Blogotional: Comic Art

Saturday, October 25, 2008

Comic Art

Thor may be the cen- tral char- acter of the Asgard tales as told in Marvel comics, but it is his father Odin that is the "Cock of the Walk" in 'ol Asgard. As we continue to walk through the characters of the masterworks of Jack Kirby - Thor and Asgard at Marvel and the New Gods at DC - we turn today to the biggest of the bigs. Born of Norse mythology, the fact that these Asgardian characters have predecessors in epic literature somehow makes them just a little more exciting.

The ancient pantheons or mythological divinity - Greek, Roman, Germanic, and Nordic were all very family like, they were all headed by a patriarch and were all prone to all the inter-family squabbling so common to mankind.

Odin may be the most interesting thing about the Thor sagas told at Marvel. hey have recently killed him off and Thor has replaced him on the throne of Asgard, and the book is suffering for it. The father son relationship between Odin and Thor - Odin's efforts to both teach Thor what it means to be a "god" of Asgard, and to allow Thor to suffer the pain of learning many of those lessons on his own was, and I hope can return to being, a very compelling narrative and worthy of any comic reader.

The TV show Smallville has long since reduced itself to the typical teen angst crap on a super-hero canvas, but in its early days when Clark was young and his earthly father alive, it shared with this trait with the Asgardian sagas, but Thor and his father Odin did it first and they did it best.

The death of Odin in the comics, not unlike the death of Jonathon Kent on the TV show, have reduced the value of these comics tremendously. As boys become men, they experience much the same exhilaration that man would discover on finding his "powers" and only a father can tame that very ugly beast in a young man.

Comics are often a window on society and no more so than in this instance. We are not better for it.