Comics: If Asgard Should Perish!

Our book today is a gem from 2010: a Marvel Premiere Edition called If Asgard Should Perish, with writing by Len Wein, artwork by John Buscema, and glorious coloring by Glynis Wein. This volume – which I somehow hadn’t known existed, and which I found just the other day in the used-book basement of the Harvard Book Store, collects eleven issue of Marvel’s Thor comic from the 1970s, and I was as happy as a pig in a warm wallow when I discovered it and thereby had the perfect excuse to re-read these adventures without digging up my forty-year-old single issues.

As eagle-eyed fans of Stevereads will no doubt recall, I had such an excuse once before, when a few years ago some of these issues were included in one of those thick black-and-white “Essential” reprint volumes, The Essential Thor #7. But reprint volume has long since disappeared from my library, and for once I’m not complaining – these are big, glorious adventures Wein cooked up for Thor and his Asgardian comrades (and feisty moral nurse Jane Foster); they deserve owned, read, and re-read in full color.

They’re not quite exactly the full colors Glynis Wein originally crafted for these issues – in If Asgard Should Perish, the colors are brighter and a bit simpler. But I’m willing to think this might be an unavoidable limitation of the reprinting process after all this time, especially when transferring from newsprint to glossy pages.

There are four stories in this collection: two are short and somewhat silly (Thor fights and then teams up with Ulik the Troll, Thor fights and then teams up with Firelord), one is a four-part time-travel epic I dearly love and have dubbed “The Temple at the End of Time,” and one is a disjointed political-personal story that gets just a little stranger to me each time I read it. The plot begins with Odin, the bearded and all-powerful ruler of Marvel Comics version of the Norse gods, acting even more short-tempered and unpredictable than usual – tyrannical, even, if that weren’t an unhelpful term in describing a character Stan Lee always wrote as being just a couple of stiff-armed salutes shy of an Asgardian Adolf Hitler. One by one, he’s imprisoned or exiled the more heroic members of Thor’s cohort, and eventually Thor journeys to Asgard to find out what’s going on.

He enlists the aid of his best friend Balder, his beloved Sif, the witch-queen Karnilla, and the Warriors Three, Fandral, Hogun, and Volstagg, and eventually he confronts Odin – who turns out to be Mangog in disguise! Mangog, the ancient foe of all Asgard! Mangog, who in his fighting prime possessed the strength of a billion billion beings! He’s weaker in these issues but still a royal pain – and still intent, nonsensically, on ending all life in the universe.

Thor of course stops him, but his defeat raises a natural question: if Mangog was masquerading as Odin, where’s the real Odin? Thor wonders if his father might be dead, so he voyages to the underworld to see what he can see – and throws a godly tantrum when he discovers that Odin isn’t there. I admit I prefer the crisp inking of Joe Sinnott on Buscema’s pencils to the scratchier and less distinct finishings of Tony DeZuniga, but even so: I reveled all over again in these visuals.

What follows the issues in this run was as natural a storyline for Thor as falling out of bed: a quest – our heroes go looking for the missing Odin. And as we’ve seen here at Stevereads, that storyline yielded gems of its own. But none quite so glittering for me with nostalgic excitement as the stuff reprinted in this volume, found by chance in a bookstore I hardly ever visit!