Introduction by Walter Simonson
Written by Stan Lee, Walter Simonson
Art by Jack Kirby, Walter Simonson, Sal Buscema
Edited by John Lind
Published by Dark Horse Comics
When I started collecting comic books in 1966 at age seven, an early favorite character was the Mighty Thor!
The then-current Thor stories were in the midst of one of the strip’s occasional science-fiction sojourns, with the Thunder God’s sidekick being a human-like robot called the Recorder.
Long before Jim Starlin made Captain Marvel cosmic, Thor was here dealing with hostile aliens, a high-tech scientist who had found a way to evolve animal life, and a living planet!
Not long before, though, there had been a whole series of stories set in and around Asgard, featuring a “trial of the gods.” The conniving trickster Loki had daddy issues and was always trying to do away with his rival brother, Thor.
Oh, and there was also Hercules, the Destroyer, Pluto, the Grey Gargoyle, the Cobra and Mr. Hyde, The Absorbing Man, and a bunch of lousy commies!
I was quickly brought up to speed on all of this because back then, back issues were plentiful and—as hard as it is to believe these days—always less than the book’s original cover price! I regularly picked up used copies of Journey Into Mystery (where Thor originally appeared) at a local junk shop, and also traded coverless copies of Adventure Comics to a schoolmate in exchange for more issues.
My point with all this is that I have seen all of Jack Kirby’s Thor and I find it one of the great runs in comics. Don’t tell anybody but I even liked Vince Colletta inking Jack. I mean, sure, not where he erased stuff or blacked stuff out but his actual inking and feathering smoothed Kirby’s wonderfully wild art like nobody else. Perhaps surprisingly, in all the pages in this book, I didn’t spot any obvious pages where Vinnie had “vandalized” the images.
Today, we have before us another of Dark Horse’s faux “artist’s editions.” The Art of The Mighty Thor presents more than 200 pages of mostly original art. About half of the volume presents a large selection of Kirby penciled pages and the second half emphasizes the highly-stylized but stunning and popular art of Walt Simonson from decades later. There are two complete Kirby-drawn stories and four from Simonson. Simonson offers a brief text remembrance up front as well, followed by a lovely appreciation from John Lind and Chris Ryall.
While many exciting Thor covers are reproduced from original art, as well, quite a few color images of the published covers show up throughout, also.
The Simonson section opens up with Walt’s classic rendition of his cult-favorite alien Thor variant, Beta Ray Bill, whose first appearance is presented here, and we’re off! Inspired, he tells us, by Kirby, the artist maintains the strip’s outsized majesty and superior design, but in an art style abut as divorced from Jack as one could hope to be.
His classic run on Manhunter with writer Archie Goodwin for DC turned Walt Simonson into an art hero and his continued development ever since has only spurred to underline his unique place in the history of comics. Unlike Kirby, Walt is credited from the get-go for the writing of his own Thor stories, and another highly recognizable aspect of a Simonson story is the lettering of John Workman. The two have teamed many times.
At the back, we get nice capsule biographies of all the folks involved, which is all well and good, but by now we all know the joy of books like The Art of The Mighty Thor is just staring at the lines on every single pages and contemplating how these ordinary humans used their imaginations and their talent, seemingly effortlessly, to stimulate our own imaginations as mightily as they did.
Booksteve recommends.
