The Walt Simonson Thor!

Our book today is the latest Marvel Comics paperback reprint from what’s become known in reverential whispers as “The Simonson Run.”

Walt Simonson’s run as writer and artist on Thor only lasted a comparatively short time – from the golden year of 1983 to the golden year of 1986 – but media experts and comics fans unhesitatingly place that run of issues among the most accomplished and definitive for the character, an epoch to rival or perhaps surpass the great Stan Lee/Jack Kirby years. One of the most remarkable aspects of Simonson’s run is how confident it is, visually and rhetorically, right from the start (when Odin, the king of the Norse gods, abruptly transports his son Thor to Asgard from Earth, leaving Nick Fury, director of S.H.I.E.L.D. standing alone in the rain asking a typically wry Simonson-style question, “Don’t these people ever travel in dry weather?”). There’s no tentative growing into a style, as is so often the case with even the best artistic runs on certain comics titles. Instead, Simonson knows what he wants to do right from the start.

The simplest way of summarizing what he wanted to do is: to humanize Thor without quite making him human. Gone are the Sir Walter Scott-style ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ of the Stan Lee years, replaced with an oddly but believably quasi-elevated style of diction employed by Simonson’s Asgardians (with whom we spend a good deal of time, since Simonson, like Lee before him, clearly considered Thor’s back-story to be infinitely rewarding). Gone is the bombast (even, mostly, from Odin, who under Lee’s tenure was the Way, the Wonder, and the Windbag), and gone are the often wooden characterizations that could mar even the most powerful of Lee’s storylines. All Simonson’s characters – be they human construction workers, Asgardian rank-and-file warriors, or the heads of pantheons – are immediately recognizable people, acting from any number of real-feeling motivations, rather than the simple on-note heroism or one-note villainy that tended to satisfy earlier writers of the title.

Simonson also brough humor to the fore in a way no earlier writer had quite dared to do with Thor. Stan Lee displaced all his humorous impulses into stock clown characters like the rotund Asgardian warrior Volstagg, and although later writers like Gerry Conway would sometimes add little comic gags (Hercules deploring the look of Thor’s Teutonic helmet, for instance), the book was for the most part unrelentingly serious. Simonson kept the high seriousness, but right from the beginning of his run, he began injecting an element of sly, tongue-in-cheek humor the title had never seen before – including, famously, the issues where he had Thor temporarily transformed into a god-sized frog (“What do you call a 6’6″ fight-mad frog?” asked one of the covers, and when the reader opened the issue, he found the title on the main page answered the question: “Sir!”).

But as refreshing as such winking and nudging could be, it was a side-show to the main story Simonson used to kick off his run, and he built that story gradually. In the middle of some entirely unrelated adventure, we would suddenly cut to a shadowy figure working an enormous anvil “far from the fields we know” – a nice allusion to Lord Dunsany – a figure obviously forging something big and dire. Gradually, these little glimpses grew bigger and more detailed; gradually, we saw that the figure was immense, and that a vast, uncountable army was sitting in the darkness, eagerly watching the creation process.

By the time Simonson was ready to move these tense little vignettes to the center stage, regular readers of Thor were half-mad with curiosity to know who the immense forger was, what he was making, and what all of it portended for our stalwart Asgardian heroes. It was a masterfully-done feat of building expectations, but as any seasoned thriller writer could attest, it runs the risk of making the final revelations seem distinctly anti-climactic. The fact that it didn’t happen in this case was entirely due to Simonson’s retrograde willingness to tell Stan Lee-sized stories. It turns out the immense shadowy figure is Surtur, the primordial destroyer from Norse mythology who has forged the Sword of Doom in order to use it to destroy Asgard and her god – and all life in the universe in the process. This is an elder-god Surtur who’s as uninterested in being an ordinary ‘villain’ as this version of Thor is in being an ordinary ‘hero’ – and Simonson doesn’t hesitate to present Surtur as the equal of Odin in power.

Surtur rampages to Asgard, stomping on all resistance he encounters. Meanwhile, Earth is attacked by seemingly endless hordes of Surtur’s demons, forcing the Avengers to team up with the Asgardians in a fight that spills across all of Manhattan (even after a dozen years, the scenes showing the heroes rallying around the Twin Towers still have the power to sadden, like coming suddenly in a happy, smiling photo album upon a picture of someone long dead). In a desperate last stand in Asgard, Odin, Thor, and Loki are finally united as father and sons against a common, unbeatable foe. Before Simonson, fans would hardly have believed it possible for such a sequence to be accomplished with the wonderful combination of humor (“For Asgard!” Odin cries; “For Midgard!” Thor cries; “For myself!” Loke cries) and grand guignol action, and yet Simonson would go on to dream up half a dozen such sequences before his tenure on the book was over.

Two years ago, Marvel Comics published a gigantic doorstop of a hardcover Thor volume collecting Walt Simonson’s entire run on the book in gorgeously re-mastered color. That book was only just barely affordable at $100 and not at all portable. With a multimillion-dollar new “Thor” movie about to open in theaters worldwide, Marvel has seen fit to calve more manageable little glaciers off the great massif of that hardcover, and the latest of these features that first stunning, wide-scale Surtur story. Thor fans will of course know the splendors awaiting them here, but even newcomers will feel themselves pulled right away into Simonson’s fantastic world of wise-cracking gods and smiling villains and desperate all-or-nothing combats. This is as good as four-color comics get, and now with 80 % less wrist-strain!