with her, but he’s not interested in that and, partly because he’s been drinking, rejects her harshly. One of the other men in the bar tries hitting on her, and she tosses him into the jukebox. Don tells her firmly to leave, and she departs, hurt. The woman from before asks him to leave, and they go for a walk together, ending up at her place. Don is thinking about the difference between an Asgardian and human life, and how he’s torn between those two worlds. They end up in bed together, and we see that Sif is standing outside the woman’s brownstone, holding the stick in the pouring rain. The next morning, Don wakes to find his stick next to the bed and gets angry. He storms up to the roof, with the unnamed woman following, where he yells at the sky, I mean his father. He accuses the woman of being patronizing (I wonder what she really thinks here), and then by way of apology, transforms into Thor and takes her flying. The narration shifts to Sif, who is standing in a park, somehow still holding the walking stick (this must be a mistake, because after two pages, it disappears from her hand). She summons the Bifrost and returns to Asgard, where she thinks it’s silly that she has to identify herself to Heimdall. We learn through this narration that she doesn’t think much of the games that Odin plays, or of the part that she ends up playing in them. She goes to see the All-Father, who is watching Thor fly around through a portal or something. She confides in him that she thinks Thor doesn’t love her anymore, but he explains that Thor is torn between his two ways of seeing things – as a mortal and as a god. He rejects Sif’s request to also become mortal, and she feels alone. Thor talks to the woman about how he sometimes wishes he was just a regular man, and she is surprised by this, being attracted to his power and enjoying flying across Manhattan. He drops her off on her roof and flies around doing some good deeds, saving a man from a falling crane, stopping some bank robbers from getting away, and putting out a building on fire by summoning some rain. A street vendor gives him a creamsicle and asks him to pose for a photo, and this bothers him. He feels that, in his Thor form, he can’t enjoy anything. He fears that Thor is not really alive, and that only Don Blake can feel joy. He flies into space, and tosses his hammer far away, knowing that if it takes more than a minute to return to him, he’ll revert to Don Blake and suffocate. The transformation happens, but the hammer returns, turning back into a stick. Dying, he strikes it against his shoe, and becomes Thor again, and flies back to Earth. Sif finds him in a wooded area in Central Park. She offers him her love, but their conversation is disrupted when a kid’s soccer ball rolls to their feet. Sif is shocked by how kind Thor is to the child, and he offers to show her why he likes mortals so much. He turns to Don Blake again, and takes Sif shopping. They have a problem at Bloomingdales because they guard doesn’t want her to enter with her sword, but the store manager offers to check it and deliver it with the purchases she wants them to make (I had to check to make sure that this came out before the movie Pretty Woman, because this is such a similar scene to the one where Julia Roberts hits Rodeo Drive). Sif is not comfortable being dressed in human clothing, or having her hair and makeup done, but she permits it to make Thor happy. He encourages her to speak normally, and takes her around Chinatown, Little Italy, and Rockefeller Center, hoping to impress her with industriousness, pizza, and tourist destinations. As they sit in a fancy restaurant, waiting for their food, Sif admits she feels nothing for the experiences he’s shown her, and she walks out. He takes her to his home, and sees that she’s happy to see her sword. Sif says she doesn’t understand why Thor continues to be Don, after Odin’s punishment that trapped him in that form was lifted. Thor says that part of it is that he doesn’t want to only do Odin’s bidding, and implores Sif to be independent as well. He tries to kiss her, but she’s not attracted to Don Blake. This makes him angry, and he threatens to burn his walking stick in his fireplace. Sif gets angry with him, saying he’s at war with himself. She tears off her clothes and leaves. Don’s phone rings – there’s an emergency at the hospital and he’s needed. He heads in and learns that he needs to perform an operation on a young girl who was hit by a car. He admits to his colleague that he lost his confidence when he lost his last patient, but the man tells him he doesn’t have the skill to do it himself. Standing over the girl, Don loses his nerve and leaves the OR. As he sits in a waiting room, pondering, Sif comes to him and admits that she loves him because he cares so much for mortals. She asks for his forgiveness, and asks if, as Thor, he would fight off an army of trolls to save the girl, and he replies that he would. This restores his confidence, and he returns to operate. We see that Odin has been watching all of this, and that he’s satisfied that Thor will not let his life as Don Blake take over, causing him to die one day as a mortal.
I’d read a small handful of Thor comics before Walter Simonson came along, but not enough to really feel confident I knew the character up to that point. I don’t know how the writers before Simonson employed the Don Blake persona, other than when he turned up in issues of Avengers. As I remember it, Simonson sidelined or did away with Blake, as his Thor stories were more focused on Asgard and on Thor being and acting like a god.
I think that might be the reason why Shooter wanted to tell this story – it served as a final reconciliation of the two sides of Thor’s personality, and as a sort of send off to Blake. It was weird to think of Thor as this incredibly skilled and respected surgeon, as the persona didn’t really match the character the way he’s been shown ever since Simonson’s run.
When I think of Thor now, I think the MCU portrayal of him as a kind of dumb meathead has leaked into the comics, where he’s often shown as unhappy or dissatisfied, but not in the existential way we see here.
One thing that stood out in reading this comic is the poor portrayal of women. The woman who meets Don in the bar, sleeps with him, and then flies around with him for a while doesn’t even rate getting a name, and is dropped from the story pretty quickly. Sif’s role in the story, and based on the way that Odin thinks of her, in Asgard in general, is to be Thor’s lover and to keep him on Odin’s approved path, and I’m not sure that her thoughts are listened to very often. In the end, it’s her apologizing to Don, and not him acknowledging that he was a bit of a controlling jerk throughout the story. Maybe that’s an 80s thing?
I’m also very bored of reading about the father/son dynamic between Odin and Thor. I’ve never understood how Odin has been viewed as a great king and leader for his people, when writer after writer shows him as petulant and butt-hurt, or scheming and manipulative. This is why I stopped reading Donny Cates’s current Thor run (the first to acknowledge Don Blake’s existence in at least a decade, even if it was just to make him into a homicidal maniac), and seeing it here immediately made me yawn. I guess that’s a topic I’ll have more to say about if I ever get around to rereading the main Thor series (I would like to revisit Simonson’s glory days).
This is an odd story to receive this kind of graphic novel treatment, which was still seen as a sign of prestige. Sure, the story is more mature than most, in a philosophical and relationship way (at a time when calling a comic ‘mature’ usually meant curse words and boobies), but it doesn’t have the kind of epic scope that would benefit from the larger pages.
Paul Ryan’s art, with Vince Colleta’s inks, looks just fine, but it’s very much the Marvel house style, and he was given no real occasion to shine or push any boundaries.
Had this story ended up being spread across two issues of Marvel Fanfare, I wouldn’t have been surprised, and think it might have fit better there. I’m not mad at digging it out, and it’s interesting to view it as a very non-Priestian example of Jim Owsley/Christopher Priest’s writing career, but I also understand why I didn’t remember owning this book.
For my next column, I’m going to revisit the DC event that was largely responsible for me sampling the entire DC line, and probably got me to keep buying at least three or four more monthly titles.
If you’d like to see the archives of all of my retro review columns, click here.
