Thor Now a "Woman"

[sarcasmoverdose]

Marvel is excited to announce an all-new era for the God of Thunder in brand new series, THOR, written by Jason Aaron complimented with art from Russell Dauterman.

This October, Marvel Comics evolves once again in one of the most shocking and exciting changes ever to shake one of the “big three” of Captain America, Iron Man and Thor. No longer is the classic Thunder God able to hold the mighty hammer, Mjölnir, and a brand new female hero will emerge worthy of the name THOR.

Who is she? Where did she come from and what is her connection to Asgard and the Marvel Universe?

“The inscription on Thor's hammer reads ‘Whosoever holds this hammer, if HE be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor.’ Well it's time to update that inscription,” says Marvel editor Wil Moss. “The new Thor continues Marvel's proud tradition of strong female characters like Captain Marvel, Storm, Black Widow and more. And this new Thor isn't a temporary female substitute - she's now the one and only Thor, and she is worthy!

Series writer Jason Aaron emphasizes, “This is not She-Thor. This is not Lady Thor. This is not Thorita. This is THOR. This is the THOR of the Marvel Universe. But it’s unlike any Thor we’ve ever seen before.”

THOR is the latest in the ever-growing and long list of female-centric titles that continues to invite new readers into the Marvel Universe. THOR will be the 8th title to feature a lead female protagonist and aims to speak directly to an audience that long was not the target for super hero comic books in America: women and girls.

It's rather odd that they couldn't find a strong female character in Norse Mythology (Freya who?), or that their marketing department thought that injecting tumblr-style "gurrl power" into a well-loved comic will bring in new readers and not alienate old ones.

Given that Thor is his name (and a completely masculine one at that) and identity and not a title, this is both puzzling and completely retarded.

Plus, since the hammer is a joke/metaphor for Thor's penis...

[Prak]

*Sigh*


Get sucking dumbass.

First, I will point out this is not the first time a woman picked up Mjolnir:


Second, this is not the first time that "Thor" has been a person who was sufficiently worthy to wield the hammer, rather than guy literally named Thor- At one point in canon, Thor was a crippled doctor whose walking stick turned into Mjolnir.

Third, while the publicity potential was likely a part of the decision, what the fuck makes shit heads like you think this is pure "RAHRAH GURL POWAH WE GONNA TAKE ALL YOUR MALE POWER FANTASIES FOR OURSELVES!!!" Has there been absolutely any indication that this wasn't a case of "Hey, you know what could be interesting?"

Fourthly- stop being a twat.

Edit: Also:

[Chamomile]

And this new Thor isn't a temporary female substitute

Don't lie to me, Marvel. We all know your characters revert back to normal after a couple of years no matter what change you make or why.

[Longes]

Le sigh. I wish they would just make a new hero, instead of endlessly changing the existing ones.

[Username17]

Le sigh. I wish they would just make a new hero, instead of endlessly changing the existing ones.

Comic heroes are mythic characters. Their appearance, their personalities, and their life stories will change almost beyond recognition as different people write, draw, and perform their exploits. Hercules is a different person when played by Kevin Sorbo or The Rock, just as he's a different person when he's the hero of a Disney cartoon or an Italian monster movie. And in the days before film, Hercules was a different person every time a play was performed or a poem was declaimed that told or retold a story with him in it.

Thor is going to be changed every time a new writer or artist catalogs the legend of Thor. Just as it was before comic books existed when every skald got to tell their own Thor stories and make him as weak or powerful or clever or stupid as they wanted. Even if every artist decided to draw Thor as a blond man, they'd still use different models and costume designs because they all have different artistic talents and resources. Even if every writer decided to write Thor as honorable and fair, the actions taken by Thor would be wildly different in one story and the next because every writer has a different set of ethics and represents virtues in a different way.

Sometimes someone will tell a new story about a mythic character that deliberately shakes up the character in some fundamental way. Usually this is done for simple shock value, but there can be valid reasons to do it. But even these deliberate pieces of change are rarely much when compared to the inherent changes that happen inadvertently simply by dint of mythic characters having shared authorship across generations of storytellers.

-Username17

[angelfromanotherpin]

Hel, it wouldn't even be the first time that Marvel Thor had been turned into a woman. That happened in Earth X.

[Koumei]

Man, remember the whole "BUT THEY USED A BLACK MAN TO PLAY AS A DUDE WHO LOOKS LIKE SEAWATER, NOT A WHITE MAN" thing? Thor really is good for putting a certain type of person into a rage.

I like this.

[Lago PARANOIA]

In your opinion, what were the biggest changes or evolutions storytelling-wise that certain superheroes underwent in the past 30 years?

Here are a couple of mine. For Batman, it was the expansion of the numbers of and relevance of his secondary cast like Terry McGuinnis and Oracle and Montoya. That very much changed the tone and scope of his character. A very close second would be making him part of the upper echelon of the Justice League (of America) but that happened more than 30 years ago.

For the Punisher, it would be when Garth Ennis and other authors realized and admitted that his war on crime was pointless in a way that Batman and Spider-Man's war wasn't. So thus ended up steadily cranking up the nihilism of the character until the end of the MAX Imprint. And yes, I consider this an even bigger change than Frankencastle, because of what Chamomile said:

Don't lie to me, Marvel. We all know your characters revert back to normal after a couple of years no matter what change you make or why.

[Stahlseele]

Spidermans unmasking and deal with the devil?
Stupid as it still is . .

[Lago PARANOIA]

You know better than to bring that up, Stahlseele.

[nockermensch]

If I still read comics I'd a bit saddened by this completely transparent marketing ploy. I'm all for female protagonists, but this is just a cheap way to generate free buzz and sell more comics both to outraged fans and to curious SJW types.

[Ancient History]

In your opinion, what were the biggest changes or evolutions storytelling-wise that certain superheroes underwent in the past 30 years?

Well, if you go back 30 years you get stuff like Alan Moore revealing that Swamp Thing was never Alec Holland, just a plant elemental that thought he was.

More recent stuff...

Luke Cage went from being a joke 70s character to literally growing the beard and becoming one of the strongest parts of the Avengers, getting married, having a kid, falling out with his dad...he literally became a character instead of a caricature.

KidLoki brought the "mischief" back to the God of Mischief.

Bucky came back to life as Winter Soldier.

Batman...I still think The Dark Knight returns was a peak for him. It was everything about who Batman is, as far as uncompromising and crazy-prepared, and in doing so it also defined Batman against his nemesis (the Joker) and his counterpart (Superman). That's all stuff that sticks, no matter how many iterations of Batman you go through.

Deadpool as a 4th-wall breaking fun-crazy-violence dude.

Nick Fury is black and looks like Samuel L. Jackson (oh, what they went through to get that in continuity).

Plastic Man as something other than a joke character. It's one of those things that you don't really see until you think about the storylines he's been in, but for all the fact that he gets forgotten about a lot, his character gained both power and depth in a way that sticks.

And that's stuff that sticks. We're not talking about simple gone-and-back-again stuff. Storm of the X-Men used to dress like a punk rocker and lead the X-Men; she was also briefly Goddess of Thunder and married to the Black Panther and fucked Wolverine. Superman was briefly dead, depowered, overpowered, depowered again, split into red and blue electrical powers, etc. Captain America was a werewolf (they called him Capwolf!) Spider-Man was possessed by Dr. Octopus and had stingers from the spider totem and talked to insects and somebody claimed he was pregnant at one point. Wonder Woman worked at Taco Bell. This is all shit that happened, but it doesn't stick. In many ways it can't stick.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Batman...I still think The Dark Knight returns was a peak for him. It was everything about who Batman is, as far as uncompromising and crazy-prepared, and in doing so it also defined Batman against his nemesis (the Joker) and his counterpart (Superman). That's all stuff that sticks, no matter how many iterations of Batman you go through.

How much of this was because of the Dark Knight returns? I'll grant you that the Joker and his love-hate relationship with Superman started because of that comic, but his being uncompromising and crazy-prepared IMO was a thing that was emphasized because of his increasing tightness with other Superheroes. Hell, I used to have a volume of The Best of Batman stories and a lot of the elements we take for granted with the Bat-God were showing up well before TDKR. If you took early 80s Batman (the comics version, not the Superfriends version) and then swapped his personality and style in with the modern Batman it wouldn't be as huge of a change as, say, swapping in Liefeld's Deadpool with Joe Kelly's.

[Occluded Sun]

Le sigh. I wish they would just make a new hero, instead of endlessly changing the existing ones.

The genes get mutated until, by random chance, they form a viable new pattern.

Then the pattern is replicated endlessly, and the process repeats.

[Ancient History]

Batman...I still think The Dark Knight returns was a peak for him. It was everything about who Batman is, as far as uncompromising and crazy-prepared, and in doing so it also defined Batman against his nemesis (the Joker) and his counterpart (Superman). That's all stuff that sticks, no matter how many iterations of Batman you go through.

How much of this was because of the Dark Knight returns? I'll grant you that the Joker and his love-hate relationship with Superman started because of that comic, but his being uncompromising and crazy-prepared IMO was a thing that was emphasized because of his increasing tightness with other Superheroes. Hell, I used to have a volume of The Best of Batman stories and a lot of the elements we take for granted with the Bat-God were showing up well before TDKR. If you took early 80s Batman (the comics version, not the Superfriends version) and then swapped his personality and style in with the modern Batman it wouldn't be as huge of a change as, say, swapping in Liefeld's Deadpool with Joe Kelly's.

The synthetic kryptonite arrow is the one that gets me for this. The bat-tank, the armor, the missiles...none of those are particularly spectacular. The kryptonite ring is something John Byrne would come up with, later (and also a great addition to the mythology, but I digress), but the whole set up of the fight...not just of two characters, but two competing ideologies, the self-satirical 80s politics, the whole bit about taking Superman down notch by notch in a fight where Bats is clearly overwhelmed...and then that last trick. His best trick. It's just the sort of brilliant "turn the tables" thing that sort of cemented Batman as being the ultimate badass, more than the hokey 50s or 60s Batman, more than the World's Greatest Detective of the 70s and 80s.

And the Joker...people might argue the Killing Joke is better, but The Dark Knight Returns shows the foe-yay like nothing else. The Dark Knight Returns Joker is never funny, never sympathetic, never cracks a joke. His existence revolves around Batman, without Batman the Joker is nothing...and that's something that has carried through in the Joker character too, like nothing else. The Dark Knight Returns wasn't the first comic to make the Joker a psychopath that killed people, or made him Batman's Nemesis, but it's really the first one that defined the Joker as only having a point to exist while there was a Batman. It's a comment on the psychology of superheroes, how they define themselves and others.

Let me give some competing examples. Skurge the Executioner was a 2-bit villain for most of the Thor run. Then Walt Simonson got ahold of him, and he killed Skurge - but he killed Skurge in such a way that not only did he define the character, but he provided such a perfect ending to the character that nobody else in Marvel has ever really touched him (yes, yes, they even had a storyline where bringing Skurge back would mean the end of the multiverse). All of Skurge's defining character was in how he chose to die, and that works because Marvel allowed him to stay dead. If you brought Skurge back to life, you'd basically be cheapening the one thing that made the character.

Contrast that with Daredevil, who is too big of a character to ever let him have a story that fucking ends. Daredevil's defining character arc isn't his origin, or his romance with Elektra, or any of his king of the ninja/Shadowland nonsense, or any of the women he's been married to, or his various costume changes. Daredevil's defining arc was and always will be "Born Again." Because the Kingpin learns his secret identity, and systematically breaks down Daredevil's life - everything we've ever seen set up at that point - and only at the end does he try to kill him...and there is no body. It's brilliant because having nothing left to lose, Matt Murdock really does become the Man Without Fear...and watching him claw his life back and break the Kingpin, piece by piece, the Kingpin fighting back as viciously as he can, is the most defining storyline Daredevil ever had. The Kingpin might have been Daredevil's enemy before, but "Born Again" is what really /defined/ their relationship and characters for all time.

Except...well, both characters still lived. So the game goes on. There should have been an ending to it, a proper ending. Instead you've got Daredevil/Matt Murdock and the Kingpin locked into their little circles of violence, and every time they play out the same old game it loses a bit of luster. Daredevil builds up his life only to lose it, again and again, but it never has the juice that it did the first time, and the character just shrugs off the changes. Like discarding an old costume.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Except...well, both characters still lived. So the game goes on. There should have been an ending to it, a proper ending. Instead you've got Daredevil/Matt Murdock and the Kingpin locked into their little circles of violence, and every time they play out the same old game it loses a bit of luster. Daredevil builds up his life only to lose it, again and again, but it never has the juice that it did the first time, and the character just shrugs off the changes. Like discarding an old costume.

I totes agree with this. And it got me thinking...

Two of my absolute favorite Punisher stories is Punisher: The End where he kills off of the last of humanity for not meeting his insane standards and where he takes down Fisk in a mutual kill. Both of those endings are, to me, perfect ways to end the character. There are some other points where the MAX imprint could have stopped and I'd feel satisfied -- like the end to Long Cold Dark and The Cell -- but to me those would have provided perfect closure. Punisher: Home in particular had one of the most darkly perverse endings I've ever read and I still read it from time to time.

But that's the rub, isn't it? Both of the endings. As in, the character would've had a great stopping point with either resolution but the comic continued on regardless and struck oil twice.

I haven't read many (any) DC/Marvel comics lately, but, is this a conscious strategy for their characters? Plan an ending for their character, reconsolidate the elements that worked, then retcon/re-legacy the character with a new starting point? None of this Spider-Man MADE A DEAL WITH THE DEVIL TO ABORT HIS KID OH MY FUCKING JESUS ANUS WHHHHHHY silliness.

I imagine that it'd be wickedly hard what with the shared universe thing and the overwhelming temptation to bring the departed character back as-is. Seems like it'd be better if Marvel or DC planned out deadlines well ahead of time and wrote their lines with the knowledge that everyone in the mainstream universe had seven to nine years to wrap up their stories, because shit was being reset.

[Ancient History]

Well, partially comics has always done this. Generally speaking, gone are the days when one creative team would stay on an issue for ten or twenty years. Now if you get a five-year run that's staggering. So what happens is that the old creative team moves on, the new one comes in, things move on, and intentionally or not a lot of the old baggage is dropped or forgotten. "New direction!" has been a staple of a new creative team for decades. Warren Ellis has made a career of it, dropping in on a series and making it awesome, and other people have made a career of dropping in immediately afterwards to undo it.

Take the whole Fear Itself storyline. It's not like they'd never done a Dark Asgardian storyline before. The Enchanters, the Dark Gods, the World Eaters...it had been done. Lots of it had been done before, and they didn't reference any of it. Just forgot about it, moved on. The whole part where Peter Parker was picked by the Spider-Totem and had stingers and shit? Forgotten. DC at least has the excuse of multiple reboots (Hawkman, heh), but Marvel just developed a sort of rolling continuity which is the new normal, and that's really the basis of Marvel Next.

And that's really why the have stand-alone stuff like Marvel MAX or Elseworlds - to have stories that can stand on their own, and it's just mythology, the same characters in different stories, and because it's not part of the main story, they can have actual ends.

The alternate model you get now is the self-contained story arc, usually in a miniseries. Gives you the ability to have an actual self-contained story with the characters, and it might be part of an ongoing string of series, but it's complete in itself. The best example I can think of is Astro City, but you see that with Hellboy, Conan, and some other stuff.

[Lago PARANOIA]

@Ancient History: Well, do they have it so that continuity deadlines are scheduled well in advance of and independent of normal writing/artist team turnover? Having new writing teams with fresh ideas popping in every five years might simulate the effect, but it's maladaptive. The Born Again example and Kingpin in general might be illustrative: you can't kill Kingpin off to hype up a superhero's slide into anti-heroism or have Red Skull take over his crime empire or have Fisk upgraydde his threat level and become an Iron Man/Captain America foe. Or rather, you can have these things happen but you can't have them happen with any frequency or believability.

Also, for readers of Ultimate Spider-Man, how did the Morales character get received? The general consensus I keep hearing is 'Morales is good on his own terms, it's just a shame that a non-asshole replaced the other non-asshole character in the universe'?

[Username17]

There are a lot of versions of the Death of Robin Hood as well.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

@Ancient History: Well, do they have it so that continuity deadlines are scheduled well in advance of and independent of normal writing/artist team turnover? Having new writing teams with fresh ideas popping in every five years might simulate the effect, but it's maladaptive. The Born Again example and Kingpin in general might be illustrative: you can't kill Kingpin off to hype up a superhero's slide into anti-heroism or have Red Skull take over his crime empire or have Fisk upgraydde his threat level and become an Iron Man/Captain America foe. Or rather, you can have these things happen but you can't have them happen with any frequency or believability.

Well, these days the individual title storylines tend to get sidelined to take into account the annual Marvel Summer Event.

Also, for readers of Ultimate Spider-Man, how did the Morales character get received? The general consensus I keep hearing is 'Morales is good on his own terms, it's just a shame that a non-asshole replaced the other non-asshole character in the universe'?

I think he's been received fairly well, but it really is a case of "Ultimate Spider-Man was the best thing in the Ultimate line, and they killed him." I don't mind that they killed Spidey, and I like Morales, but it reads more like Invincible these days (minus the man-rape and miscarriages).

[radthemad4]

I don't follow comics. Is the dude who was Thor [the title] an Asgardian named Thor, or some earth schmuck who picked up the hammer?

Hel, it wouldn't even be the first time that Marvel Thor had been turned into a woman. That happened in Earth X.

He's being replaced by a woman this time, not being turned into one, but I wonder which of the two would annoy people more.

[Josh_Kablack]

Asgrim had two sons, and both of them were named Thorhall. ... and Thorhalla was his daughter's name.

[Prak]

I don't follow comics. Is the dude who was Thor [the title] an Asgardian named Thor, or some earth schmuck who picked up the hammer?

Yes. Which is to say, it depends on which era we're talking about, and whether we're taking retcons into account.

[Stahlseele]

@radthemad4:
He is both.



also, one very really big change that went mostly unnoticed . . the frigging green goblin actually went and became potus or something like that for some reason . .

[radthemad4]

Yes. Which is to say, it depends on which era we're talking about, and whether we're taking retcons into account.

I'm asking about the one this thread's about.

@radthemad4:
He is both.

So... some earth dude picked up the hammer, then went back in time to whenever Thor was born and lived as Thor since then, but with his memories from his earth life intact?