Writer & Editor
I first had the opportunity to talk to Jon Mikl Thor back in 2005, while he was in the midst of a gruelling tour and had recently suffered an onstage accident in which he was nearly electrocuted. Despite that, he was very upbeat about his music career and made for a great interview. The only kicker was, I was interviewing him for Lögberg-Heimskringla, an Icelandic ethnic newspaper, and in the course of the interview learned he was not of Icelandic background at all.
Full disclosure: I’ve not only read Chadwick Ginther’s Norse-mythology-infused novel set in Manitoba, Thunder Road, I got to do so in my capacity as freelance copy editor. So I felt, having had a part in its production, I shouldn’t interview Chadwick about his book.
But, I figured, there was nothing wrong with hosting him as part of a blog tour. (Info on the book launch can be found at the end of this post; he’ll also be appearing at Thin Air: the Winnipeg International Writers’ Festival this autumn.)
Artist Oliver Coipel revamped Thor’s look for Marvel Comic’s reboot of the series, written by J. Michael Straczynski, in 2007.
Author’s note: a few things have changed since this was written. First, there was the resurrection of Thor by Marvel Comics in the acclaimed run on the new title by J. Michael Straczynski, alluded to in the comments from Tom Brevoort below. Also, there were new incarnations of Norse myths in independent comics, such as Grant Gould’s The Wolves of Odin.
And one other thing, what was that? Oh yeah, Marvel’s Thor is going to be a female character now, which has some people excited (nothing wrong with a more diverse Marvel lineup) and some people upset (because they forget Marvel’s Thor has also been a frog and a horse-faced alien, among other incarnations).
Add to that, two blockbuster movies starring Chris Hemsworth as the titular thunder god, who also featured in The Avengers movie and in its sequel, The Age of Ultron, due out in 2015. If you want to see how the god of thunder went from medieval god to modern superman, read on…
Though their names leap out at us from the days of the week, Norse gods were relatively obscure until recently. Opera figures of Siegfried and Brunnhild were one tentative step into this pagan world, but it took another form of entertainment to plunge a new generation into the old myths: comic books.
ONE of the reasons Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were able to cast ancient Norse gods as modern comic-book superheroes was that they were comparatively unknown, Richard Wagner and the names of our weekdays notwithstanding. Here, then, are a few terms so you can tell your Asgard from a Hel in the ground.
