SQUEEE!

[seawasp]

To my Loyal Lieutenant, who apparently read my whinging and decided to send me a pick-me-up. I just got the first volume of the Walt Simonson "The Mighty THOR" comic collection.

Simonson's run on Thor DEFINED the character for me, and included what may just be the single most CMoA (CROWNING MOMENT of AWESOME) in all comicdom in the duel between Thor and Jormungandr. Or maybe in the Last Stand of the Executioner. Or maybe... Hell, there's so many CMoAs in the Simonson run of Thor!

I had the original comics. They, along with a number of my other comic acquisitions (my entire run of Dazzler, the Godzilla comics, older X-books, Spider-Man, New Teen Titans, etc.) were destroyed in two floods in two different houses.

Thanks, Shana!

Comments

[melchar.livejournal.com]

So very agree. We keep the Simonson's segment of Thor separate from the rest of the collection = and in one of the comic storage boxes for comics we like to go back and read. A lot. It was -so- good. Thor talking around his name to the Migard serpent! And the bridge ... it actually made me -cry-.

[oneminutemonkey.livejournal.com]

On the bright side, if you're talking about the Marvel run of Godzilla, both that and the Dazzler run are available as Essentials...

(And I weep for your comics, I really do. I know the feeling. My basement's had flooding issues in the past.)

[seawasp]

Alas, my collection was complete at least up through the time I finally quit Marvel -- as in, it included the X-Men comics in which she made her first appearance (which was of course the beginning of the Dark Phoenix saga), the entire Dazzler run, other crossovers, the Beauty and the Beast miniseries, the graphic novel... (yes, she WAS one of my favorites).

And my entire ROM collection is gone too.

[oneminutemonkey.livejournal.com]

The two Essential Dazzlers definitely contain those first two X-Men she appeared in, the Beauty and the Beast miniseries, the Secret Wars II crossover, and the graphic novel. Yeah. I'm a Dazzler geek also. I was so happy when the Essentials came out and I could read everything in order again... I didn't get into her until partway through the series.

Ouch, losing ROM had to hurt. I have a lot of the series, courtesy of cheap back issue bins, but I'm still piecing it together. And it would take a miracle for Marvel to get the rights to reprint those. Sigh.

[seawasp]

Okay, now I know something else to put on my Amazon wish list.

Yes, losing ROM did hurt, especially since it's one of the series that I started reading at the beginning on a whim, and thus just HAPPENED to have chosen to read the most bizarrely influential series in Marvel history, at least to that point. Who would EVER have guessed that a toy tie-in book would end up literally transforming the Marvel cosmology?

"...At last it can be said that Galactus has found a world that he could not STOMACH!"

So Marvel doesn't have the rights to ROM?

[midnightlurker.livejournal.com]

Marvel doesn't have the rights to the ROM toy. They can use everything else, as they invented Galador, the Dire Wraiths, et cetera, but they can't show Rom in his Spaceknight armor.

[seawasp]

Well that's just stupid. It's not as though the toy's being produced any more, and the only chance the manufacturer would HAVE of making more would be if ROM was re-released.

[oneminutemonkey.livejournal.com]

Which is why, when they released a Spaceknights miniseries some years back about the next generation (post-ROM series), we never saw Original Rom pictured in his armor or called by that name. That fact that it wasn't anywhere near as awesome a series as the original was incidental. :>

Sadly, I think there was an issue of Power Fist & Iron Man that couldn't be collected into that series' Essentials because it guest-starred Rom. Which is really annoying, especially if you were buying the Essentials for the sake of having a complete run of something you never owned before.

I'd dearly love Essential Rom. And Essential Micronauts.

[seawasp]

IIRC, didn't ROM crossover with the Micronauts?

I'm still puzzled as to what earthly or even unearthly reason a company would have to NOT allow Marvel reprint, if not New-print, rights to the old series, when the only value of their current rights depends on publicity which only Marvel could provide.

Do they envision some sudden golden age in which ROM will magically become popular without anyone hearing of him again?

[jry.livejournal.com]

I started reading Dazzler at issue #2. I can't remember if the ones I had are still around here somewhere or if I unloaded them. I'm astonished to run across other people who liked it and gobsmacked to learn of a collection. The world it is surely full of things.

[seawasp]

I loved Dazzler; at the time, she was one of the very few, perhaps the only, "superhero" characters who really, seriously, didn't WANT the gig, and had a real, honest-to-god other career that she spent time pursuing. And I loved her powers and the way she slowly developed more tricks to use with them.

I also preferred her original outfit, but hey, that's just me.

[shana.livejournal.com]

Glad it cheered you up.

[seawasp]

It did. I'm slightly puzzled because it says it's "#1", yet it seems to me that this is NOT the beginning of Simonson's run...

[midnightlurker.livejournal.com]

If it's the Ballad of Beta Ray Bill, then it's the beginning of Simonson's run as author.

He had an earlier stint as artist only, during the Roy Thomas years iirc -- the search for Odin in space, with the interstellar longship and the aliens who stole gods to power their planetary defense system...

[seawasp]

Ahh, that makes sense. And now that I'm well into the re-read I can see how things are fitting together.

[seawasp]

By the way, (1) did you get the updated files yesterday, and (2) is there something up with the Bar? I tried checking in this evening and got some wierd error.

[shana.livejournal.com]

1. Yes. I thought I'd sent you a message but I guess I didn't get to it before the phone started this morning. I guess the last writing session was ACTION! time.

2. I often have problems connecting to the bar.

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

Speaking of Thor, what are your thoughts on the upcoming movie?

It strikes me that Thor will be a trickier one to pull off than many of the other Marvel titles they've turned into (variously, so-so to really good) movies recently. If you're doing the Marvel version of the God of Thunder, then you have to embrace a certain amount of cheese... but at the same time, your character has to have enough gravitas to be able to carry off the cheese factor because he is the freakin' God of Thunder. He's not some guy who happens to have superhuman strength and superhuman toughness and superhuman whatever, he actually is more than human. I'm afraid that's going to be a hard line for the movie to walk.

On the other hand, the Marvel movies have surprised me before, so perhaps they'll pull it off.

[seawasp]

As you say, it'll be hard to do. But they've done good so far; even the worst of the recent Marvels has been at least okay and many have been excellent.

Thor is only the SECOND-hardest of the upcoming ones to do right. By far the hardest to do right will be Captain America.

[midnightlurker.livejournal.com]

They've already made the right decision, by doing it as a World War 2 movie and leaving the waking-in-modern-times part for the eventual Avengers flick. Whether they execute it properly is another story...

[seawasp]

The problem in today's climate will be to get across the actual honest-to-god All-American Spirit -- because part of that will be the clear demarcation of Good Versus Evil, with Good being the Americans and their Allies, and Evil being the Axis.

[midnightlurker.livejournal.com]

Ah, Walt Simonson. Almost everything he touches turns to gold (except the inexplicably bad World of Warcraft comic).

So many awesome moments.

"Nine steps the hero took, striding like a giant."

"He stood alone at Gjallerbru. And that answer is enough."

"Thor can no more throw bolts of subnuclear fire than a mountain can dance!" (A few panels later) And the mountains of Hel begin to dance...

"MY ARM! YOU'VE BROKEN MY ARM!" "There speaks the cunning Loki at last!"

(An Assistant Editors Month filler issue, iirc, also gave us "THE SON OF ODIN WILL FEIGN WEAKNESS NO LONGER!" ... "I landed in a place the gods forgot: New Jersey.")

As a side effect, Simonson's runs on Thor and then on FF caused me to despise Tom DeFalco with every fiber of my being. I hate him more than I hate Joey the Cheese and Geoff Johns combined. >.<#

[seawasp]

And one line I'll be stealing for use towards the end of Polychrome:

"...Heroes... Heroes have an INFINITE capacity for STUPIDITY!"

[seawasp]

I don't recognize DeFalco's work per se, so what makes him a thing of hatred?

[midnightlurker.livejournal.com]

He came onto Thor immediately after Simonson left, and quickly set about demolishing EVERYTHING Simonson had done. With what I can only describe as malicious glee.

Then, a few years later, he did exactly the same thing with Simonson's FF.

And since he was Marvel's EIC at the time, there was nothing to be done about it.

(It's one thing, of course, to set out to make your own stamp on a series. But DeFalco's entire design philosophy appears to be this: "I, and I alone, have the divine right to alter anything Lee and Kirby did, so the first thing I have to do is tear everything everyone else wrote since they left apart and set things back to their standard. Then I'll try to imitate L&K and fail miserably."

[seawasp]

Hmm. My brain appears to have simply done the obvious and correct thing and blotted out any memory of post-Simonson Thor.

What, did he return Thor to being Donald Blake, reinstate the five-minute timer, erase Beta-Ray Bill, etc?

No, I'm not looking at Wiki, it would probably tell me TOO much.

[midnightlurker.livejournal.com]

Actually, he linked Thor up to someone else, a guy named Eric Masterson. There was also a very confusing subplot about Donald Blake possibly being an independently-existing human who'd been shunted off to the side by Odin to make room for Thor, so he'd been in stasis ever since that fight against the Stone Men from Saturn.

The very first thing DeFalco did, of course, was shave the beard. :P

There were rather silly plots with the Celestials and the Egyptian gods, the return of Odin and a complete reset of the Asgardian political situation (and yes, Simonson's Ragnarok was just another fake, move along, nothing to see here).

...All that was annoying, but it was his FF run that really clinched it. No, Alicia Masters can't possibly have fallen in love with and married Johnny Storm; she's been a Skrull impersonator ever since Secret Wars, and never mind all the freaking THOUGHT BALLOONS that tell us otherwise!