Cross the Rainbow Bridge of Asgaaaard,…”

Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month, and we’re in the back end of Asgard Week. You knew it was inevitable that at some point, the prompt would have to be Thor!

Many of the char­ac­ters I’ve been draw­ing here, I’ve nev­er attempt­ed before. I can’t say that about Thor, though. I’ve drawn him a few times.

Way back when I was try­ing to break into comics, I remem­ber work­ing up a sam­ple page fea­tur­ing Thor. One of the pan­els fea­tured a close-up of an angry Thor, yelling just pri­or to leap­ing on his foe while swing­ing his ham­mer. I had heard that com­ic artists some­times shot pho­to ref­er­ence, so I shot a Polaroid of myself mak­ing the face I want­ed, try­ing to get it just right. The end result was a Thor face that looked a lit­tle too much like me! The les­son as an artist is that using pho­to ref­er­ence, you have to be real­ly care­ful that it does­n’t take over.

I’ve gath­ered that some Sil­ver Age fans back when Thor was first com­ing out made the con­nec­tion that he was kind of Mar­vel’s equiv­a­lent to Super­man: being able to fly, hav­ing super-strength and vir­tu­al invul­ner­a­bil­i­ty. There’s also the aspect of him hav­ing been sent to Earth by his father. A less obvi­ous cor­re­la­tion might be between Thor and the orig­i­nal Cap­tain Mar­vel, as both char­ac­ters make a big mag­i­cal trans­for­ma­tion to get from their civil­ian iden­ti­ties to their hero­ic ones.

Tomor­row’s the finale of Asgard Week. Who’s it going to be? You’ll have to come back to find out!

4 thoughts on “Cross the Rainbow Bridge of Asgaaaard,…”

  1. Don Chin

    Hi Mark! Love the comics you’ve been shar­ing but real­ly need to see some MIGHTY FORE! ? God bless you, buddy!

    Reply
    1. Mark Post author

      Thanks for stop­ping by Don! Glad you’ve been enjoy­ing this stuff. Fun­ny; I did­n’t even think of The Mighty Fore when I did this, but you’re right; that could count as anoth­er instance of my draw­ing Thor, after a fashion.
      Eons ago, for Don’s Par­o­dy Press, I did a split com­ic with one side fea­tur­ing a par­o­dy ver­sion of Thor called The Mighty Fore. I inked and let­tered the one cov­er myself, which you can see here. The Fore sto­ry was writ­ten by Lyle Dodd, pen­ciled by me and inked by Wayne Fauch­er. There’s no let­ter­ing cred­it, but I’d sus­pect it might’ve been Kurt Hath­away (since he qui­et­ly did a lot of let­ter­ing for Don in those days).
      I also pen­ciled a short five-pager for this com­ic that Lyle wrote, called “Xarol, the Crea­ture with­out a Schtick!” Inked and let­tered by Sam Wray.

      Reply
  2. joe musich

    And there I was dis­tract­ed from today’s image by some fun stuff. The twirling Mjol­nir does it for me. Mjol­nir spin­ning takes on an angel­ic sort of halo around Thor’s head, par­tic­u­lar­ly since we do not see much of the ham­mer. Good one. Like you, I nev­er got the com­plete Super­man par­al­lel. There were parts of me that first saw a “sane” Hulk. But the real Cap­tain Mar­vel, or maybe even Jr. bet­ter, as Don had the dis­abled leg. At any rate, an amal­gam for sure.
    Now to find if any Mighty Fore’s are out there. Thanks Mark.

    Reply
    1. Mark Post author

      Glad you liked my Thor here. Some cur­so­ry Googling reveals that you should­n’t have too much trou­ble find­ing a copy (it’s always an odd feel­ing when I go to a Con and see a deal­er sell­ing a com­ic I con­tributed to; kind of the same see­ing one online). Don’t pay an arm and a leg for a copy if you don’t have to!

      Reply

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