Thor, the sixty years of an often poorly understood thunder god

It is 1962, a crucial year for American comics. The editor and writer Stan Lee and the celebrated illustrator (and script writer) Jack Kirby, who the previous year created the Fantastic Four for the Atlas of Martin Goodman (the future Marvel Comics), give life to new famous characters for the same publishing house: the Incredible Hulk, Spider-Man (which, after Kirby’s preparatory sketches, is entrusted to the designer Steve Ditko) and Thor, the god of thunder. Odin’s son from Scandinavian mythology was confined to earth by his father to teach him humility as the lame human Donald Blake. He takes a trip to Northern Europe, discovers a cave, in which he finds a strange stick, beats it three times on the rock and transforms into Thor: the stick becomes the legendary Mjolnir, the hammer of the thunder god.

Lee’s brother Larry Lieber (Lieber is the real family surname) contributes to the creation of the character, which appears in number 83 of Journey into Mystery.

The Thor of the comics is somewhat different from that of the myth: he has blond hair rather than red, and the legendary Asgard in which he lives when he is not in our world, looks more like a sci-fi city than a mythical land. Thor is divided between Asgard and Midgard (the earth), he fights his half-brother Loki and other supervillains, often allying himself with the terrestrial superheroes (together with Captain America and Iron Man he is one of the columns of the Avengers, the group that unites the most powerful heroes of the earth). Lee enjoys making him speak in a courtly, Shakespearean English, a bit like in the same years Carlo Chendi and Luciano Bottaro made Donald Duck speak in a deliberately archaic Italian (which probably would have inspired Mario Monicelli for “L’armata Brancaleone ›› ).

Sensitive to the spirit of the times, Lee makes him fall in love with a Midgard woman, the nurse Jane Foster, arousing the wrath of Odin (a god cannot be with a mortal woman), conflicts between parents and children similar to those of the America in the sixties.

But the charm of the series has always depended on the mythological background, so different from that of the other Marvel heroes and which will be well exploited in the Eighties by Walt Simonson, in what, which lasted from 1983 to 1987 is still now considered the best cycle of the character. Thor fights Loki, the Ice Giants, the Fire demon Surtur, beings unfamiliar to us Latins but well known to those of Nordic origin (like Simonson himself).

Over the years, however, the character has taken different directions: at the beginning of the millennium, the writer and screenwriter Dan Jurgens kills Odin, Thor thus becomes the lord of Asgard which he decides to bring over the sky of New York. The gods come down to earth and feed the hungry, punish the wicked, overthrow cruel dictatorships.

He is a Thor who seems to echo the ideology of the American neocons, who in those years, with the idea of ​​spreading democracy in the world, pushed the presidency of George Bush Junior to invade first Afghanistan and then Iraq.

More recently for a time Thor, feeling unworthy, could no longer lift Mjolnir and was replaced as the thunder deity by the ex Jane Foster. This choice was also the daughter of the times: Asgard for a certain period frees itself from the “patriarchal regime” of the god Odin, is renamed “Asgardia” and is ruled by three goddesses.

In the current stories, written by Donny Cates, Thor is back lord of Asgard: in superhero comics, in the end, we return to the status quo.

However, this schizophrenia has also affected the films about the character, released between 2011 and 2022 starring Chris Hemsworth. If in the first two he is a classic fantasy hero of comics, in the following ones, directed by the irreverent Taika Waititi, we have an often comic character, and outclassed by superheroines, such as Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) who in the recent ‘Love and Thunder’ Thor as in the comics.

It is quite evident that Disney (which has bought Marvel for ten years) does not know what to do with Thor, perceived as from a certain point of view, too “patriarchal” and on the other too “good” without nuances and therefore deliberately demystified in the latest films. Yet, as can also be seen from the recent series of Amazon Prime (<>) and of Sky Atlantic (<>) there is a great desire for fantasy in the public and it would be nice to see the god of thunder return, in future films, to the stories of the myths of the North to which he belongs.