Essential Thor Volume 3

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Essential Thor Volume 3 (Marvel, 2007)



About 18 months ago, with one eye skeptically wavering, I sat down to read the second volume of Marvel's Essential Thor, knowing that I really didn't like the character when I was a kid and read some his overblown and stilted late '70s adventures, but also knowing that the original '60s material by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby was certain to be different and superior. I had no idea what a trip I was in for. This stuff was completely wild and wonderful, absolutely one of the best two or three comics of the 1960s.

I elected to save this book for a rainy day, so to speak, and savored the anticipation, and am glad that I did. What a thrill this book is. It's 500 pages of beatdowns and wildly escalating, insane cosmic threats. It's every bit as long as a proper rollercoaster should be, especially one of the great wooden ones like the Georgia Cyclone where you have no idea where in the ride you are or what you can possibly expect around the next bend. Lee and Kirby just kept ratcheting this mad book up, with one unbelievable threat after another for thirty issues without a pause. There's Ulik the troll and the Wrecker and Karnilla the Norn Queen and a war between Galactus and Ego the Living Planet and Greek deities and Mangog and every so often, you just have to put the book down and rest for a little bit.

In the stories reprinted in the second volume, the format was a 16-page lead story and a separate five-page backup by the same team called Tales of Asgard where Thor and some of his adventuring friends had wild tales set in some nebulous, glorious past. Those backups reach an end after about ten of the 30 issues here, and I kind of missed them, though I was pleased that Fandral, Hogun and Volstagg were incorporated into the main storyline, expanded to twenty pages at a time, a little bit. They're present when Mangog, sole survivor of a race of billions who got on Odin's bad side some millennia previously, decides to attack Asgard while Odin is in his cannot-be-awoken-lest-the-universe-end "Odinsleep," leading to the cast's most desperate battle yet, until the next one, anyway. It's a book that writes its own hyperbole. Sheer, unadulterated bliss.

Also, at one point, Thor is flying around New York, realizes he's thirsty and gets himself a chocolate ice cream soda. He salutes the soda jerk's concoction and cute girls swoon over him. If that doesn't make you smile, you're hopeless.

There's a fourth Essential Thor available which takes the story into the early 1970s, and sees Kirby, whose art in this book will separate your jaw at least once every ten pages, stepping down, replaced by John Buscema and Neal Adams, and Lee handing the reins to Gerry Conway. Those men are all fine talents, but a big part of me doesn't want to see the saga end that way. In a perfect world, Thor is so much more than a simple character within the big, bulky Marvel Universe and a cog in that machine, he's the lead character in one of the most consistently entertaining comics that anybody's ever made. Very highly recommended.

Swingin' Sixties Edition, with Tezuka and Kirby

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death. This time, reviews of Dororo (Vertical, 2008) and Essential Thor volume 2 (Marvel, 2005).



Dororo was first published over twelve months in the pages of Shonen Sunday from 1967-68. The strip didn't reach a proper concluding episode by the time its creator, Osamu Tezuka, wrapped up his one-year commitment and went off to do other things, but it inspired a successful cartoon adaptation and was recently made into a live-action film. Vertical released the first English edition of the comic in April.

I can't give this quite the emphatic recommendation that I had hoped to. That's not to say this wonderful story by Tezuka is at all bad; it concerns a swordsman named Hyakkimaru and his associate, a young little thief calling himself Dororo, who travel through a strange, timelost medieval Japan on a quest to slay 48 demons. Because of a deal made by his evil father, Hyakkimaru was born a misshapen, helpless thing without a face, organs or limbs, kept alive by magic and willpower, and given prosthetics by the kindly doctor who raised him. The death of each demon restores one of the body parts he was born without. It's an odd mix of allegory and adventure fiction.

For the most part, I enjoyed the book tremendously, and was pleased to see another mad appearance of the "face tumors" that the great Tezuka would also use in an installment of Black Jack, although played a little differently here.

Unfortunately though, the translator's periodic use of modern slang and phrases which weren't in use when this serial was first published forty years ago really takes the reader out of the story. I think this is fantastic and can't wait for more collections - there are apparently just two more to come, completing the original serial - but I also can't help but believe that this was just one edit away from being truly perfect. It also makes me worry whether Vertical's translation of Black Jack will be accurate.




This, on the other hand, this I can recommend completely.

As a kid, I didn't have much interest in the late 70s Thor. It felt old-fashioned and wordy. Now, adult reasoning tells us that proper Lee and Kirby Thor from the 60s must be good stuff, because, you know, it's Stan Lee and Jack Kirby but their Thor comic is perhaps overshadowed by the period's other, more merchandised material, and it was rarely reprinted. So I'd never actually seen the real stuff before now. I was advised to start with the second collection, as it took a dozen or so issues for the team to find their feet. But if what's in the first book is even half as good as what's in the second, I'll concede that this is even better than the duo's Fantastic Four at its peak.

Holy anna, I can't tell you how fun this book was. It is a complete blast from cover to cover, one great big serial of wildly over-the-top mayhem. There's one sequence where some armed robbers burst in to a restaurant where Hercules is trying to eat, and he beats the hell out of most of them, chases the others outside, and incapacitates their getaway car by hurling a street lamp at the tires and separating the car's undercarriage from the rest of it.

Best of all is Thor himself, who's certainly old-fashioned and wordy, but man, nobody trash-talks like this guy. Even when Odin the All-Father gets annoyed at him for some familial slight and saps half his strength, he still tells his opponents in no uncertain terms just how unbelievable a beatdown they're about to suffer, and then delivers.

The artwork is uniformly amazing from cover to cover. It's certainly true that Kirby's work would have been better served with Joe Sinnott or Dick Ayers on inks than Vince Colletta, but I was never taken out of the reading experience because of sloppy linework or shortcuts. Whether it's the grandeur of Asgard or the deck of some spaceship in the "Black Galaxy," there's always something completely amazing to catch your attention, and surprises galore. I was familiar with Ego, the Living Planet from the 1980s Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, but its first appearance is still completely eye-popping.

Neatly, each issue of Thor teamed a 16-page lead story set in the contemporary Marvel Universe with an ongoing 5-page serial called Tales of Asgard, in which Thor and his warrior pals have an earlier set of adventures. It's in these that we meet this enormous, overweight braggart called Volstagg. I remember as a kid thinking this guy was the stupidest thing in comics, but in Lee and Kirby's hands, he's actually completely hilarious.

There are currently three Essential collections of Thor - 500-ish pages for $17 - with a fourth on the way next year which should, if I understand it, wrap up the Lee and Kirby days. I've got book three on order at my local comic shop, and so should you. The best superhero book of the sixties? Quite possibly!

(Originally posted June 13, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)

Volumes One of The Bumper Book of Solar Wind and Thor Visionaries: Walt Simonson

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death. Today: reviews of The Bumper Book of Solar Wind vol. 1 (Omnivistascope/Lulu, 2008) and Thor Visionaries: Walter Simonson vol. 1 (Marvel, 2001).



The British small press scene is a pretty interesting one, with lots of very talented young creators working away in relative obscurity. It's a market that I don't know very much about, and that's entirely my fault: when I was very interested a few years back, I used neither credit cards nor PayPal, and now that I use both, I'm trying to limit the number of single issue comics in the house for cost, space and storage reasons. But when the complete run of Solar Wind and its companion homage anthologies Big War Comic and Sunny for Girls were announced in low-price bookshelf editions, I ran out of excuses.

I'll look at the second collection in a month or so. This first one compiles the first five issues of Solar Wind, with work by the likes of Al Ewing, Matt Timson, Paul Scott, who edited the work, along with several others, and it is a real treat. I read the first third of it over lunch and was laughing so hard that a lady at the next table said "That must be a funny book!" It sure is. Solar Wind is a tribute to British newspaper comics of the 70s, with a smart-aleck editor, awful advertisements for stamp collecting kits, and a whole pile of over-the top comics. So the lunch in question, at the nearby "Loafing Leprechaun" faux-Irish pub, with British soccer on television and Led Zeppelin's "D'yer'maker" in the background, was a good setting!

Even better, after the first issue, each Solar Wind is a "merger" issue, so Solar Wind absorbs some other, non-existant other comics, taking on some girls' comics (Zoe Biddle, Wheelchair Ballerina is the greatest thing ever), war comics, crunching hard-man action comics and horror comics. The humor ranges from playful and loving to mean-spirited and over-the-top, and it all works very well indeed. None of the strips run for more than four pages, so those rare jokes that fall flat don't linger for long, and they're more than matched by the very successful ones. It's triumphantly silly, a real winner from start to finish, and very highly recommended, especially at less than eleven bucks! Don't be stubborn and miss out on this like I did!

Read more about the Omnivistascope small press world, from which Solar Wind emerged, at their web site!



I featured this book on my old Weekly Comics Hype in March of last year. A reread has prompted the following observations:

1. It's so nice to be able to read old comics in a vacuum. There are occasional references to other Marvel comics, but what you get in this book are twelve chapters of absolute awesome, with no backstory needed. If you know that Thor is a superhero take on the Norse god of thunder, then you're good to go.

2. Simonson's pacing is very odd in places. There's a sequence in the early pages where the warrior Volstagg is relating a tale, but several days seem to pass in the "meanwhile" of the main story before he finishes.

3. "The Last Viking" story is just amazing. Much has been written about Simonson's run on Thor, but I think this brilliant story, full to bursting with heart and life, is often overlooked.

4. Is this the best American superhero book of the 1980s? It's certainly close. Unless I'm overlooking one, it's either this or Levitz/Giffen Legion.

5. There are now five volumes of Simonson Thor in Marvel's Visionaries line. The second and third are still pretty hard to come by, but a couple of months ago, the company promised that new editions would be in print soon.

(Originally posted May 13, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)