Butcher, Crusher, Eater, Jewel

Even if you're a god in the Marvel Universe, life is no paradise.



Loki: [mockingly comes to attention before Odin and laughs] I really don't see what all the fuss is about.
Odin: Do you not truly feel the gravity of your crimes? Wherever you go there is war, ruin and death!
Loki: I went down to Midgard to rule the people of Earth as a benevolent God, just like you.
Odin: We are not gods! We're born, we live, we die, just as humans do.
Loki: Give or take five thousand years.



That exchange from the beginning of the 2013 movie Thor: The Dark World should give you an idea where I'm going with this. Today's title refers to four characters who throughout Marvel Comics' decades of publication have at best guided and at worst destroyed or sought to destroy all of the being of extraordinary power and long life who at different times in human history inspired worship, desired sacrifice, and led their followers to glory in their names. In our own largely monotheistic world, it's almost impossible to NOT see members of the grand pantheons of myth, and even a few today, as fictional avatars of who we aspire to be like, projecting our ideas of highness and godliness onto beings we can't be yet want to approach. And that approach comes for us in worship.




No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistence of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now.... How long, they wonder, have [the Overlords, aliens that arrive to guide Earth into a Golden Age from Arthur C. Clarke's novel Childhood's End] been observing humanity? Have we watched Mohammed begin the hegira, or Moses giving the Jews their laws? Do we all know that is false in the stories they believe? 



Among the top ten of most frequently seen gods in Marvel Comics -- the one whom Gorr the God-Butcher, Grog the God-Crusher, Demogorge the God-Eater, and Xorr the God-Jewel have all interacted with or will interact with a time or two. And Thor, based on the Norse (in my part of the world, Norwegian) god of thunder, will lay into them with thunder and lightning he's able to command while wielding Mjolnir his hammer. But he couldn't always do that. In the three time periods that Jason Aaron and Esad Ribic's 2015 Marvel work that Thor: God of Thunder - The God Butcher (ISBN 9780785166979) spans, the past and future Avenger faces the title antagonist who's traveled throughout history and with his command of darkness tortured and destroyed gods throughout the universe. Thor is not Gorr's first god, but his first Asgardian. And from their first meeting in the late ninth century when Thor's wielding a giant axe he's leading a Viking tribe to the present day of the story to the future where Thor as the last surviving Asgardian is KING Thor, the God-Butcher has been waiting especially for him.




Gods come and go, Son of Odin. Such is the way of things, and one group never much cares what has become of the other. Why someday even the great Thor himself may be forgotten. [I expect under the Lord Librarian's breath] Let us hope so at least.

Hm. "Let us hope so at least." The part of Thor's quest after leaving Omnipotence City's library the reader sees takes him from the corpses of gods who haven't been seen for 2,000 years (which in itself is an appealing number considering our real-life two millennia past) to one who died barely a century ago. I must admit I didn't expect to go on quite this long, but I really liked this story which is just the beginning of Thor (and Thor and Thor) being able to catch up to and deal with this being who wants to kill them. And this is just volume one!



Such is the way of things,



David