{"id":8448,"date":"2020-04-01T12:00:46","date_gmt":"2020-04-01T16:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=8448"},"modified":"2020-05-01T23:15:25","modified_gmt":"2020-05-02T03:15:25","slug":"thor-391","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2020\/04\/01\/thor-391\/","title":{"rendered":"THOR 391"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I don\u2019t know that it HAD to happen, but it did. About a year and a half after their messy exit from the Spider-Man world, Tom DeFalco & Ron Frenz have to scratch that itch. Shortly after leaving Amazing, the pair wound up on Thor, following the legendary, character-defining run of Walt Simonson. That\u2019s two all-time great runs in a row this team and kinda shuffled in after. Awkward. Brett Breeding inks and Christie Scheele colors. If you\u2019re wondering how big Spidey\u2019s guest spot is, well\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What did Frenz have against MJ to insist on drawing her hair like that? His Spider-Man is strangely looking both more and less Ditko-y. More in that he\u2019s more buff, less in basically all other respects. I wonder how much of that is Brett Breeding. At any rate, Spider-Man failed to notice he was swinging by a hotel with The Mongoose in it, who says a weird thing in his hand called a \u201cCellsmograph\u201d has led him to his quarry, and he will \u201cFeast on his living flesh!\u201d Delightful. Let\u2019s see what the hero of this book is doing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Thor currently moonlights on Earth as a construction worker called Sigurd Jarlson. Mm hm. DeFalco & Frenz have kept Thor so busy since Walt left that he didn\u2019t even know his home on Earth was destroyed, and he can\u2019t go to Asgard because The Rainbow Bridge was destroyed, so he\u2019s in a bind. So he tracks down his old construction boss, who rehires him on the spot. And then\u2026 things get weird.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Sooooo not to get too off track, but Tom & Ron\u2019s aforementioned messy exit from ASM was due to a clash with editor James Owsley (now known as Christopher Priest). Priest has written at length about what happened, and at least the way he tells it, DeFalco was late a lot, almost missed several deadlines, and Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter demanded he be fired. Priest eventually did fire him, and Frenz went right after, and there was bad blood all around (And then Shooter demanded to know why Priest had fired DeFalco). On top of that, after DeFalco decided Stern\u2019s secret identity for The Hobgoblin was bad and made up his own, Owsley decided DeFalco\u2019s didn\u2019t work, either, and went to extreme lengths to prevent him from revealing his choice by killing the character (Look at me dancing around spoilers). And so, in the same issue with Spider-Man in it, here we have a caricature of James Owsley ruining Thor\u2019s new construction site with his ego. Very inside baseball. And on the same page, we meet Eric Masterson, soon to become Thor, sort of. But that\u2019s off topic. ANYWAY, The Mongoose shows up and attacks Sigurd, somehow knowing he\u2019s Thor even tho they\u2019ve never met. The element of surprise allows him to knock Thor off a skyscraper in progress, falling to certain doom! But come on, who is our guest star?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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(We\u2019ll see that meeting eventually) Sigurd, of course, changes to Thor and flies back up to battle, where Not-James-Owsley turns up again\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Boy this is weird. And look out, it\u2019s Spider-Man\u2019s true archnemesis: gas! Thor saves our guy, but The Mongoose slips away. In trying to smack him with his hammer, Thor smashes the floor out from under the various people around\u2026 including\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Woof. Thor finally starts treating this lame like the lame he is, and actually throws his hammer so accurately that the strap grabs Mongoose by the ankle, flying him out over the city before he gets loose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This turns out to be a mistake, as The Mongoose just runs off. The heroes chase him all the way to the base of the building, where he leaps from the shadows, gases Thor, and then knocks out some of the building\u2019s support columns, causing it to start collapsing.  Eric Masteron is trapped under some debris, and soon Thor is left the only support column the building has. For once, it\u2019s not Spider-Man who has to lift the very heavy thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The day is saved. All that\u2019s left is a 2-page teaser for next issue, which is obviously outside the realm of this blog. What a strange, strange comic. For his part, Priest was very contrite and remorseful about the situation parodied here when he wrote about it in the early 2000s. I wonder if Tom & Ron ever mellowed out about it. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don\u2019t know that it HAD to happen, but it did. About a year and a half after their messy exit from the Spider-Man world, Tom DeFalco & Ron Frenz have to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8692,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[218,332,884,321,2,65,124],"class_list":["post-8448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-brett-breeding","tag-christie-scheele","tag-mongoose","tag-ron-frenz","tag-spider-man","tag-thor","tag-tom-defalco"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8448","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=8448"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8448\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8704,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8448\/revisions\/8704"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8692"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}