#HUNKY NORDIC WARRIORS FOR FREE#
The book is easily available digitally, for free as part of Comixology Unlimited, but a quick image search online will show you just how different it looks now from when it was published in November of 1983. It’s worth pointing out that almost every version of Thor #337 you can get your hands on how has been recolored. This is a Thor that manages to feel both old fashioned and beyond our time at once, the sort of retro-futurism that Tomorrowland promised with a healthy gloss of ancient Nordic traditions. Thor has always been suited to these kinds of theatrics, with the faux Shakespearean speech patterns and the evocation of ancient gods and monsters. From the first page it’s clear that Simonson intends to tell a story that’s massive in scale and scope, operatic and wild. Issue #337 was his first, and it starts with a bang. As writer and artist for three years and writer for an additional one, Simonson helped to usher Thor through the awkward 1980s while embracing just how wild an alien god’s story can be. Simonson is the man behind some of the most recognizable and memorable moments in Thor’s publishing history. His brief cameo in Thor: Ragnarok had fondness and a little good natured ribbing bubbling up, but Bill hasn’t gotten enough exposure to the broader audience for folks to really understand where he came from – which is to say, Walt Simonson. Thanks in no small part to his truly goofy appearance and belonging to an era of Thor canon that has been largely abandoned post-MCU, Beta Ray Bill is exactly the type of character that tends to be deeply misunderstood and misconstrued. When it comes to less recognizable characters, the weird ones that exist on the fringes of canon and pop up occasionally to remind us that superpowers are just the start of where comics deviate from normalcy, the differences become even more profound. Pop culture consciousness changes faster than ever thanks to the internet, and it can be both fascinating and frustrating to see just how different our collective and individual understanding of fictional characters is from each other, let alone from the source material.
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