ROB'S NOTE: May has become the go-to month of the Comic’s Industry (even
though National Superhero Day is late April, but whatever… Congress…
pshaw). It is when Marvel drops their
big movie of the year. May also sees the
annual Free Comic Book Day celebration take place on the first Saturday of the
Month, so I hope you all got to check that out.
May also has 31 days of the month so what better way to celebrate the
wonderful world of sequential art with the 31 Days of Comics?
Seth Hahne, who runs the blog GoodOkBad,
has put together the 31 Days of Comics challenge. A daily challenge in which you are given a
category and you have to fill it with a comic that you think fits it the
best. You’re all on the internet, I
shouldn’t have to explain it to you. For
the rest of the month I will be taking this challenge. It is my hope it encourages others to make
and share their own lists either in the comments here or on their own
websites. The sharing not only might
turn comic fans on to works they have yet to sample but maybe catch the eye of
a few non-comic fans and highlight the diversity of the form.
Our prompt for Day 10 is “The Most Beautiful Scene in Any
Comic”
Thor #362 “Like a Bat Out of Hel”
Written, Penciled, and Inked by Walt
Simonson
Colors by Max Scheele
This one was
very close. So close I’m going to
briefly go over my runner up.
Mary Jane
Watson was introduced as the happy-go-lucky party girl in the early days of
Amazing Spider-Man. She eventually
evolves into the one true partner for Peter Parker. The key scene in this is right after the
death of Gwen Stacy. Peter, obviously
distraught, is yelling at MJ to leave him alone in the hospital as she never
had “time for squares” like Gwen. And in
one move Mary Jane gains a depth of character and a metaphor for her
relationship with Peter (until Marvel ruined it with One More Day).
As great and
powerful as that scene is I think it pales a bit in comparison to the one I
ended up selecting.
Walt
Simonson’s run on Thor is widely regarded as one of the single greatest runs on
any character, if not the greatest. I’m
not exactly the biggest Thor fan but the parts of this run I have read are
spectacular and I plan on going back and reading the whole thing when time and
income allow.
Even if your
fandom for Thor is limited the scene depicted in issue #362 will leave you in
equal parts awe, shock, depressed, and happy.
Thor, Baldar and a few others have just led a mission into Hel to rescue
the souls of a number of people from Earth that were trapped there. They were joined by longtime Thor villain
Skurge the Executioner, who had asked to help.
Freeing the souls the group still needed to escape as they reached a
bridge that would take them to safety.
Realizing that the hordes of hell would overrun them and they needed to
buy time to cross the bridge an already injured Thor stepped forward to
volunteer for this suicide mission. Thor
is then hit over the head and rendered unconscious by Skurge. While at first his actions appear to be that
of a traitor he is instead volunteering to make this sacrifice. Baldar informs him that he will most surely
die. Skurge replies that he is viewed at
as a joke by most, and that each time he hears of everybody laughing at him he
thinks he already is dead. But Baldar
was always too kind to laugh. All he
asks of Baldar is that he and Thor have a drink and toast him one day. And then we get this
So many
levels of awesome.
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