{"id":21719,"date":"2024-06-19T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-06-19T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=21719"},"modified":"2022-10-16T12:14:50","modified_gmt":"2022-10-16T16:14:50","slug":"thor-v3-8","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2024\/06\/19\/thor-v3-8\/","title":{"rendered":"Thor V3 8"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Thor! A crossover with another title seems a weird choice for only the 2nd issue of PPSSM, but they did it, so we get to look at this. Dan Jurgens is writing this relaunched Thor series, and  yes, John Romita, Jr. is also drawing Thor at this time! And it is a title he was born to do. I\u2019ve remarked before (Probably many times) about how, in some ways, Jr is as much the successor to Kirby as he is to his dad. Nobody captures the scale and scope of Kirby\u2019s most ambitious concepts like John Romita, Jr. Thor is the book Kirby drew 2nd most during his first tenure at Marvel, after FF. He launched the title and then left for awhile, but once he came back, his lifetime love of Norse mythology and his interest in both space and the idea of gods kept him happy there longer than most Marvel titles. As much as Kirby is associated with most of the Marvel heroes, he\u2019s most associated with the FF and Thor. And aside from Walt Simonson (And that\u2019s a BIG aside, as Walt\u2019s run as writer\/artist is rightly held as maybe the all-time best Thor), no one\u2019s drawn a better Thor since Kirby left in 1970. And Romita\u2019s inked here by his best inking partner of all time, Klaus Janson! As I recall, Jr\u2019s stuff feels a little more like it was layouts that Janson finished here, as opposed to tighter pencils for Hanna on Spider-Man. But that\u2019s ok, back in the 80s when Romita was doing layouts for ASM, Janson interpreted them best. Jurgens made a choice I did not care for at all right off the bat in this title, binding Thor to a paramedic called Jake Olson. I think Olson died in a battle in the first issue or something, and Thor is living his life as penance for taking it, or something? It\u2019s been a long time. But, anyway, that last thing I wanted was a new Don Blake. I want Thor to be Thor, doing big, crazy stuff, not stuck on Earth trying to hide a secret identity. So, I wasn\u2019t too keen on that. But I bought all of the first 25 issues for Romita\/Janson, and don\u2019t regret it for a second. Jurgens is also dealing with how Asgard was destroyed and the gods disappeared before Heroes Reborn. Thor lost his powers and stopped wearing a shirt, it was a weird time. Now, Jurgens has created \u201cthe Dark Gods,\u201d who were trapped below Asgard by Odin and are now set loose, and because Odin wiped them from history, Thor has no idea what\u2019s going on. That\u2019s maybe all the exposition required to get into this. Gregory Wright and Dan Brown color this issue. Having finished whatever adventure he was previously on, Thor decides to go try to get some answers about what happened to Asgard. So he begins whirling his hammer around himself to teleport, as he often does.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 I mean, come on. That is a powerful Thor. But no matter how cool he looks, he\u2019s zapped back to Earth immediately, before he can even see anything, because of the so-called Dark Gods:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A complete fusion of Cosmic Kirby and Romita\u2019s own tendency toward complicated geometric designs. The winged guy in shadow down there is called Tokkots, and after he\u2019s denied the chance to kill a captive Baldur in front of an also captive Odin, he flies off, spots Thor\u2019s teleporting cyclone, and hops in just as he\u2019s sent back. And, also on Earth\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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One assumes this is Dan Brown, the color technique is really different from what Wright is doing on the Spidey books. Or, I dunno, maybe that\u2019s intentional. But it becomes really obvious with Peter and May showing up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Enter paramedic Jake Olson, aka Thor. And yes, he works in the same hospital as Jane Foster, the nurse Thor romanced as Doctor Don Blake in the 60s, now a doctor herself. As I recall, Thor remembers a lot of his doctoring and gets in trouble for doing more than a paramedic should to help people. Also Jane is kind of onto him being Thor from the second they meet. If she hasn\u2019t confronted him about it yet in this issue, she soon will.\u00a0Romita draws Peter\u2019s cameras SO HUGE! It\u2019s kind of hilarious. But it somehow feels right in his larger-than-life style, too.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I\u2019ve already spoken in multiple places about how much I like Scott Hanna\u2019s inks, but nobody touches Janson on Romita, Jr pages. He brings such a grit to anyone he inks, and it\u2019s right at home on Romita pages. The trouble is Tokkoks bursting out of the ground. For some reason? I mean, why didn\u2019t he materialize where Thor did? Why did the hospital and the Bugle send people to cover this before it happened? Tokkots talks in rhyme, like Jack Kirby\u2019s creation the Demon for DC, and has a similar color pallet, but looks nothing like him. He tells anyone who\u2019s listening that his slightest touch makes things age rapidly as he goes on his rampage. As he so often does, which is one of the reasons I didn\u2019t like him, Jake Olson abandons his partner during a crisis where they\u2019re trying to save lives so he can go be Thor. It\u2019s just irresponsible. Sure, maybe Thor can end this, but leaving Demetrius to deal with all the people hurt in Tokkots\u2019 wake is not terribly heroic. Peter and Jake run into different alleys and become their alter egos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Not a line that\u2019s aged well, there, but a great page! Tokkots stands on a building, making it become brittle and collapse, but (off panel) Spider-Man webs the debris together as Thor holds up what is essentially one whole side of an apartment building. With Thor thus kept busy, Spider-Man\u2019s free to go fight Tokkots. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Romita\u2019s art went through a phase in the mid-to-late 90s which I loved where everyone was massive. Even Spider-Man was burly. And few people draw characters with real mass and weight like him, so it was cool. It was especially, gloriously exaggerated on his 2nd X-Men run. But here we really, really see him shifting to a skinny, lithe Spider-Man. His Spidey is basically only gonna get skinnier over time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I don\u2019t know why so many people do such a bad job writing in rhyme. When half your couplet is way, way longer than the other half, say it out loud. Thor\u2019s insistence that Spider-Man hide behind him as if they don\u2019t have plenty of history fighting side by side doesn\u2019t make any sense. But, next post, we pass the baton to the team of Mackie, Romita, Jr. Hanna and Wright to finish this up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thor! A crossover with another title seems a weird choice for only the 2nd issue of PPSSM, but they did it, so we get to look at this. Dan Jurgens is writing…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21696,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[410],"tags":[35,1877,474,275,1878,118,435,2,65],"class_list":["post-21719","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1990s","tag-aunt-may","tag-dan-brown","tag-dan-jurgens","tag-gregory-wright","tag-jane-foster","tag-john-romita-jr","tag-klaus-janson","tag-spider-man","tag-thor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21719","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21719"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21719\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21734,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21719\/revisions\/21734"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21696"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}