The Mighty Thor Omnibus, Vol. 2
Stan Lee (scripts)Jack Kirby (art)Marvel Comics, 2013 Only one slim month remains until the cinema premiere of “Thor: The Dark World,” the second big-budget movie featuring Marvel Comics’ hammer-wielding superhero Thor, the Norse god of thunder. The first Thor movie came out in 2011 and made 500 million dollars. The character’s second big-screen outing was in 2012’s “The Avengers,” which has gone on to make several billion dollars. “The Dark World” is therefore as close as any legitimate movie studio can get to being a license to print money: it will earn back its reputed 200 million-dollar budget in about ten hours and go on to make Marvel vast dragon-hoards of money.The comic book side of the company can therefore feel justified in suspecting there’s a buying public out there for Thor-related products, and the latest of those products, a second omnibus of the character’s long-running comic book series, has just appeared as a hefty hardcover featuring full-color reprints of Journey into Mystery #’s 121 – 125 and then (after its title change, the character never originally having his own first issue) Thor #’s 126 – 152, spanning from October 1965 to May 1968.The first Thor Omnibus, issued shortly prior to the first Thor movie, reprinted the character’s earliest appearances, wooden, adventure-of-the-month stuff featuring distracted plotting by writer Stan Lee (and a small host of less well-known names acting as buffers and polishers) and clunky, placeholder artwork by Lee’s brother Larry Lieber.This second volume is a very different thing. Around the time Thor graduated from Journey into Mystery to his own title, he somehow began to actually interest his creative team. Until then, he had mostly been Marvel’s answer to (or ripped-off version of, depending on your point of view) Fawcett’s Captain Marvel: crippled human doctor Don Blake, upon tapping his walking stick on the ground, is transformed in a flash into Thor, the god of thunder, the son of Odin, the prince of Asgard (and the walking stick is transformed into the mighty mallet Mjolnir). Most of those early adventures had hinged on some silly bad guy’s ingenious method of separating Thor from his hammer long enough for him to revert back to Don Blake. But gradually Lee began to sense the dramatic potential inherent in the character’s enormous mythological backdrop, and something of this grander, more Wagnerian feel communicated itself to Kirby, who began to turn in the best artwork of his career (very ably assisted by inker Vince Colletta, whose scratchy finishes became the perfect accents to the more muscular art Kirby was suddenly producing).Thor Omnibus Volume 2 collects the finest fruits of that renaissance. Here we have Lee churning up his signature melodrama with wild abandon: Thor has epic encounters with the unthinking, unstoppable Destroyer (“With one indescribable blow, the mighty Thor does what none have ever done before … he downs the dread Destroyer!”), the savage rock-troll Ulik (“Ulik! For a lifetime, I have heard thy name, spoken in hushed, fearful whispers! But, ever thought I ‘twas merely legend … to frighten young Asgardians into slumber!”), the sorcerer-warrior Enchanters (“Since we be without our special powers … ‘tis strength against strength! And throughout the countless galaxies, one truth is known: None have the power to match the mighty Thor!”), and the ability-mimicking Absorbing Man (“I have your strength … plus my own! Why can’t I beat you? Why?” “Think, human! Can you ever hope to possess the fighting heart of an immortal?”). In the collection’s best story (the one that actually carried the character from Journey into Mystery to his own book), Thor faces his Greek mythology counterpart Hercules, using his hammer, his fists, and verbiage only Stan Lee could unleash:
Anger??? By the bristling beard of Odin, thou knowest not the meaning of the word! Not all the fury in the heavens – not all the savagery on earth – can equal the sense-shattering cyclone of rage which is Thor, when seized by a pounding paroxysm of wrath!
Parse that, you pusillanimous pantywaists!The Thor run reprinted here is one of the best in the character’s long comic book history, rivaled only by the legendary Walt Simonson era, likewise recently given a lavish hardcover edition. But the superlative fun of the material itself (colonizing space aliens! Living planets! Soda fountains!) also serves to throw an unwanted spotlight on the many bizarre decisions the volume’s editors have made, starting with the cover, which is a stylized re-painting by current Thor artist Esad Ribic of the Kirby/Colletta cover of Thor #147, an issue called “The Wrath of Odin” – the original cover is no compositional masterpiece (Thor is the least noticeable of the three characters shown), and its reproduction by Ribic provides no sense of the special occasion of this new volume – a dashed-off feeling only deepened by the fact that the volume’s Introduction is also a reprint, a bit of Stan Lee boilerplate from 2005. For a $100 price tag, Marvel couldn’t come up with an entirely new cover and an entirely new Introduction?The inclusion of a Thor-parody from Marvel’s defunct self-parody title Not Brand Echh is a welcome treat, but how to make any sense of the five-page cover gallery that follows it, showing covers not of original Thor issues but of Marvel Spectacular issues, a mid-‘70s Thor reprint series? And although it’s certainly interesting to include reprints of the original letter-columns from all those early issues, one such letter – written by an intelligent but distraught Midwestern reader lamenting the company’s decision to replace the brilliant Tales of Asgard backup feature with one starring The Inhumans (the writer correctly pointing out that the Inhumans have no intrinsic connection to the world of Thor and should more properly be a Fantastic Four back-up feature) – inadvertently points out another bizarre editorial choice in this volume. True, the Inhumans back-up features have been removed (thereby confusing any new reader who bothers to read that well-composed letter) – but the Tales of Asgard features have been retained, even though a) they badly disrupt the dramatics of the main stories when read in tight sequence like this, and b) they were themselves the star of an excellent hardcover Marvel reprint volume only a year ago (and their removal from this present volume would have freed up room include more of the twenty-something issues Lee and Kirby went on to do; this pricey hardcover is a bit on the thin side).That Tales of Asgard volume raises the most serious question of all concerning this new volume. As fans and connoisseurs will recall, both that Tales of Asgard volume and the Walt Simonson volume were lovingly remastered on every page: colors were heightened or softened as the panel’s mood warranted; backgrounds were enriched; skin-tones were enlivened – and the end results were stunning. Where was that skill and dedication when this present volume was being made? The colors and backgrounds of these stories – the seminal ones on which all subsequent great Thor epochs are based – alternate between garish and washed out (the illustrations in this review are from the original issues, with the Captain Crunch stains edited out for your convenience). Nothing like the care of the last few high-priced hardcover reprint volumes was expended on this one, and given the divine nature of the main character, that’s something very close to sacrilege.Even so, there’s enough thundering good thrill and pathos in these issues to endure a little lazy reprinting, and long-time Thor fans will be grateful for the tough new edition. Their pulpy original issues weren’t getting any younger, after all.
