Cimmerian 'Stravaganza: The Comics - Part 2!

"Conan the Barbarian" (the phrase is synonymous with the character, and yet, in classic "Elementary, my dear Watson," or "Beam me up, Scotty" style, it was never actually used in the original material) became a modest, surprise hit for Marvel Comics shortly after its debut. Fans responded not only to the whole sword-and-sorcery sub-genre but to Roy Thomas' specific vision of the Hyborian Age created by Robert E. Howard for the pulp market decades before. The four-color comic sold well enough, in fact, to sustain a spin-off: "Savage Tales of Conan" was another great Thomas idea, a larger-format black-and-white magazine designed to showcase longer and more visually opulent stories than the regular comic book would usually do. And both "Conan" and "Savage Tales" drew sustained life from the pencilling talents of the same man: Marvel Comics' heavyweight fan favorite, John Buscema.

Buscema was already a legend when he came to the "Conan" titles, but they gave him a range usually unavailable in super-hero comics. In the pre-historic world Thomas was fleshing out from Howard's writings, Buscema was free to let his considerable imagination soar, without needing to conform to the super-strength and eye-beams norms of titles like "The Fantastic Four" or "The Avengers." He was far less meticulous than his predecessor Barry Smith had been, but he also never ran the risk of stylized, static lapses into which Smith's art could sometimes fall. At the height of his powers, Buscema could scarcely draw a cup sitting on a table without viewers worrying it would spill on them - his panels virtually vibrated with movement.

The result was the visual conception of an entire world - and of a character. Gone was the epicene rock star of Smith's run on the title. In his place stood a far more solid adult man, broad in the chest, wide in the waist, less the lithe superhero, more the thickset tavern-brawler. This Conan might still at certain angles have looked young, but he was unquestionably seasoned - he sported a shaggy Prince Valiant haircut, a fur loin-cloth, wide lips, and a broad, oft-smashed nose. He was a stoic, no-nonsense man of violence, and the visuals Buscema came up with issue after issue helped Thomas to refine his idea of the character to an immediate perfection seldom achieved by other writers with other characters (instinct and luck play a certain part too, and timing - think of Claremont and Byrne's Wolverine, or Miller's Daredevil). To most of us reading these issues eagerly every month, this was Conan.

The world Thomas and Buscema helped to create (the working partnership between these two was an amazing fluke on its own - both imperious control-freaks who fundamentally disliked collaboration, and yet here they were working in what seemed to be perfect tandem) was an enormous elaboration on the one Smith had begun to sketch. Monsters roamed everywhere - Buscema's talent for drawing most animals stood him in good stead as Thomas' scripts called for a veritable Noah's Ark of gigantic bears, moths, rats, lions, eels, squids, lions ... as well as the perennially-popular dinosaurs. Conan fights sabre-toothed tigers, pterodactyls, slugs the size of rhinos, and even, in a breathlessly-paced sequence, a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

And through it all, Buscema's Conan is as far away from Smith's virginal quester as possible. This is a man much closer to Howard's original conception (and, with any luck, the version we'll see in only a few days when the new movie adaptation opens in a theater near you): a boisterous creature of huge appetites - some of them frankly sexual. Buscema was able to indulge to the fullest his oft-announced affection for drawing sultry women - including every kind of evil-eyed seductress imaginable (one of them ends up being made of sea weed), a stunningly re-imagined Red Sonja (Buscema replaced the jerkin-and-skirt Windsor had given the character with ... nothing much at all), and, in a long and satisfying story-arc, the corsair-queen Belit, whose death and brief resurrection marked the 100th issue of "Conan the Barbarian."

The run was immensely successful, and it defined the character for an entire generation. Even when the vogue of sword-and-sorcery started dying out, those Marvel issues kept coming: "Conan the Barbarian," "Savage Sword of Conan," "King Conan," and countless stand-alone specials and spin-offs (Thomas and Buscema spent less than a year on an adaptation of one of Howard's other great creations, King Kull, for instance, and it was a joyous event for fans of the character). Conan was drawn in this same period by other great pencillers - Gil Kane, Jim Starlin, Gene Colan, and many others tried their hands at the Cimmerian - but he belonged to Buscema, and of course to Thomas. When their time with the character finally petered to an end, it seemed almost like a Hyborian funeral was in order. Those of us who'd loved the era thought: there might be crappy knock-offs in the future (done more to keep the copyright alive than out of love or craftsmanship), but this kind of genius won't come again.

We were wrong, of course. But we had to wait a while.

Cimmerian 'Stravaganza: The Comics - Part 1!

Our Cimmerian 'Stravaganza of 2011 kicks into high-gear this week in anticipation of the new Lionsgate spectacular premiering on the 19th and starring Iowa's own Jason Momoa in the role that made a certain once and future California governor a star. And the most natural place in the world for our ongoing 'stravaganza to, um, go next is the medium where the character, the world, the very concept of Conan the Barbarian flourished - comic books.

And when we enter that medium, one thing becomes glaringly obvious: with all due respect to creator originality and meaning no disrespect to Robert E. Howard, Conan the Barbarian as he exists in the popular consciousness has a fully equal co-creator, and that co-creator's name is Roy Thomas.

Thomas will be familiar to the more nerdy among you (and to those of you who dote on my frequent comics-postings here at Stevereads)(i.e. the most nerdy among you). He was the organizational and conceptual workaday genius who pretty much inherited the mantle of Marvel Comics from Stan Lee when the company was bought and Lee was promoted to Publisher. Thomas took all the bursting creativity of Lee and his artistic collaborators, added a much more intuitive and comprehensive grasp of inter-title continuity, and almost single-handledly created the next great age of Marvel titles. And in 1970, he managed to convince Glenn Lord, the literary manager of Howard's estate, to allow Marvel to put out a comic titled "Conan the Barbarian."

Despite a significant amount of reader demand, publishing a sword-and-sorcery literary adaptation in 1970 was a bit of a risk for a mainstream company like Marvel, so Thomas originally had a tight budget - too tight, in fact, to allow him to have the company's first choice of artist, the fan favorite (and correspondingly expensive) John Buscema. And in retrospect, this was a blessing: it forced Thomas to 'settle' for a sexy young Brit named Barry Smith, whose pencilling work (especially when he handled his own inking) was only just starting to show signs of the lavish, unique brilliance it would achieve in part because of the leeway Thomas gave the artist on this book. As Thomas remarked at the time when presented with the choice of artists, if he'd gone with Buscema in those early days, he'd have sold more issues and won fewer awards.

Looking at that initial Smith run on the book, it's utterly amazing how fast he throws off the unconvincingly Kirbyesque style he was using in issue #1. In a remarkably short time, Smith starts to show readers the sinuous, glittering detail for which he would later become famous. Most artists mature more slowly, but even by issue #4, the landmark "Tower of the Elephant," there are clear foreshadowings of Smith's more mature look.



Those earliest issues give us a very young Conan - lithe, boyish (indeed, many of Smith's '70s big-hair panels make the character look like the baddest-ass Bee Gee of them all), savage but inexperienced, and as such they make the perfect companion to this new movie, which features a Conan just at the beginning of his incredible career. He's not yet the preposterous monolith we were given in the last movie adaptation, and let's hope he never becomes it: the real Conan was far more than a simple strong-man - he's much more a lion than a bulldozer.

And magnificently sustaining Smith's evolving visuals was the scripting of Roy Thomas, who took a personal love of the character in Robert E. Howard's stories and re-created that character and his entire world for a much, much broader readership than Howard had ever reached. Long before the original movie and long after, mention of Conan was as likely to conjure the world Thomas created as visions of Austrian weightlifters. That world, like Howard's is full of torch-lit taverns and fantastic creatures who've survived from even earlier eras in Earth's troubled history. And more: it was Thomas who perfected the driving tension in the background of Howard's stories - the tension represented by Conan himself, a mortal man without super-powers who encounters all these fantastic creatures, these stubborn hold-overs from earlier times in which even Conan the Barbarian would not have survived ... encounters them, and defeats them. Not for heroism's sake (Thomas' Conan, like Howard's, is usually indifferent to heroism), but because he insists on dominating his own world. As paradoxical as it may seem, this Conan was both a representative of Everyman and an avatar of the 'modern' world.

For all his genius, Smith was never cut out for regular comic book series work, and everybody knew it (it's precisely this quality in his work that makes his frequent forays into the genre so instantly memorable). Luckily, as "Conan the Barbarian" sales blossomed, Thomas was able to acquire an artist who was not only cut out for regular series work but gloried in it, and that artist would go on to create as definitive a visual of Conan as Thomas had created a mental one. That artist of course is the aforementioned John Buscema, and we'll look at his contribution in our next chapter!

Comics: Essential Thor Volume 5!

Our book today is Marvel's new Essential Thor Volume 5, which for some unknown reason features a retouched version of this cover:



- which is just a run-of-the-mill John Buscema (the volume claims the cover is done by Buscema and John Romita, even though that's visually not the case) fight scene with the dialogue removed, instead of this cover, which is a vibrant basic from the tuxedo-neat pen of John Romita:



And the mis-choice of cover maybe gives readers a hint of the trouble to come: this is an uneven volume, to put it mildly. It collects 25 issues from the early 1970s, all written by the great Gerry Conway, almost all drawn by the great John Buscema (a couple are done by his perennially-underrated brother Sal, and a couple more are only roughly laid out by either Buscema, with finishes done by the, shall we say less inspired? pen of Don Perlin), almost all inked by the great Vince Colletta. And don't get me wrong: the volume has dozens of great moments in Thor's comic book history. But unlike previous Essential Thor volumes, it doesn't really boast a classic Thor-style epic storyline like some we've examined here over the years.

Not that it doesn't try real hard! Gerry Conway took over the writing and plotting chores on "Thor" directly from the master himself, Stan Lee, but even if you're encountering the stories in this thick black-and-white volume for the first time, you'll notice right away that Conway doesn't quite have the knack that Lee had for crafting just the right mixture of super-heroics and bargain-rate Wagnerisms to keep Thor a believable character. And again, it's not from want of effort - there is, in fact, the sketchy idea of a great big epic-storyline unfolding across a large number of the issues contained in this volume, but it only comes close to coalescing.

Festivities start off with him again - Mangog, the mole-clawed prehensile-tailed super-baddie with the strength of ... wait for it ... a billion billion beings. He's wreaking havoc in Asgard as this volume's set of reprints gets underway, and he's once again intent on killing Odin, the king of the Asgardian gods, killing Thor just 'cause, and last but not least, drawing the Odinsword from its scabbard and thereby killing the universe (Mangog only and always talks about revenge, so the point of that last part is a little trick to follow). The Asgardians are losing badly - including Odin: Conway very much liked the concept of Odin as an older and wiser-but-still-powerful king-god figure, rather than the energy-wielding cosmic heavyweight favored by Lee.



But Odin, as always, has a plan. Many plans, in fact, so many plans that not only Thor and the readers but Odin himself have no hope of understanding them. Take this storyline, for instance: Odin has sent Thor (and his comrades the Warriors Three) to the Twilight Well at the World's End, to collect some of its mystical waters, and he's sent Thor's beloved goddess Sif (under the protection of Hildegarde, a gigantic fur-caped warrior woman of Conway's invention, a wonderfully hard-bitten character who's never used again in "Thor" and really should be) to a mysterious world populated by dragons, knights, and steamboats. Odin has his reasons for both these decisions - but they make no sense and end up only pointlessly complicating things and, briefly, costing him his life. The reasons involve Kartag, the huge but noble guardian of the well, the Norns, who have some interest in Thor's errand, Ego-Prime, a giant-sized avatar of the living planet Ego, and three apparently normal humans who've been picked by Odin to play a part in some kind of cosmic-upgrade to godhood. No explanation of the need for three brand-new gods is ever given, nor do we ever see those brand-new gods again, although Thor's outrage over the manipulations involved in their creation causes Odin to banish him to Earth forever for about the tenth time. During this banishment Thor and his friends interrupt their bouts of self-pity to fight various Earthbound menaces like the Absorbing Man, but when Balder the Brave shows up and has a nervous breakdown because of what he's seen back in Asgard.



Thor and crew determine to go back to Asgard even though they've been banished, to see what's going on. They find the city deserted of gods and infested with talking, gun-toting reptiles who inform Thor that Asgard was attacked by marauding space-ants in flying saucers who somehow defeated all of Asgard including Odin and took the whole of them back to their homeworld to sell as slaves. Anybody familiar with comic books would have sniffed out the falsehood underneath this story in two seconds: in comics as in the movies, reptiles are always the bad guys. But Thor must not have read comics when he was a kid, because he trusts the lizards and voyages with them to the space-ants' world, where he does indeed find a battered and drugged Odin being held as a slave. The rescuers are briefly held as slaves as well, until Thor discovers that the stinking gruel the prisoners are being fed is the thing that saps both their will and their power. He refuses it eat it, breaks free, frees everybody else, deals with the lizard-men (who - duh - turned out to be playing a treacherous game of their own), and everybody sails back to Asgard, having adventures along the way.



Like I mentioned, all of this raises a lot more questions than it answers. For instance, how the hell does an invasion force of space-ants conquer Asgard? And how do they manage to break the will of every single Asgardian - including Odin - so quickly? And how's come Balder made it out in one piece? And no matter how he escaped, why did it cause him to lose his mind - isn't he a several-thousand-year-old warrior god?



The last story-arc in this volume concerns Tana Nile and the Colonizers of Rigel, whose far-off space empire (curiously unused elsewhere in the Marvel Universe) is being threatened by the Black Stars, enormous wandering space-bodies that consume every planetary system they touch. Throughout these stories, Conway yields over and over to the temptation to mix the mythological elements of Thor's world with this kind of science-fiction plot (there are no fewer than six space-related menaces in these issues), and the results often make for great moments. Thor and his comrades travel in the Starjammer, a Viking-style wooden longship complete with rudder and sails but mystically capable of interstellar flight, and Buscema does some wonderful work juxtaposing its archaic appearance against the space-hardware called for by Conway's plots.

Another aspect that crops up again and again in Conway's stories is his conception of what Asgardians are like as a people - especially, that they love to fight. Time and again in these stories, we're told that their eyes gleam at the prospect of battle, that they enjoy it for its own sake, etc. I think this kind of characterization is a whole lot more sensible - and enjoyable - than the saintly oafs who so often cropped up in Stan Lee's Asgardian mini-epics; Conway's Asgardians aren't saintly, they're bloodthirsty (and, in another refreshing twist, unapologetically randy) - and their immortality can make them fairly obnoxious ... most certainly including Thor himself. One of my favorite moments in this volume illustrates both these things, when, gazing in wonder at the vast space fleet carrying the entire fleeing race of Rigellians out of the path of the Black Stars, Balder asks the quintessential Asgardian question:

Nine billion people, milord ... the entire population of the Colonizer's lost world, in flight from a menace they cannot escape! 'Tis a most strange insanity. Why do they not stand and fight?

To which Thor replies:

Because they are only mortal, brave Balder ... and their lives are too short to be spent on useless warfare. They seek only to live, and honor can mean nothing to such creatures ...Only life matters, and only death is feared. And, in the end, who can say if this is strange insanity ... or a strength we may never hope to understand!

There are lots and lots of other great moments scattered liberally throughout this volume, of course. Just because Conway was usually much better suited to writing more down-to-earth stuff doesn't mean he doesn't rise to the cosmic occasion quite often. We see Hildegarde chewing out Thor for yelling at the Avengers' butler Jarvis; we see a depiction of the king and queen of the Trolls that's actually sympathetic; we get some fascinating Freudian exchanges between Thor and his evil half-brother Loki during one of their obligatory fight-scenes (Loki's angry because Thor connived to steal Odin's love! Apparently he hasn't been reading "Thor" back-issues, or keeping up with all those banishments-to-earth); we get a wonderful sequence where Tana Nile complains that a massive door is made of "Mondurian steel - a foot thick and electronically sealed as well! It would require a company of good Rigellian battlecraft to even penetrate it!" To which Thor responds, "Hildegarde - I shall have need of thy good arm! Shall we see if the strength of two lone Asgardians be equal to that company of Rigellian battlecraft?"



And in a charming little scene, we get ... Gerry Conway himself! He and some of his colleagues in the Marvel bullpen (including Glynis Wein, whose fantastic coloring work is uncredited through most of this reprint volume - and invisible anyway, the only price readers pay for the cheap cover price and bountiful contents) have travelled to Rutland, Vermont to watch the famous Hallowe'en parade presided over by Tom Fagan, and in a move that was almost unheard of at the time (the classic example being the moment when Nick Fury's men turn Stan Lee and Jack Kirby away from the wedding of Reed Richards and Sue Storm), we hear a little of their banter before the fighting erupts.

Great moments, then, though no really great sustained story-arcs this time around. But a collection of great moments is certainly justification enough for this volume, especially since otherwise many of these issues would just crumble to dust unread by anybody. It's my hope that Marvel's craze to cash in on the hoopla surrounding the upcoming "Thor" movie will push them to reprint just about everything Thor-related they've got in their capacious archives. There's a LOT of great stuff there, and it all deserves a new audience.

Comics: The Infinity Saga!

Our 'book' today is the great seven-issue "Infinity Saga" story arc from 1970's Marvel Comics Thor, a baggy magnum opus that would mark Stan Lee's departure from regular scripting chores on this title (he was leaving all his usual Marvel haunts around this time, or had left them already and was 'training' the next generation of writers, uncredited, of course). He leaves Thor with a real flourish, uncorking just the kind of quasi-mystical cosmic-sized storyline that's perfect for the character and his mythological cast.


Perfect because what other good use can you find for Thor? The character is as strong as the Hulk, and he controls the weather, and he's got thousands of years of experience in combat - in normal comic book terms (A.I.M., Magneto, the Red Skull), he's pretty much unbeatable. And unbelievable - as I've mentioned here before, why would the Norse god of thunder bother to spend any time at all stopping the Stilt-Man's latest crime-spree? No, the character is much better served with sprawling cosmic epics - and despite his undeniable skill at small interpersonal moments, Lee clearly relishes such epics. His run on Thor is saturated with them (especially if you include his Tales of Asgard backup features, where he simply gave the tendency full rein), and "The Infinity Saga" is one of the best, despite the obvious signs all through it that Lee was growing a bit tired of the genre - or worse, finally running out of nifty ideas.

The story starts clean enough - Thor is striding down the streets of Asgard, home of the gods, having been summoned from Earth (where he'd just spent two issues kicking Doctor Doom's ass and off-handedly destroying the armed forces of Latveria) by his father, Odin. At the time of this story, Thor and Odin are on good terms - which is fairly remarkable as far as Thor goes during Lee's run (in fact, Lee's Odin might be one of the most consistently unpleasant parent-figures in all of comics - if Superman ever read these comics, he'd be glad Jor-el wasn't around to endlessly criticize his taste in girlfriends). Thor shows up in the royal audience chamber and finds Odin mighty perturbed. He's been troubled by portents of dark evil at the edge of the known universe, a great nebulous hand that seems to be wiping out whole worlds. These portents are matched by some closer to home: not only is the weather on Earth all screwed up, but in Asgard the massive Odin-sword is slowly inching from its sheath. If it were ever to be unsheathed, the resulting shockwaves would tear apart all creation, as Thor well knows (it came up in a previous Lee Thor epic, one we'll cover in the fullness of time). "Each fateful day I find it thus!" Odin says, re-sheathing it. "Each fateful day I sheath it anew!"


And that's not all: all through these things, Odin's had one word repeating in his head: Infinity, Infinity, Infinity! He has no idea what it means, but, as he tells Thor, he suspects knows somebody who does: the Silent One, a mysterious robed figure who appeared recently and, true to his billing, says nothing. Odin's sure he's connected to the mystery of Infinity - and he's sure the danger can only be faced in the heart of nebulous disturbance - the World Beyond (you can see what I mean here, right, about Lee's slightly flagging inspiration? The names in this story tell it all: The World Beyond, Infinity, The Silent One, The Guardian ... as generic as as generic gets). Odin has already sent three of Thor's friends, Fandral, Hogun, and Volstagg, to investigate the World Beyond, and now, over Thor's objections, he goes himself - with the Silent One following right behind.

Loki, Thor's evil half-brother, sees the fireball of Odin's departure and takes the opportunity to return from exile and raise a troll-and-giant army to attack Asgard. His minions capture Thor's best friend Baldur the Brave and Thor's Asgardian girlfriend Sif (the fact that Thor for the longest time kept a girlfriend in Asgard and a girlfriend on Earth can be chalked up to the fact that Lee was, pound for pound, the coolest writer comics have ever had), but Thor quickly rescues them and tells off his brother, irritated that Loki can be so petty even when something as big as the World Beyond is threatening them all. Evil half-brothers! There's simply no living with them!

Predictably, Thor decides to go after Odin. He whirls his hammer and flies to the World Beyond, which turns out to look a lot like Scotland - lots of rocks and mist, plus irritable natives: in the case, a four-armed giant who calls himself the Guardian and insist Thor has to die. While they're grappling, the Guardian points out that the only exception he's ever seen to the rule was the white-haired old guy who showed up recently and was claimed by Infinity himself - naturally, on hearing that Odin passed this way, Thor goes wild to find his father and promptly kills the Guardian to get him out of the way (this also is a feature unique to Thor during Lee's run at Marvel: although he's careful to observe Earth politeness when he's on Earth, when he's offworld Thor kills his enemies with a happy recklessness). But there's another obstacle: out of the mist steps Fandral, Hogun, and Volstagg, who've been taken over by Infinity and turned into Thor's enemies! They mindlessly shuffle forward to do battle with him, but since he can't bear to lift a hand against them, he creates a cyclone with his hammer and sends the three of them back to Asgard - along with his hammer.


At the same time, we get some great surrealistic shots of Odin off somewhere fighting against the unseen Infinity while the Silent One watches - these and other panels throughout "The Infinity Saga" really give artist John Buscema a chance to strut his cosmic stuff in a way he wasn't doing in any of the other Marvel titles he was drawing at the time (yes, you heard that right: he was drawing more than one title a month, all superbly, and all on deadline, often for years at a stretch ... sounds impossible, doesn't it?)(of course the pinnacle of his 'cosmic' style happened in Silver Surfer, but it's more prolonged here in Thor)(his artistry is here immensely helped out by the stunningly clean inking job of Sam Grainger and Joe Sinnott, and by a superb coloring job done throughout by an uncredited master, Stan Goldberg).


There are two problems with Thor's strategy for disposing of his brainwashed friends: first, according to the enchantment Odin put on his hammer, if it's away from his possession for longer than one minute, he reverts to the puny mortal surgeon Don Blake, and second, whenever the Guardian gets killed, he gets revived by Infinity. That happens now, and poor schlub Don Blake is facing a quick, messy end as the Guardian advances on him.


Even in the midst of his own battle, Odin sees the trouble his son's alter ego is in and fires off an energy-bolt that stuns the Guardian long enough for Thor's hammer to return to him. Thor and the Guardian face off again, Thor charging straight at him with inimitable ferocity and hitting his favorite refrain from the Lee/Kirby years: "As thou art strong, so Thor is strong! As thou canst fight, so Thor canst fight! But as thou be mortal, Thor be God of Thunder!" Nothing like a little taxonomy to clarify a scrap.


Thor defeats the Guardian and finds the Silent One beckoning him. The walk through the mist a bit, and then Thor meets the last person he'd expect to find out here in the middle of nowhere: Hela, the goddess of death! Buscema takes the old slightly frumpy Jack Kirby version of the character and makes her an arresting figure - eight feet tall and unapologetically curvaceous (she's a whole lot more impressive-looking than a little goth girl in a tank top, if you know what I mean).


She pops up out of nowhere and stuns Thor with a bolt of life-ending energy; as she vanishes from the scene, we see Thor rapidly aging and dying - until the Silent One revives him, at the cost of his own life. Thor takes one panel to grieve over the old creep, then he flies off to Odin's side ... only to find Odin looking just as brainwashed as Fandral, Hogun, and Volstagg! Yep: while Thor was busy with Hela, Odin lost in his fight against Infinity and was taken over - and he promptly attacks Thor.


It's a fight he can't possibly win, and he knows it, and Odin knows it (even brainwashed, the guy's a champion windbag, telling Thor, "'Twas I who made thee what thou art! 'Twas I who gave thee godly power. For I am the Will, the Word, and the Way! And I say thee now ... thou must fall!") - so Thor flees back to Asgard, where in his absence the good guys - including Baldur and Sif - have been trying to come up with a way to push the Odin-sword back into its sheath, to no avail.



When Thor shows up and tells them the worst possible news, that Odin is possessed, they're naturally distraught. They've seen how tough it is to break Infinity's possession: the sexy Norn Queen Karnilla came to Asgard specifically to break that possession (she agreed to do so in exchange for the, er, gratitude of Thor's friend Baldur - she loves him, but he can't return that love as long as she's a kinda-sorta enemy of Asgard ... it's one of those fascinating quasi-subplots that Lee could string along literally for years) and failed until Loki reluctantly helped her. He's been hanging around this whole time, snarling and sniping, despite continuously having it pointed out to him that if the Odin-Sword actually comes out of its sheath, he'll die too. Evil half-brothers! I tell you!



Eventually, Loki sees the light and actively tries to help; he and Karnilla pool their vast magical energies and fire off a bolt of power designed to stop Infinity from merging completely with Odin. The bolt fails, but it gives Thor an idea: if Karnilla uses the life-force of all the strongest Asgardians for another try, it might work. They do, and it does - Odin wakes "as though from a haunted dream" and summarily destroys the remnant of Infinity still hovering around.


He returns to Asgard and undoes all the damage (everything on Earth is righted too), and everybody lives happily ever after. It turns out that months ago, while Odin was in one of his period semi-hibernations known as the Odin-sleep, Hela had split off a portion of his soul, and that portion had become Infinity, and Hela, being the goddess of death, had very much liked Infinity's world-gobbling ways (that's why she was on the spot to zap Thor when he was in the World Beyond). Since Infinity is now re-absorbed into Odin, the crisis is passed.


Or is it? In a coda only Stan Lee could pull off, Odin sternly warns everybody that since Hela was denied her prize of Odin's soul, she'll certainly come looking for Thor's (nobody - including Lee - seems to recall that she already did come looking for Thor's just a couple of issues ago). The triumphant chapter ends in looks of horror all around.

Odin comes up with a temporary plan: "Thou shalt assume thy human form - be the mortal Donald Blake and hide thyself 'pon the distant planet Earth. Once thou art safe, the time will come to plan." In a bolt of energy, Thor is sent back to Earth and into hiding, and then Lee shifts the scene to Hela's cold, foggy underworld and gives us one of those great, seemingly effortless glimpses into the souls of his so-called villains that were, up until he came along, utterly unheard of in comics. Hela, it turns out, isn't really a bad guy at all - at least, she doesn't see herself that way: "Why do the living so fear my touch? Do I not bring peace to those who long have borne life's burden? Do I not bring rest at the end of life's weary journey? Do I not banish pain from all who may suffer? Do I not cure all ills and put an end to all wounds? In truth I am gentle - in truth I am fair. To me, all are equal! I deny none my embrace." It's hammy stuff, true - but it's epic hammy.



Loki goes to Hela to tell her that Thor is hiding on Earth, and while he's doing that, Baldur is going to Karnilla to ask her help in saving Thor - help she's happy to give him, if he finally renounces his allegiance to Asgard and swears fealty to her. Outraged, he draws his sword in front of her minions, but ultimately her arguments sway him and he swears. She sends him to Hela's realm, where he's just in time to stop Loki from blurting out the part about Thor being in human form. There follows a panel-quick battle in which Loki uses his vast sorcerous powers to flatten Baldur - a good reminder that not all Asgardians are created equal: Thor and Loki are the two biggest hitters. But Hela, bored with the fighting, banishes them both from her realm before Loki can spill the beans.


She decides to visit Earth herself, and she tries to be inconspicuous by donning the world's sexiest pill hat .... but, um, she's still eight feet tall, which draws the attention of two gun-wielding lowlifes who try to mug her (this was 1970 New York, after all ... a Norse death-goddess walking the streets might be believable, but a nighttime stroll without a mugging? Please!). "It was not yet your time," she tells them (Buscema puts in a neat detail of her pupils turning to skulls), "but since life means so little to you that you would take another's, I shall hasten your entrance into my silent realm."

Still, the delays in finding Thor are irksome to her (she gets a little distracted, in fact - she keeps the disguise but starts walking in midair about twenty feet off the pavement, which is something of a dead giveaway, as it were), so she decides to take an indirect approach: she finds some fire-fighters saving people from a burning building and starts rapid-aging them. Don Blake hears about this on the radio and, despite the warnings of his friends and his father, he becomes Thor in order to save innocent lives. And as soon as he's done doing that, Hela stands waiting. He has no choice - if he resists, she'll just strike at bystanders again. Thor submits.

And just at that moment, Odin appears! "Hela, hear my words," the old windbag says, "though I be the Power and the Light, the Judgement and the Will, thou I be the Sovereign Supreme of all that was and is and yet shall be - I be one thing more: I be father to the Thunder God. And to thee I say ... Thor shall not die!"




She's unimpressed. She knows perfectly well that Odin has too much respect for the natural laws of the universe to kill her - she knows he won't do away with death itself, not even to save his son. "You know full well," she tells him, "while I do live, not even you may stop me. And even lordly Odin would not dare to slay me."

"To save my son - Odin dares!" he yells, and he kills her with an energy-burst (and a classic Stan Lee sound effect: "sshossp!"! That's the sound of death dying!).

Thor knows immediately the impossibility of what Odin's done - without death, the universe will be overrun with life and suffering (after all, Hela was right about the beneficial role death often plays in the natural cycle of things). Thor's not morbid by any means: "Believe me, father," he says, "I find life sweet - and have no wish to die! But, let me die a thousand times, rather than cause the calamity which is to come."


Odin knows all this. He knows he has no choice but to restore Hela to life, knowing full well the first thing she'll do is claim the life of Thor. With tears in his eyes, Odin says, "May the mighty Thor bring glory to Valhalla, as he hath brought glory to the grieving Odin." He restores Hela, and she begins the process of withering Thor into her silent realm. Odin embraces him briefly, then just before the end he tries one last gambit - he transports Sif to Earth, to Thor's side. She sees what's going on and right away turns to Hela:

"Hela! Though thou be the queen of death, thou art a woman too - surely love hath touched thy heart?"

"Why speakest thou to me of love?" Hela asks.

"'Tis all I know! 'Tis all there be!" Sif says. "Without it, life hath no meaning and no joy! Thou still couldst save the dying Thor - thou must! Thou must, O Hela! The regal Odin may not beg, for he be Lord ofAsgard. But I am a woman, as thou art a woman! I beg! I plead - Sif doth implore thee.

Or if my words should not move thee - this last request I make thee: do but spare the mighty Thor ... and take Sif's life in forfeit."

"Thou wouldst die to save thy true beloved?" Hela asks, with tears in her eyes. "Sif asked if Hela had e'er known love ... and now I answer nay! But at last, I know what it doth mean! Not even death may crush it"

She restores Thor to youth and vigor and vanishes, and Sif and Thor embrace. Thor openly wonders if Odin transported Sif to Earth merely to pay her last respects, or was it possible that Odin anticipated what might happen? Unfortunately, the old coot has fully recovered from his grief and is right back to his old self. "I am the Way! I am the Light!" he blusters. "And none may share my Odin-thoughts!" Whatever, gramps.

The final issue of this arc catapults our characters straight into the next story line (hint: Evil half-brothers! There's simply no living with them!), but shortly after that Stan Lee would begin 'sharing' his writing chores, and then he'd abandon regular comics altogether (in the '70s, we were told he was 'spearheading' Marvel productions in Hollywood - which seemed a dubious concept when it started producing garbage like the "Hulk" and "Spider-Man" TV series ... luckily, Marvel productions improved quite a bit once special effects grew up and the right people started getting involved - although still no Thor movie, and that's probably a good thing). "The Infinity Saga" was his last hurrah doing the kind of epic stories he brought to such perfection in Thor and Tales of Asgard ... after this, the title would go almost a hundred issues until it got this kind of treatment again (likewise Buscema would after this gradually lessen and then leave the Marvel fold, after spectacular runs on Thor, Fantastic Four, Silver Surfer, and Conan, not to mention some of the finest Tarzan work this side of Joe Kubert)(although as you can see, the one artist's trick Buscema almost never pulled off was the great cover - his mostly stink, only the last one in this arc being any good).


By my count, the next "Essential" Thor volume (7? 8?) will likely include "The Infinity Saga," and since my 1970 issues are literally falling apart, I'll certainly buy that volume (even though in this case it's really pretty coloring that's being left out of that black-and-white series) - and you all should too, to revel in the glories of comics' Silver Age!

Conan the Derivative!

I've said it before: has any fictional character ever been so poorly served as Conan the Barbarian? His creator, Robert E. Howard, gave him birth in a slapdash way, ping-ponging around a character chronology he kept largely in his head, and then abandoning that chronology when he blew that selfsame head off his body. The first Conan short story was a rewritten version of an earlier tale originally starring another Howard creation, King Kull of Atlantis (the Kull stories are fantastic in their own right, and although they tend to lack the signature vigor of the Conan stories - where Howard's heart very much resided - they do have something Conan never has: a steady, engaging supporting cast), and after Howard's suicide, the character passed from hand to creative hand like a church collection plate.

A thousand times as many people have seen the Conan movies and watched the various Conan cartoons as have ever actually read one of Howard's stories (the forthcoming big-budget Hollywood version will only multiply this), and for decades reading one of Howard's stories wasn't always as easy a thing as it sounds. Throughout the 1970s, a stream of Conan books were published (many of them "co-written" or "finished" by the great journeyman sci-fi writer L. Sprague deCamp, whose novel Lest Darkness Fall is well worth your time to find and read), many of the sporting now-iconic Frank Frazetta covers, and all of them making fine, fun reading - but they hardly represented Howard's character as Howard meant to write him.


That lack was finally supplied in 2003, when Del Rey began publishing its epic, incredible trade paperback editions of the works of Robert E. Howard, including three volumes of the Conan stories (in a wonderful nod to the pulp-fiction origins of the characters, every volume is heavily illustrated) presented in exactly the order Howard first presented them way back in the '30s.

Here you get the glories (slightly hyperventilating glories, but glories all the same) of some of Howard's best work, including such stories as "Rogues in the House," "Black Colossus," and of course "The Tower of the Elephant." Here you get that particular mixture of heady description and wry self-awareness that shines in even Howard's most, um, titillating passages:

Tanada shook back her long black disheveled hair and faced Conan. She was bleeding from a score of scratches on her breasts and thighs, her locks fell in confusion down her back, and she was as naked as the day she was born; but she stared at him without perturbation or uncertainty, and he gave back her stare, frank admiration in his expression of her cool bearing, and the ripeness of her brown limbs.

"Who are you?" she demanded.

"Conan, a Cimmerian," he answered.

"What are you doing in Shumballa?"

"I came here to seek my fortune. I was formerly a corsair."

These volumes do great work, but they fight an uphill battle against all the popular entertainment conceptions of Conan, most especially the atrocious movies that launched the "acting" career of a future American president. The problem is that Howard originally envisioned the Conan stories as shards of a single mosaic, random glimpses of one man's whole remarkable life - as freebooter, mercenary, corsair, general, husband, father, and king - but movies, cartoons, and comic books have tended to plop their derivative adventures down squarely in Conan's earliest days as the sword-wielding all-purpose barbarian the general public knows (a welcome exception in the comics world, "Conan the King," was short-lived and unenthusiastically received by fandom). The aforementioned Hollywood movie will continue this - the current rumored front-runner for the lead is Alan Richtson, an incredibly nice kid with lots of untapped screen charisma but who'll land the role for one reason: his muscular body (it's a risk I myself would be willing to run for the chance to get Richtson in the part, since he's especially good at the sardonic-humor-in-the-midst-of-action that is the quintessential Conan trait).

And what of books, you ask? What of the innumerable Conan spin-off pastiche novels that have come and gone since Howard blew his brains out? Well, as you can imagine, they've all stuck to the same formula mentioned above: their Conan is uniformly young, often in his early teens, and reading the books, you get the impression this is done in large part so the respective pastiche writers don't have to bog themselves down with mastering the detailed timeline that governs Conan's more adult life (was Belit after Zamora, or before? That kind of thing).


Robert Jordan's Conan novels are every bit as turgid and boring as his "Wheel of Time" books. The seasoned veteran hack Steve Perry became seasoned in large part through writing Conan books, and his are always reliably entertaining, as in a scene from the less-than-stirringly titled Conan the Formidable (guess Conan the Above Average was taken) where our young barbarian faces a group of would-be robbers on the road:

"Ah" [says the leader of the robbers]. Well, that sword you wave about so dangerously might be worth something. We could sell it."

"I am not disposed to give it up."

The man waved the morning star at his band. "There are six of us and but one of you. Give us the sword and whatever valuables you carry and you may leave here unharmed."

"Pardon me for not trusting you, but I think not."

"There are still six of us to your one."

"That can be changed."

But alas, most of these knock-off novels are ruinously dreadful. The ongoing Conan comic book series is a bright light in this regard, always excellent and well worth your time, but a truly great Conan novel has never been written, not even by the creator of the character himself. This is an odd but consistent failing Conan has in common with a surprising number of other characters from the pulp era - there's no one stand-out great novel of Doc Savage either, or the Shadow. Tarzan has both Tarzan of the Apes and Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar, but all three of Robert E. Howard's great creations, King Kull, Solomon Kane, and Conan, live most fully in the short stories he crafted for them. And until the creative bar is raised - until Conan comes to stand in the reading imagination for more than quaffing ale and beheading people - that's likely to remain the case. Maybe someday a visionary director will come along and make the great, exciting, heartbreaking movie "The Tower of the Elephant" begs to be, and suddenly the character will undergo a renaissance.


But in the meantime, the forthcoming movie has at least one thing going for it: Nicholas Cage won't be playing Conan.

The Temple at the End of Time

Our book today is “The Temple at the End of Time” by Len Wein, and what is that you say, all you over-privileged egg-headed little ewoks out there? ‘There’s no such book! We’ve skimmed them all and worked up our best ways of bullshitting about them! There just CAN’T be one we missed!’ But your focus is too narrow, you miserable squajes, for our book is a four-issue story-arc from the ‘Mighty Thor’ comic book of the 1970s, a story-arc as full of pathos and drama and glinting moments of humor and insight as novels three times as long.

This particular story-arc will be immortalized and made available to you all in the next volume of Marvel’s ‘Essential’ series (or perhaps the volume after that, depending on how many extra titles the editors pull in), but oh! That subsummation will happen without the gorgeous, thought-provoking coloring talents of Glynis Wein, and that’s a heartfelt shame. Who knows how long it’ll be before Marvel Comics resurrects or freshly creates a full-color reprint series of their great old stuff? And even when that happens, who’s to say the powers that be behind such a series will see where the quality is? The ‘70s at Marvel were a golden age, the last age in which workhorse creators like Len Wein, Roy Thomas, Gerry Conway, John Buscema, Joe Sinnott, Rich Buckler, Joe Kubert, and John’s unjustly underrated brother Sal (as well as such rejuvenated old-timers as the mighty Gene Colan and the mighty Gil Kane) would have the freedom and relative anonymity to craft radically different great storylines in completely different titles. In today’s overpaid fanboy-inflated atmosphere, John Buscema would draw one issue of Conan every other month and periodically miss an entire year for undisclosed personal reasons. In today’s convention-fueled mindframe, Roy Thomas could only write a gut-wrenching storyline about Reed and Sue Richards if the Marvel Comics suits gave him permission to kill Sue Richards, preferably by means of gang-rape.

Thankfully, such was not always the case. Once upon a time, comics creators were long-haired hippies who actually believed in what they were doing, and at Marvel, once Stan Lee finally eased his zombie-fingers off the nominal ‘writing’ and ‘editing’ chores, they were free to spread their wings and really dig into the creative legacies they’d been left.

So Len Wein finally came to Thor and the story-arc we here at Stevereads are choosing to call ‘The Temple at the End of Time’ is the first full fruit of his inspiration (in the first issue - sorry, chapter, of our book, he’s referred to as ‘spanking new’ editor/storywriter).

First, a little big background, for those of you pitiful enough to know nothing about the character Thor in Marvel Comics: he’s the god of thunder out of Norse mythology, only refitted by the genius of Stan Lee with the trappings of a super-hero: a secret identity, a mission to fight injustice, and a big, red cape. He comes from Asgard, where Odin, his father, rules as king of the gods and is portrayed as a cartoon parody of the Old Testament God: bearded, irascible, and murderously omnipotent.

Second, a little small-background, for those of you pitiful enough not to know your 1970s Thor in every page and detail: just prior to our present story-arc, Thor’s mortal girlfriend Jane Foster was dying, and Thor’s immortal girlfriend (yep, Stan Lee’s thunder god was a playah), the goddess Sif, sacrificed her life to ‘fuse her spirit’ with Jane Foster in order to cure her. In a not particularly heroic turn, Thor appears OK with this (one’s better than none, we suppose), and he and Jane hold hands and pledge their love. Then everybody goes off to fight the Egyptian death-god in another dimension.

Our present story-arc begins on their return, when, after a brief spat between Odin and Thor, our hero heads to Jane Foster’s apartment with his gal. Odin leaves for Asgard, where in the following issues he will act even more hysterical and obsessive than usual; this is a nifty sub-plot (it builds to the stunning revelation in issue #250 that this newer, more hissy Odin wasn’t Odin at all but really - gasp! - Mangog in disguise; Mangog is one of Thor’s greatest villains, an ugly-ass monster with, as he endlessly proclaims until you just want to tell him to shut up already, the strength of a billion billion beings), but it need not concern us today.

Our concerns begin in our first ‘chapter, issue #242, which opens with Thor and Jane Foster relaxing in her apartment watching TV with three of Thor’s Asgardian buddies - these three are Fandral the dashing swordsman (think Errol Flynn, only minus the, um, wayward hands), Hogun the grim (grim guy with a mace, who was doing the whole stoic-hardass thing decades before some guy named Wolverine showed up), and Volstagg, an enormous Falstaff character, all bluster and buckling bravery.

This quintet is basically hanging out, bantering over soft drinks, when suddenly a giant HAND breaks through the wall and seizes Jane Foster. Our heroes leap to the gap in the wall and see a gigantic quasi-robot, the Servitor, with a fleshy red face, holding Jane Foster in one hand and an enormous power-lance in the other. He’s seized Jane in order to force Thor to do as he’s told, and with any other Marvel hero, it would’ve worked, and a tense parlay would have resulted.

With Thor, at least as Wein writes him, not so much. He and his friends hurl themselves straight at the Servitor (well, Volstagg does a prat-fall into some garbage, but the others leap), without seeming to care that it could get Jane Foster squished. What follows is a classic John Buscema battle-sequence, served up like a slice of Heaven. Thor fans will usually attest to three distinct periods where his artwork was at the top of its game: Jack Kirby, John Buscema, and Walt Simonson (this was back when an artist stayed with a title for more than the six issues needed to generate a graphic novel - long enough, in other words, to get good at drawing the characters), but we here at Stevereads disagree. Surely for all his genius and wit (his run is probably the single best the character has ever known), Simonson can’t stand as a separate artistic category from Kirby? The one clearly learned everything from the other: big overdone figures, straightforwardly kinetic action sequences, etc. Buscema’s style is entirely different - more sinuous, more detailed (especially when matched with his perfect inker, Joe Sinnott, whose hyper-finished style would have been drastically mis-matched with Kirby’s wild, woolly scratchings) and ultimately more dignified. His Thor LOOKS big and regal, even in small panels.

In any case, Buscema’s action sequences can be grand and thrilling, despite his many static qualities as an artist (the obvious comparison is Curt Swan, but Swan’s action-sequences almost never actually worked), and this long battle with the Servitor displays the fact amply. And in short order, and without any real difficulty, Thor eventually wins and is at the point of pounding the Servitor’s pudgy red face inside out when a ray-blast shoots between him and his victim, causing Thor to pause. He looks up, and there before him is Zarrko, the so-called Man of Tomorrow, a villain from the future who’d plagued Thor a few times in previous issues. At which point long-time fans probably uttered a frustrated sigh - Zarrko is, after all, a lame excuse for a villain.

Fortunately, Len Wein is not a poor excuse for a writer. In his second ‘chapter,’ he starts shattering preconceptions right away, by characterizing Zarrko as something other than a bargain-rate Lex Luthor (they’re both bald as an egg, in case you’re loser enough not to know that). Zarrko apologizes to Thor and his friends - there was a miscommunication, his enormous Servitor was only meant to get their attention, not to attack them. Zarrko is from the 23rd century (clearly, there are some sleazeballs the Legion of Super-Heroes haven’t got around to rooting out yet), and he relates to his listeners how, after his last defeat at the hands of 20th century superheroes, he returned to his own time to lick his wounds and - and here’s the magic Wein touch at work - rethink his life.

That’s of course the thing super-villains never do: they never limp back home and re-evaluate this whole fighting-superheroes thing. The Wingless Wizard developes small, portable anti-gravity devices, but does he negotiate a contract with the DOD? Nope! He opts to keep getting his butt kicked by the Fantastic Four. The Mad Thinker can dream up the most sophisticated android technology on the planet, but does he patent his work and go public? Nope! He, too, elects to get his plush posterior pasted by the Fantastic Four four times a year. The list is endless, and the writers of Stan Lee’s time would have said that’s the whole point - that these villains ARE villains specifically because such worldly, pecuniary rewards aren’t sufficient to satisfy their craven ambitions.

Well, not so Zarrko! He got his futuristic ass kicked one too many times and, under Wein’s careful touch, he decides to do something about it. First, he re-models one of his century’s ‘indestructible mining robots’ into ‘a fitting servitor for one such as I intended to become’ - and he and his Servitor boarded a time-travelling cube and travelled FORWARD, not backward. AWAY from the Avengers and the Fantastic Four (apparently, over at Marvel there are no superheroes in the future). He goes to the 50th century - a fairly peaceful time whose inhabitants don’t stand up long against Zarrko and his enormous Servitor. Zarrko sets himself up as (relatively) benevolent dictator. Virtually any super-villain in Marvel or DC could have opted to do something equivalent, but Len Wein’s Zarrko is the very first to follow through with it.

And there he’d have stayed, happily dictating, if it weren’t for the menace he’s come to the 20th century to discuss with Thor: the Time Twisters. Once he’s got the warriors’ attention, he draws them a story - apparently, these Time Twisters appear to be travelling backward in time, touching down at Earth’s timeline every 30 centuries and bringing planet-wide devastation each time. Zarrko has used his time-travel technology to see the destruction of the 80th century, and he knows his own opportunistically-chosen 50th century is next, so he does what anybody would do if they knew the home century of the god of thunder: hop in your time-cube and go enlist his aid! His case is made all the stronger by the fact that if the 50th century falls, Thor’s beloved 20th century will be next (of course, in Thor’s case Zarrko had backup centuries, like the late 9th, or the 6th - but then, if Zarrko picked those centuries, oddly enough, he’d have had a credibility problem with Thor, who’d be a complete stranger to him).

The arguments work, and Thor and his comrades (including Jane Foster, who makes an impassioned argument for her inclusion on the mission, making blatantly manipulative reference to the fact that the goddess Sif’s life-essence is now inside her) vociferously declare their willingness to fight on Zarrko’s behalf, to save his adopted century and so their own. They all board the time-cube and head into the timestream, where trouble’s a-brewing.

That trouble soon makes itself apparent, as the time-cube runs aground on a temporal eddy and is attacked by ... a Tyrannosaurus Rex! Buscema’s rendering of the famed beast is anatomically accurate (longtime fans will recall what Kirby would have done in drawing a t.Rex - recall, and shudder), and Thor goes out to give battle. The fight is of course inherently one-sided physically, although there’s distinctly more parity mentally - because Thor TALKS through the whole of it. TO the T. Rex. Which has a brain the size of a walnut and is of course as ignorant of the nuances of spoken English as your average blogger. Thor offers the beast a chance to surrender with honor; he repeats his offer; finally he laments that his offer isn’t being accepted and hurls the dinosaur back into the mists of the timestream.

But the creature was just the beginning - from out of the mists now come hordes of enemies plucked from wildly different eras of history, from Greek hoplites to Mongol nomads to futuristic soldiers on anti-gravity sleds. A great battle ensues (Zarrko stays inside the time cube, but the Servitor fights and fights well, further increasing the favorable regard of the Asgardians) - until Thor decides to summon storm and lightning (um, yes, they appear to have weather even in the timestream .... moving on ...) to disperse the enemies. It’s having the desired effect when for just a moment Thor is distracted with thoughts of the lost Sif and is only stopped from accidentally sweeping his own comrades away when they call on him to cease and desist.

The clear import of both the T. Rex encounter and this one is that Wein considers Thor a bit of a lunkhead. But at least his heart’s in the right place.

Finally our travellers reach the century Zarrko has so recently conquered, and when they disembark, they find a squalid, wretched setting quite out of synch with the pride Zarrko takes in it all. Citizens shamble around gaunt and hungry, and when one dares approach Zarrko with a complaint, he’s rudely swept aside by the Servitor. Our heroes are dismayed but inactive - Wein usually writes his Asgardians as a little above temporal politics, perhaps even a little indifferent to them. Thor does point out that Zarrko’s world seems a fairly grim place, and Zarrko’s response has more understated, selfish intelligence to it than can be found in a dozen spittle-flecked rantings of Doctor Doom:

“It’s a simple equation, thunder god. Energy produces mobility ... mobility produces communication ... communication produces dissent ... and dissent produces rebellion. By withholding all sources of energy, I eliminate that rebellious temptation ... and insure my subjects’ safety. All that threatens them now is - the Time Twisters!”

And just that easy, the subject changes. The OTHER prodigiously powerful red-caped super-guy would have set about immediately improving the lot of Zarrko’s hapless subjects, but Thor and his buddies take it in their stride - and they’re helped to do so by the fact that just as Zarrko mentions the malevolent Time-Twisters, they appear smack dab in the middle of the street! And we’re on to ‘chapter’ 3!

This is issue #244, and its cover embodies the height of ‘70s overkill: there’s dialogue, for instance (it’s all but unknown nowadays, at Marvel or DC), and it’s emblazoned with the issue’s title, “This is the Way the World Ends,” and it includes the oddly masochistic advertisement, “AT LAST! The battle the Thunder God cannot hope to WIN!” (as though fans had been waiting for the event).

The issue itself finally brings our heroes into contact with the fabled Time-Twisters, but not before Zarrko tries to deal with them in his own inimitable style: he broadcasts his scowling visage to his poor downtrodden people, warning them about the appearance of the Time-Twisters in their midst and offering them one entire month of energy if they successfully defeat the intruders. The crowds rush to take him up on his offer, mobbing the tall, etoliated Time-Twisters with clubs and pitchforks. Again, Thor only wanly objects: he tells Zarrko he mislikes using mortals as pawns, but he doesn’t exactly fly out a window to interfere, and the crowds get decimated by the Time-Twisters, whose eye-beams work temporal havoc on their victims, reducing them to old crones or little babies in an instant.

He does go, however - they all do, walking to confront the Time-Twisters while Jane Foster urges Thor to try talking with the intruders before he starts brawling with them: “Look at their clothing, their faces - look into their eyes, Thor! These are creatures of vast intelligence! Speak to them, darling - reason with them! Try to make them understand what they’re doing!” Thor responds predictably, telling her “Such is not the warrior’s way,” but he agrees to try nonetheless, boisterously hailing the Time-Twisters, verbosely and somewhat unhelpfully:

“Aliens! Thou who dost tread the myriad pathways of time! In the name of reason - in the name of peace - the prince of golden Asgard doth bid thee halt!”

Needless to say (especially in comic book land), such stuff does no good - the Time-Twisters keep stalking along. Thor berates them and finally stoops to asking them “What manner of creatures ARE these?”

This gets a response: “A question. At our inception it was decreed all questions must be answered ... for in answers alone may the quest for knowledge be fulfilled.” Thor asks them what their purpose is, where they come from, why they plunge planets into ruin in their wake. The Time-Twisters (Buscema’s design is brilliantly counter-intuitive - they look too frail to stand, much less wreak havoc, whereas Kirby would have decked them in elaborate muscles and armor) explain that they come from time’s end to seek out time’s beginning, and when Thor reminds them that they haven’t yet answered his question about leaving ruin in their wake. They respond with complete denial - as far as they’re concerned, they bring enlightenment to the worlds they leave behind (they think this mainly because they don’t bother to turn around and look, but we’ll refrain from all potential political commentary). When Thor assures them otherwise and insists they abandon their quest, they ignore him, saying they’d rather die than abandon what they’re doing.

Well, with Len Wein’s Thor you really don’t need to say more than that. Thor and his friends yell out ‘For Odin! For Asgaaaaaaard!’ and leap to the fray with weapons drawn.

The Time-Twisters respond as they always have: they bathe our heroes in the eerie eye-beams that only moments before reduced an entire crowd to extreme old age or mewling infancy. But nothing happens, and when Fandral mentions this to Thor, he gets a refreshingly laconic answer: “What matter the ravages of time to we who are immortal?”

(Back in the ‘70s, one persnickety fan wrote in reminding Wein that the Norse gods didn’t come by their immortality genetically; they need to feast on the golden apples of immortality to keep eternally young - but it doesn’t really matter; that fan’s objections went unnoticed, as they always would, until the bright day dawned when he had a log of his own and could exact his REVENGE on ALL of those who once scorned him!!!)

Still, it doesn’t help with final victory; the Time-Twisters summon a timestream-like army of warriors from all time periods to fight the Asgardians. It’s a blatant distraction, and the Asgardians know it, but when Mongol hordes run at you screaming, what can you do but raise your weapon and dig in? Even Volstagg’s on board with such a choice, as is Jane Foster.

Ah, Jane Foster! The problem with her whole sub-plot, a problem we perhaps haven’t made clear as of yet: the choice to ‘kill’ Sif in favor of Jane Foster went down very poorly with about half of all the Thor fans out there. This half thought something like, Thor’s been in love with Sif for thousands of years, whereas Jane Foster’s been a girl-hostage simp for about a minute of Thor’s conscious life. These fans argued that if anybody should have survived a soul-infusion, it should have been Sif, not Jane Foster. Letters were written, stamped, and mailed. Letters appeared in something once called letter columns. And that faith was unbelievably taunted by one great panel-sequence right at this point in our story: Buscema draws it perfectly - one instant, Jane Foster, dressed drably in Earth-ware, has her sword raised; in the next instant, illuminated by a flash of lightning, readers are treated to a glimpse of Sif, sword raised, black hair flying; then the final panel of the triptych shows us Jane Foster completing the swing. It’s a neat little feat of visual trickery, done with a restraint that would be unthinkable to young comic book artists today.

But the battle ends up being meaningless - the distraction works. The Time-Twisters leave Zarrko’s Earth, and the planet is engulfed in flames. The ‘chapter’ ends with our heroes miraculously untouched (Zarrko and his Servitor have already chosen the better part of valor and boarded their time-cube) but despairing, because they’re alone on a ruined world.

The final ‘chapter’ necessarily opens with an explanation: how the heck did Thor & Co. survive the destruction of 50th century Earth? Thor has a theory: the goddess Sif possessed the ability to ‘transcend time and space’ (i.e. she could mystically teleport herself and passengers), and it’s possible Jane Foster was able to tap into that ability in their hour of need. It’s a dumb explanation (why don’t any of them remember being teleported? Where did they go while Earth was being destroyed? Scranton?), but it’s quickly put behind us as Zarrko’s time-cube materializes and the disposed dictator starts yelling at Thor about how he failed in his set task of saving Zarrko’s century. “We do not deny our guilt, Zarrko,” Thor answers. “Shouldst thou not do the same? Where wert thou when the moment of truth arrived?”

Irked by this impudence, the Servitor smacks Thor upside his winged helmet, which prompts a response stalled only by the making of a speech: “Thou hadst no call to do that, Servitor! I had looked on thee as an able comrade-in-arms ... mayhap even as a friend! But if thou dost choose to set thyself against me, so be it! Thou didst strike from behind, without qualm, without warning! Thus so shall mine enchanted hammer Mjolnir strike - without mercy!”

What follows is an extremely abbreviated version of the fight these two had in the first ‘chapter’ - but it’s long enough for us to see that young Derek, a downtrodden peasant under Zarrko, had secretly boarded the time-cube before his world’s destruction. He slips away to find his young wife:

“Derek shambles aimlessly thru the misshapen slag that had once been the city he called home. Granted, a city without energy, without hope, but his city nonetheless - for Derek’s wife had lived here.”

We leave him crumpled over the remains of his destroyed home, and we return to our brawling heroes, who’ve been separated by Jane Foster, who’s pointing out that while they stand around fighting, the Time-Twisters are moving on to 20th century Earth. Thor suggests they travel not backwards to the 20th but forward to, say, the 80th century, to fight the Time-Twisters there and perhaps save both Zarrko’s century and their own. The Tomorrow-Man does them one better, suggesting they travel to the end of time itself and stop the Time-Twisters before they even start, and our heroes agree.

There’s turbulence along the way (it causes Thor to let loose one of Wein’s favorite archaic outbursts, ‘Zounds!’ ... sadly, all his Asgardians blurt this out at the drop of a hat, which they certainly wouldn’t, it being a medieval contraction for ‘Christ’s wounds’), but eventually the end of time itself is reached, a solitary temple on a crumbling shelf of rock, a barren place with three Kirby-style stone statues outside its entrance.

Once our heroes breach the temple’s force field (the Servitor helps accomplish this, as he helped quell the time-stream turbulence, both times insisting he was only acting out of loyalty to his master, not out of comradeship, although Buscema’s sly renderings of his doughy face clue the reader in otherwise), they’re shocked to see the statues come alive - they’re the Protectroids, and they immediately commence firing force-beams that disperse our time-travelers. At one point Zarrko is trapped before one of these Protectroids, who raises a hand to fire (“No, you mustn’t” Zarrko yells “I can’t have come this far only to die!”), but the Servitor steps in front of the blast, lumbers forward as the energy destroys him, and falls onto the Protectroid, destroying them both. The battle is over a moment later, and Fandral urges Zarrko to come away: “There is nothing more we can do here. Thy servant hath passed beyond our power to attend him.” “He was more than just my servant, Asgardian,” Zarrko says, and Buscema has drawn touching grief in the character’s face, “He was my friend.”

Thor tells him to honor his fallen friend by completing their mission, and they all enter the temple, where they find an eerie sight: three pulsing embryos, clearly the Time-Twisters at the moment of their birth. In an act that would be unthinkable in today’s comics, Thor raises his hammer to squash these helpless enemies-in-waiting, but he’s stayed by a shriveled figure who steps out of the shadows. This impossibly old man is He Who Remains, and he first urges Thor to step back and then bathes him in a paralyzing energy-beam that leaves him helpless on the floor. He Who Remains tries to explain:

“You see, stripling, time is but a circle. From the ashes of the final holocaust, the universe will begin anew. Those who sleep are our gift to the future - three beings who are knowledge incarnate - and will teach those of the next cycle to avoid the errors we made.”

But Thor’s still recovering, so Jane Foster steps up to maintain the philosophical debate:

“But that’s the problem, don’t you understand? Armageddon is final! It cannot be breached! Your sleepers will survive the cataclysm - but somehow they’ll be twisted in time! Seeking time’s beginning, they’ll move back thru the ages - and every world they touch they’ll destroy!”

(Presumably Thor’s still too weak to point out to Jane that the very mythological world he lives in and comes from is entirely predicated on Armageddon NOT being final - as far as he’s concerned, Ragnarok will have survivors, including his two sons Magni and Modi)

Naturally, He Who Remains doesn’t believe this. “But all our hopes,” he says, “our dreams of a universal utopia...” “Are you willing to murder countless trillions of living beings to make those dreams come true?” Jane Foster asks him. “That’s what it comes down to, you know. Can you be that selfish?”

Before he can answer, the planet’s final upheavals begin, and Zarrko and the others run to the time-cube. Thor offers safe passage to He Who Remains - “Comest thou with us, old one. Thou hast discharge thy duty most nobly. Leave thy sleepers to the spinning fates and flee!” “There are things left to be done here that only I can do,” the old man responds. “Save yourselves while you can, and know that you take with you an old man’s gratitude - for more than you could ever realize.”

Our heroes bolt the scene, with only Thor pausing long enough to “bid farewell to one far nobler than we,” and then they’re off, back into the past. They don’t see He Who Remains shuffle around his tottering sanctuary, they don’t see the solitary tear slip down his withered face, and they don’t see him abort the unborn Time-Twisters.

What they do see, when they return to Zarrko’s 50th century, is a flourishing wonderland of flying craft and gleaming towers, a place bursting with wealth and vitality. Zarrko is more stunned than anybody, especially when he’s taken before the first citizen of this utopia: Derek, who’s been elevated to benevolent supremacy by the whims of reconstructed time! Zarrko sputters and sputs at this comeuppance, but our Asgardian heroes don’t seem particularly eager to help him - especially since they themselves are fading, disappearing back into an altered timeline in which they never came forward at all.

Our ‘book’ ends as it began: a calm afternoon in Jane Foster’s apartment, everybody settled in and chatting happily. No gleaming metal hand bursts through the wall, no wild time-straddling adventures ensue. All is as it was before, but Wein and Buscema’s readers have been taken on an exotic and fascinating ride. Thor’s comic title would shortly after this fall on some hard times and a fallow period of creativity, but that doesn’t change the wonder and wit of this particular run. When it comes available in a mass-market format, we here at Stevereads will cheerfully recommend it to you all - and in the meantime, if you’re desperate, those four wonderful issues are probably available online from some mouth-breathing virgin living in his mother’s rumpus room. You’ll be glad you went to the effort.