Another Odd Comic

What is odd about Thor 380 cover dated June 1987 you may ask. Well, for one thing the comic has 22 pages of story yet only 25 individual panels. Every page apart from the last was a single large panel of Thor fighting the serpent Jormungand accompanied by an extremely long and annoying “sound effect”.

Perhaps I’m doing Walt Simonson a disservice but the artwork looks hurried. Walt is listed as only doing the writing and layouts with the art being finished off by Sal Buscema although more recently it has been claimed that wasn’t the case and Walt was responsible for all the artwork. I may be wrong but with the lack of background detail in these large full-page panels it appears to me that this comic could very well consist of what was going to be 4 pages of normal artwork expanded to fill the issue. Perhaps after writing and drawing many of the previous 40 issues (at one point Thor was transformed into a frog!) he was running out of plots as after No 382 Walt left the comic. Whatever reasons prompted the strange format it’s certainly an odd comic as it takes about 30 seconds to read it from cover to cover.

The “sound effects” are stuff like:-

BRAKAAKKTHWOOOMMM!

SSKKKASSSSSHHH!

SKREWWHRAKKKK!

SCCKREEEEEEEEE!

KAAKKKEEERHRAMMMMMMM!

SCREEEEEEEEEEEEE!

KKRRALLLLAAANNGG!

SKKEERASSSSHH!

KKRREEEEEEEEEEMMMMMM!

THHRR000UAM!

Makes you long for the good old days of “Biff”, “Bam” and “Pow”………