Alright, here's the good stuff, albeit something I came to years after the fact. I got most of the back half of Walt Simonson's Thor run from the same cousin who gave me the first four years of GrimJack, then tracked down the remainder later.
Simonson's run lasted 46 issues, minus a fill-in or two along the way. I think it was Warren Ellis who, in some argument about Thor being a boring character, pointed out that even Simonson's first move was to replace him with Cyborg Horse Thor, aka Beta Ray Bill. Which doesn't feel accurate since BRB is pretty quickly established as a supporting character after his initial arc. It's still the Thor show, there's just another new pal for him. Someone Thor can team up with to beat the shit out of demons. Everyone needs a buddy like that.
It also feels like Simonson wanted to get rid of the "Donald Blake" identity and Odin transferring that enchantment to someone else - a warrior who underwent brutal modification to protect his people that isolated him from them - was a way to do that. Although Simonson did have Thor try to maintain a secret identity as "Sigurd Jarlson", courtesy of Nick Fury, so maybe he liked the idea, but not that it was a needed lesson in humility.
But Beta Ray Bill also serves as an unexpected way to introduce the major threat of Simonson's first year-and-a-half on the book, as Bill's people are menaced by a string of demons that devoured their planet's star. Simonson builds it slowly, a panel or page here and there of a shadowy figure forging something from the heart of that star. Meanwhile, Thor's fighting a dragon alongside a lost Viking warrior, getting bewitched by the Enchantress' sister, and tangling with the Dark Elves over the Casket of Ancient Winters.
And then Surtur breaks loose, and you've got Asgardians and Avengers fighting together in New York City to push back a demon invasion. Simonson pulls the threads together beautifully. The Casket, the lost warrior, Balder rediscovering himself as a warrior after being traumatized during his escape from Hela's realm. Loki actually teaming up with his hated half-brother and adoptive father to battle Surtur (albeit for his own selfish reasons).
You would think after that, things would taper off, but Simonson's rolls the fallout into big things as well. Thor is still under Lorelei's spell, and between the things he does there and the grief over his father, he embarks on a crazy mission of rescuing mortal souls from Hela. Which gives us Skurge's Last Stand, but also turns the last third of the run in essentially Thor versus a pissed off Goddess of Death. Thor is forced to confront a great fear of his: not to die in battle, and to be confined to a bed and unable to fight at all, let alone die.
And of course Loki makes his own play to take advantage. One of the great things about Simonson's Loki is, he's always got another plan. As soon as Thor thwarts one - and a lot of the best comedy bits in the run are when Thor pulls one over on Loki - there's another plan in motion immediately.
Simonson's got the epic aspect of the story down. The faux-Shakespearean dialogue, but also the sheer scope. When Thor and the Midgard Serpent fight (in a comic done entirely as splash pages), time itself stops for the battle. Simonson's Thor is immensely broad, even beyond what previous artists would depict. Filling panels up. So when he fights someone like Surtur, the fact he's dwarfed by them gives you the sense of scale. He knows when to zoom out, to show the heroes charging through a portal to be confronted by a desert filled with undead warriors, and when to zoom in, on Beta Ray Bill nearly panicking because he thinks Sif might be dead.
Sal Buscema draws several issues in the back half of the run (possibly because Simonson was drawing X-Factor at the time), and while Buscema's fights have the oomph Thor demands, they don't quite have the scale or grandeur. It's not so bad when it's a Mutant Massacre tie-in and Thor's smacking around the Marauders. It's not quite as effective when the Destroyer armor is running amok through Hela's realm, disintegrating dead warriors left and right.
I especially like Simonson's version of Volstagg, who is himself even bigger than normal, but is portrayed as someone mostly just pretending to be a cowardly lion or a clumsy oaf, and who loves his wife and his many, many kids. When a plague lays low almost all of Asgard late in the run, Volstagg is one of the only Asgardians able to move under his own power. Balder's the only other one, and he needs a special elixir to manage it, which says something of Volstagg's strength.
Love actually seems to be a recurring theme in the work. Lorelei thinks having Thor at her beck and call, a helpless servant, is the be all-end all. Then she's bewitched the same way towards Loki (who has enough ego to not figure out something's wrong.) Karnilla finally (mostly) stops trying to entrap Balder into being hers, and lo and behold, he's actually really into her when she knocks that off and lets her better qualities shine. There's even a cute recurring subplot about Volstagg's eldest daughter Hildy having a crush on Hogun, but walloping any of her brothers that bring it up.
It doesn't all work. The Enchantress/Heimdall relationship doesn't get much build besides Heimdall dragging her out of her home when she's moping over Skurge being dead. And the Thor/Sif/Beta Ray Bill thing kind of meanders. Probably because Thor and Sif spend so little page time together, and Lorelei's got her hooks in Thor for a lot of it.
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